Summary of Week 2

This week you focused on the leadership as a person perspective, which is still the dominant way of approaching leadership in academic and popular culture. Specifically, you examined the leadership traits perspective. We offered a critique of this position as elitist and riddled with problems of reliability, generalisability and, most importantly, of prejudice. That said, we also introduced the idea of leaders as symbols of organisations and sectors: the notion that through thinking about, analysing and questioning who people choose (or reject) as leaders, you can more powerfully question your own practices and preferences. Finally, we underlined the key practice of critical engagement as something that should be threaded through all leadership practice. Next week, we move on to consider the most influential of leadership theories, that of transformational leadership, and consider some of the important power issues and their implications for the sector.

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