Abstract
A world leader in venue operation, Wembley Stadium is fully aware of the importance of its Crowd Safety and Security Managers and offers them training courses in a range of areas. The Stadium asked me to provide a course of advanced “training” to a group of students selected from among the team responsible for hundreds of security and steward staff. My brief was to help these students to recognise that they were high performing leaders that needed to inspire each other to become the best they could be. To this end, I introduced them to a selection of reading on leadership and helped them to put the ideas from their reading into practice. As one of the students put it, “I was attracted to the [leadership] course because I wanted to do better in my job. I have plenty of innovative ideas about how to run things here—I just need to know how to articulate them”. Looking at theorists on leadership and ethics as well as seminal English essayists such as George Eliot and Francis Bacon, students were encouraged to re-examine the vague terms they had been using and to become more analytical and precise in their writing.
Who questions much, shall learn much, and retain much.
—Francis Bacon
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Notes
- 1.
Their principal jobs ranged from fairly significant managerial roles to entry level positions perhaps reflecting the subsequent comments by the students on the range of abilities at Wembley.
- 2.
With a group of software engineers, I am currently using excerpts from Thoreau’s Walden and Melville’s Moby-Dick to explore the concept of leadership from a literary perspective, questioning concepts of appreciative observation, non-conformity and the tensions between the individual and authority.
- 3.
See Chap. 1 for my discussion of Attridge’s distinction between literary literature and instrumentalist literature.
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Eastman, C.A. (2016). The Quest for Leadership at Wembley Stadium. In: Improving Workplace Learning by Teaching Literature. SpringerBriefs in Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29028-7_3
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