Abstract
Leadership in the context of contemporary management culture is something widely talked about yet poorly understood. The current view of leadership, limited by the prevalent individualism of contemporary life, is to that of a heroic human being single-handedly overcoming adversity. But organisational leadership is more than this. In fact, in the study we report on here, the goals that aspiring leaders name position leadership as a relational activity embedded in emotional intelligence and social intelligence. The study we draw on in this chapter is a 5-year study into how ‘spirited’ leadership is produced through organisational coaching. Spirited leadership is transformative. It emerges from an interrelated worldview that weaves peoples’ inner and the outer worlds in a socially located practice. With its foundations in interconnectedness, spirited leadership aims at building positive relationships. A spirited leader therefore has to exhibit emotional intelligence, but it is more than this. In order to be innovative – to think outside the box – a spirited leader requires a particular form of sensibility – the ability to read others, the context and the environment in order to guide, challenge and develop people. We use the study to draw on the experience of aspiring leaders to understand more fully the notion of spirited leadership.
There are, and always have been “little sacraments of daily existence”, those subtle weavings of the heart that move us on a minute to minute basis - the fabric of our existence, which we ignore but which are the DNA that binds us together. (Malouf D, The Great World. Random House, New York, 1990)
Hilary B. Armstrong is the Director of Education at the Institute of Executive Coaching and a Master Coach. Hilary holds a PhD in critical social sciences with a speciality in critical and narrative psychology and was an academic at the University of Western Sydney, Sydney, Australia, holding senior academic positions for a number of years. She is on the advisory panel of the International Coaching Psychology Review and a professional associate of the St James Ethics Centre, Sydney.
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Notes
- 1.
In 2004 research was initiated to assess the effectiveness of a socially located coaching practice in growing talent and leadership in organisations. Our interest was twofold. One was to ascertain both the benefits that coachees were gaining from coaching and the significance of these benefits on their leadership journey. The second was to ascertain how coaching was working to create these benefits. The research employed several approaches: a before and after online survey with a space for open-ended comments, both qualitative and quantitative methods with responses from coachees and from people (third parties) who worked with them. The coachee respondents all completed six to ten sessions of hourly coaching with a coach accredited in the approach described above. For yearly reports of the results, please refer to www.iecoaching.com
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Armstrong, H.B. (2012). Spirited Leadership: Growing Leaders for the Future. In: Roffey, S. (eds) Positive Relationships. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2147-0_13
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