 Hello and welcome to my introductory lecture on leadership. My name is Jim Bandell and I'm a professor of sustainability leadership at the University of Cumbria in the UK. Now this lecture is going to provide an introduction to leadership from a critical perspective. Before we begin to learn how to be better leaders or less bad leaders or help other people with that, it's important to explore what we mean by leadership and what we might be assuming. Despite most of us knowing the enterprise, organisations, movements, politics, we're all about ideas and collective action. There's a widespread view which places great emphasis on special individuals. Shaped over decades, perhaps longer, it's the view that leadership by any senior roleholder is one of the most important or the most critical issue in either organisational or social change. The stories we read about the past are often stories of individuals rather than wider social processes and groups, hence the word history, his story, not their story. This view is promoted today in our media when they assume the key salience of whoever has a senior role in an organisation. It means that when things go horribly wrong, we look at senior roleholders. Many leadership courses I've been on reflect that assumption that the person at the top is the most important thing for organisations or communities of all kinds. But in this leadership course we take a somewhat different approach. I think this different approach is important as our normal lives and assumed futures seem to be falling apart around us. We're going to need leaderful groups to emerge to help reduce harm and save what we can in kind and joyful ways. I'm recording this lecture at home during lockdown, so please forgive any background noise of things that happened in houses. We're going to in this lecture explore popular concepts of leadership to identify some unhelpful myths about leaders and leadership. This will be a way of considering critical approaches where critical doesn't just mean being questioning or negative, but involves looking at the power relations involved in the choice and use of concepts in order to help us to be more consciously engaged with life. I will give one example or case study from my own work in strategic communications and leadership because before I went full-time on deep adaptation to climate change when I was a consultant, I acted as a communications strategist and speechwriter to the Labour Party in the UK for the 2017 general election. I worked with the leaders office and shadow chancellor's office on the manifesto and speeches. Now questions of leadership were central to that campaign, so now that Jeremy Corbyn is no longer party leader, I think it's okay now to share some of the thinking behind the work I did with him and his team. And even if you aren't interested in politics or the UK or UK politics, hopefully it will illustrate the power of discourse or framing of narratives in the realm of leadership. Now the aim of this lecture is to prepare the ground for us exploring new meanings and practices of more sustainable leadership at a time when organisations and societies face crisis and even collapse. So in our live classes we're going to go much deeper, but I hope this lecture will help get things started. Now you've probably, if you've ever been to a train station or an airport, gone and had a look at the business section and you'll see all these different books on leadership and you'll have seen many of these different phrases. It's as if any, you think of any word and you can put it ahead of leadership, authentic, charismatic, visionary, effective, collected, distributed, responsible, global, servant, spiritual, etc. It's a very popular topic to write about, how to be a better leader. And it can seem quite, it's an area for management fads really. And I think what happens in that is that we then deproblematise the second word. We assume what we mean by leadership. And so rather than just saying let's talk sustainable leadership or sustainability leadership and then just talk about what sustainable or sustainability means, I think it's really important to look at what we mean by leadership. And I organised a conference about five years ago, the first conference I organised on leadership at my university in the Lake District. And we had a few headline speakers. One of them was Nandita Das, who's a director and actress from India. And she, I asked her, like I asked everyone, to give me a quote about how what leadership meant to them ahead of coming to the conference. And so this is what she said. Leadership is not about having followers, but following your passion and believing that a better world is possible. Now I thought that was inspiring, I still do. And it really, I think, also captures something about her approach to her work. And then I shared it with another person who I was very delighted was coming, an environment minister at the time. I shared the quote and said, could you maybe offer one of your own? And she said, that's ridiculous. How can you be a leader without followers? Other things are important, but then use a different word, not leadership. And so just there in the organising of the conference, we saw how people meant such different things when they were talking about the same thing. Or at least they thought we were talking about the same thing. So I think it's really helpful, and it also can be a bit of fun, to just clarify what do we mean by leadership? And I don't mean leader, I mean leadership, the act of leading. And so before we go on, please just take a moment, so you can just press pause on this video and write your own definition down. Or if you've done this before in some preparatory work for my course, then look back at what you wrote before continuing. Yeah, define leadership, leadership is dot dot dot. Okay, have you done that? Welcome back. I have a working definition and I'll always call it a working definition because it's kind of provisional and fallible. For me leadership is usefully thought of in this way. Leadership involves helping groups to understand why and how to work together for significant change. Now in that phrase, you can see then we've got ideas about collectives collaborating. We've got ideas about significance of change and change rather than just aces. It's a bit imprecise because it says that leadership involves, so it doesn't restrict it to this, but that it should really involve this. It's an emphasis on helping, not directing. And it's quite focused on the motivation, the why and the how, but it's not really so much on the what, what gets done. And that's for me quite deliberate. So you've had a definition of leadership you've offered. One, you've written one down. I don't know if that was there some similarity there or not. You might want to think about it. But also now was there an assumption about your definition that it meant you thought it was good leadership? If you look back at my definition, a significant change could be a really bad one. However, if you really help people understand why and how to work together then that's unlikely to be really bad one. So there's an implication in my definition here that this would be good leadership. But have a look back and see whether you've really been clear about what is good somehow, what kind of values you have there. But otherwise, actually stop the video and also see if you could write down, clarify what you mean by good leadership and then continue. So I ask my participants in my courses to do this before we gather. And I've done that for the people who are gathering at my next leadership course. And they offered their ideas of the leaders and the leadership that they cited as inspiring. And I picked a few of them here, just a few. So Cristiana Figueres, Costa Rican diplomat and former chair of the main climate intergovernmental process. And she is identified by one of the participants in my course as an inspiring leader because truthful, direct yet utterly compelling and caring. Another participant identified the US Congresswoman, Alexandra Ocasio Cortes who was elected as the youngest woman ever in Congress. And the key qualities there were identified as for showing you can be young, female, true to your values, represent real people and fearlessly take on powerful billionaires. Now another participant focused more on leadership rather than an individual and also leadership is sort of a quality or a way that organisation might work on selected Extinction Rebellion quote for their decentralised way of organising. And maybe there's some themes there that you've spotted from your own definitions. Now when anyone comes up with an idea of what is good leadership or who is a good leader I think it's helpful to look at what we're focusing on. And you can look at, are we focusing on the input, should we say, the leader, the process of leading or the outcome, leadership. So if we go back there with Christiana Figueiras, it's fairly much, it's focused on her as a person, the leader, so the input. There's something there about behaviour in terms of being direct about truth in that definition. And if we look at Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez you see that again it's a lot to do with her but then there is a behaviour there which is to fit the courage of challenging power. And if you look at Extinction Rebellion that's where the decentralised way of organising that's more relevant to the process. None of the definitions there that I've shared really focused on the achievement or outcomes. So the different approaches to leadership that are out there can focus on the leader. For example their trait, style, experience, power and there are whole books written on that. But there's also some people focus more on the process, supporting, communicating, directing, influencing, helping to make sense. And lots of books and tips on that. And then some people focus more on assessing leadership in terms of what's to be the impact on a team or organisation or movement. So are they confident, sharing a vision, having direction and purpose and so on. Now I've done that, I've unpacked that in a way in that way because there's a lot we can learn about leading leaders and leadership by being better at learning through everyday life, through watching behaviours and watching our own behaviours and thoughts and trying new things. So learning by watching and doing. And becoming better at considering what is it we admire and what is it am I. That can help us learn better in that way. So I typically ask students to look for shared themes of what they consider constitutes good leadership. And that kind of work that I ask the students to do kind of reflects what's often done by a lot of leadership scholars when they just try and find out what is good leadership by going into large organisations and doing studies and trying to find out what people think either about themselves as good leaders which is possibly a bit ridiculous. But also sometimes studying people in organisations and what they appreciate about someone who's considered to be leading. And one of the books on this which drew upon masses of data of that kind of analysis is the leadership challenge by Cousins and Posner. And they identified five behaviours of emergent themes that were leaders who were admired by colleagues. They said they model the way, they inspire a shared vision, they challenge the process, they enable others to act and they encourage the heart. So these are nice little memorable phrases for different things. But that all sounds very interesting and one can get some sense of confidence for thinking oh yeah that kind of makes sense to me and now I know what good leading looks like and what good leaders are about. But I wonder is it really that useful? And how is this reflection and analysis on what we admire going to help us? One way it might be useful is so we become better at identifying what we admire and being clear about what we're therefore going to aspire to do in our own lives. And having that model of leadership from the leadership challenge can be a useful sort of mirror and we can look at ourselves. And so long as it's not imposing sort of a correct outlook those sorts of models can help. But yeah the problems with this I would say the first issue is that people aren't consistent over time. However strongly we feel we know a character, people make choices, they're not constrained by a character trait. Kind people do unkind things. Our confirmation bias leads us to see continuity of character even when it might be directly contradicted by evidence of behaviour. So if you thought someone's a mean bastard then when he does something nice for an elderly woman what might you think? Perhaps it's because he feels guilty or he wants to make a good impression and confuse us because he's devious. In other words all generalisations are likely to break down whether about traits or behaviours. So analysis of traits is really based on this fundamental flaw of thinking that people have characteristics that are stable somehow. It's also quite arbitrary what opinions, ascribed qualities or behaviours are going to be lumped together or split apart into different traits by a particular analyst or author of a leadership book. The second issue is that even if there are consistent and coherent meaningful traits or behaviours from someone there's something quite different about expressing those naturally than learning that you should be exhibiting them in order to become a good leader. There's a massive difference in that. But perhaps there's, well I think there's a deeper problem with this whole approach to looking at leaders and leadership with the aspiration to promote better leadership. And that is something to do with the focus. And I mentioned it at the start. So in the examples that you identified earlier how important was the individual's leadership to the outcome compared to other factors? In nearly all cases people don't think about that. They think about that person is really a great leader for some reason and they may have included the perceived impact of the person or that person's participation in massive social change or organisational success. But by looking at that individual in that context what one can do is prioritise and over-prioritise that person and therefore the role of a special individual or someone who's seen as special in producing that change. And this is the great man's view of history which is kind of typified perhaps quite well by Napoleon writing to his brother in 1808, men are nothing, the man is everything, the general is the head to the whole of the army. And that painting, wow, he's trying to show a lot of that exceptionalness in how he's riding the horse there. Now this isn't an unusual thing I discovered when I picked up a copy of China Daily a few years ago. But there's still the same notion of the extremely great special leader, the modern CEO grappling, rapidly shifting business world. So these old ideas, these old stories of the exceptional individual being incredibly important to everything is quite pervasive and is promoted today even in this sort of amusing cover of China Daily. So what I want to do now is actually tell you about one study that helps us reflect on some biases when we're reflecting on leadership. Now psychologists in the 1980s conducted studies where volunteers were shown statements about a situation in the company when a new manager or leader joined a team. Now these were fictitious studies, but the volunteers did not know that. The studies described the new manager and then the performance of the team as a percentage of increase in sales. In some cases the volunteers read that sales went up 2%, 10% or 25%. The participants were asked to attribute significance of outcome to the leader versus other factors. So if the sales went up 2%, 10%, 25%, so below average, above average, to attribute significance to the leader versus other factors like market conditions, suppliers, all sorts of technologies for example. So here's an example of what was given. John Smith, the director of sales from a major northeastern appliance firm, John assumed this position five years ago following his attainment of an MBA degree. Prior to this MBA, John had completed a bachelor's degree in marketing. In this position he has gained the respect of both his subordinates and superiors. On his last evaluation, John was rated as a capable worker and his subordinates have indicated that they enjoy working for him. John currently is in charge of five subordinates. All the subordinates working in John's department have a good working knowledge of marketing principles as demonstrated by their prior and current work experience. At the end of the fourth quarter, new customer accounts have shown a slight, moderate, large increase, 2%, 10%, 25%, so they would just change that for each volunteer during the year over the last year's performance. So you've got to note there for that the participants would have read simply 2%, 10%, or 25%, and not known that other participants may have seen different percentage increase figures. They then rated the significance of John Smith to the outcome, 2%, 10%, or 25%, so slight, moderate, or large increase in sales. They then rated the significance of John Smith to the outcome and in contrast to other factors such as the market environment. It should be noted that the information in that example provides nothing with which you could assess whether John Smith in particular mattered to that outcome rather than other factors like the economy, technology or the competition or his five subordinates which you have been told did know their job. So volunteers off the street, given fictitious information, the only thing that was different was 2%, 10%, or 25%, and people had to rate how significantly the manager, the leader was. So the tests were, this is an old study and I'm sharing it with you because it's a powerful one and the data has been repeated again and again and again to find the same results. So the tests were conducted sufficient times to be statistically significant. They also used other cases with other information about other bosses which were purposely chosen to give the participant no meaningful information upon which to attribute the sales outcome to the boss rather than to other factors. So you should, let's consider now what the results might be expected to be. We can plot performance of the ex-organisational unit on the x-axis along the bottom with 2% sales increase on the left and 25% sales increase on the right, so high. On the vertical y-axis we can plot the views of the participants about the significance of the boss to these results. Now for a moment think about what the results should look like given that the information was completely random. Some of you might consider that the results would be all over the place and so there would be no correlation. And if we wanted to draw a line through the results like that it would have to be a horizontal line somewhere between these random results. Some of us might consider that if the results are really good at 25%, then we might accidentally consider that to be the result of the new boss rather than the other factors and thus drawing a line through the results might lead to one sloping upwards towards the right. But what you think the real results are from hundreds of studies make a guess before we go on. Have you guessed? OK, so here are the results. The yellow line shows that participants thought the leader was more significant if the results were poor or the results were good. They thought the leader was less significant if the results were ordinarily OK, moderate. The blue line here shows the strength of attribution to other factors. So they thought other factors were less important than the leader if the results were either good or bad. So note again that the data was intentionally designed to give no indication of the leader being particularly good or bad. This test was replicated around the country and then around the world. So I think for a moment, what does this tell us about what people think about leaders or people with authority or about leadership? What does it mean that respondents rated leadership higher than other factors even when they had little or no evidence upon which to base their judgement? James Mindle and his colleagues concluded that this was evidence that our sense that leadership is salient to situations, processes is our susceptibility. Indeed it can be questioned whether leadership is anything singular and concrete at all rather than just the labour we throw around to tell stories of cause, effect, praise and guilt, whatever the evidence we have. Mindle and his colleagues said that leadership is a collectively constructed romantic discourse where our romance by the idea that special individuals in power matter more than other factors. These findings from back in the 1980s show that we're all susceptible to thinking leadership matters the most in any situation. So let us unpack this idea a bit. By leadership we could be implying good analytical capabilities, good communication skills, ethical credibility, ability to empathise, understanding of group processes or understanding of how to manage people in difficult situations and much more. There are lots of things we might be lumping together in this notion of leadership. Those things we vaguely and differently assumed to be involved in leadership when we hear or use the word might actually be really important in certain situations. Yet this study suggests we need to be more questioning. And why is that? Can you think of the drawbacks of our collective susceptibility to focus on the leader as the most salient factor in organisational change or social change? You can pause the video so you can see if you can think of at least a couple of drawbacks before we move on. So the drawbacks of that romantic view of leadership that have been identified in research focus on how or tell us about how a focus on the importance of senior role holders or managers prevents deeper analysis on how change does or doesn't happen. It reduces the sense of agency and responsibility of those who don't have seniority. It generates a high risk point of failure in a project or movement. And it can encourage narcissism within senior role holders. Some scholars in this field have looked at how the myth of the all-important leader has been promoted by established institutions of various forms and has a suppressant effect on democratic participation. Writing in a top academic journal on human resources, Genell and Oakley said I quote, leadership is a myth that functions to reinforce existing social beliefs and structures about the necessity of hierarchy and leaders in organisations. A serious sign of social pathology. A special case of a myth that induces massive learned helplessness amongst members of a social system. Ouch! Now this critique of leadership is not at all a new idea. It's not unknown to management studies, policy studies and other fields of scholarship and education. This quote here on this slide is from 30 years ago from a mainstream management publisher explaining why the dominant concepts of leadership in 1990 or just before then have been really unhelpful for corporations. They say at the centre of this evolving drama is the critical need for organisations to adapt to continually fluctuating environments. This change renders large centralised hierarchies obsolete and selects for systems in which leadership resides in the outer boundaries as well as in the centre. So, yeah, this has been around for a while. And a lot of work that critiques the mainstream views of leadership and it's something that I've taught, researched, advised and published on some years now. The field has a name it's called Critical Leadership Studies and within it we look at how the concept of leadership is socially constructed, how it's built by us people talking about it and then we look at how certain social constructions of leadership have certain effects privileged certain views and people and not others. So that's the field that I draw upon in this course. The critical leadership approach asks questions such as does leadership require leaders? Is leadership a good thing? Does leadership matter more than followership? Does leadership matter more than other factors? Does leadership exist beyond the word for it? Really? And not really is the answer to these questions with various theoretical, philosophical and empirical basis for that answer and yet we still work on it, we still teach about it and that's because the people who are interested in leadership are typically interested in very important questions about purpose meaning effectiveness, change how to get things done and so forth and they're interested in questions of legitimacy as well. So it's a very important space to be in but be in in a way which doesn't just assume leadership in the way it is in mainstream society. So critical leadership as a field is one where we're seeking to shift thinking about leadership to emphasise leadership acts that are enabling distributed and emergent. This new approach to leadership is not so new but is certainly gaining ground and influencing the design of training at the top of large organisations worldwide as well as in civil society and in social movements. It's useful for people to experience processes where they can see themselves as I see how I was assuming certain concepts and how that was influencing my behaviour. So that can be done in class. Some processes experiential learning around that can be done in class. There are also powerful ones, more fun that can be done outside. For instance the local leadership development consultants in Cumbria in the UK called Impact International they take groups out onto the fells and they tell them that they have to make their own way back to the hotel. Either by a long route or on paths or a shorter route which then means that they have to cross a lake or even shorter route with some app sailing involved and they have to discuss and negotiate amongst themselves what to do and one of the people in the group might know some orienteering or they may know some app sailing or how to captain a boat and one person might know how to facilitate meetings and some members of the group can experience the processes where someone decides to volunteer to lead in a particular moment perhaps because they know how to app sail and then how some people in the group then look to that person as the leader suddenly for the rest of the time he was helpful in that one instance because of a particular skill set then assumes that they are a leader for that group and that moved from a leadership act to a leadership position whether ascribed or assumed that occurs subtly and is important to identify so groups can become more fluid about who steps up and who steps back at different moments depending on different contexts so that's the kind of fun you can get up in the Lake District hopefully it can also be useful to work together online I think all these things can complement each other the next question of course is how do you promote it if you buy into this version of leadership what are the challenges and opportunities to shift perspectives on leadership in this way and so I think now would be a good time if you took a break and had a think about the challenges and opportunities to promote a shift in perspective on leadership in your workplace or community and then after you've done that and made some notes if you're a participant in one of my courses please post those thoughts on the discussion board of the course website and if you're not but if you're a member of the deep adaptation forums business and finance group in the professions network then also there will be a thread where I would very much welcome you sharing your thoughts on how the challenges and opportunities to shift perspectives about leadership from this perspective that I've just covered so yeah press pause before before continuing please so welcome back for the rest of this lecture I'm going to give you an example of how this critical approach to leadership was used in a high stakes situation at least it seemed to me at the time it came about because at the end of 2016 I was giving some voluntary input to the leadership of this of the Labour Party about their communications I've become convinced that due to how bad our situation is with climate change that we needed radical action by governments a kind of emergency socialism to both cut carbon and adapt to the impacts of climate disruption now by early 2017 with my colleague at the time Mark Lepatin I was hired to advise the leader of the Labour Party on a new communication strategy and it gave me the opportunity to put some of these ideas on critical leadership into practice now the UK general election of 2017 encouraged a whole nation to discuss leadership the election strategists of the incumbent Conservative government decided that the leader of the opposition Jeremy Corbyn was the weak point of the Labour Party when the unplanned snap election was called in March 2017 Corbyn's popularity was at an all-time low according to the polls the low 20s in terms of grassroots membership the Labour Party had been re-energised by his explicitly left-wing agenda there were remarkable numbers of people signing up making the party the largest in western Europe at the time but in parliament the majority of his elected MPs were skeptical of his ability to leave the party or the country and many had not been shy in telling the media about that and many people also in the party apparatus behind the scenes were against him and the team around him so they were believing that it was only a matter of time before he was replaced and the party would become more centrist or at least more focused on winning support from swing voters so these divisions meant that there was a constant flow of negative media about Jeremy Corbyn and the party at the time when I started working for them in early February 2017 the decision of the highly paid consultants to the Conservative Party headed by Linton Crosby their decision to focus on the leadership of Theresa May and contrast it with that of Jeremy Corbyn did have a rationale after years of austerity falling living standards and no sign of economic recovery having created decent careers for British citizens there wasn't much success to point to as a party of government given the uncertainties, divisions and difficulties in navigating Britain's exit from the European Union it would be a challenge for the government to develop and champion a vision to the electorate therefore they based their campaign on the idea that the election was a choice between Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May as leader they decided to describe May's qualities in a way that could reveal the weaknesses they perceived in Corbyn their phrase for the election strong and stable leadership in the national interest was chosen because it could be supported even if you did not think things were going well for the country under the current government although during the campaign the slogan and the ideas it conveyed were broadened to describe the Conservative Party as a whole the first month of campaigning was very clearly focused on conveying a description of the Prime Minister herself that was the majority of the campaign that was focused in that way because the campaign is only six weeks long the fact that a top political communications agency chose this framing of the election about leadership highlights a couple of things first it shows how the idea that individual senior role holders are the most important factor in governance was assumed to be widespread in Britain second it assumed that strength and stability would be seen as the best attributes of leadership today the alternative is that the communications consultants were not even conscious of their assumptions in that choice of framing so how was strong being defined or implied by the Conservative Party communications at the time strong in consultation strong in responsiveness strong in openness no not at all it wasn't defined but the way the idea was invoked and the tone of voice often used was that strength meant resisting others with different views but what did that suggest about leadership that involves not responding to outside pressures or alternative ideas looking back at the 2017 election campaign it's amazing how little debate about what leadership is actually occurred during those weeks that lack of debate suggested many journalists may have imbibed certain views about what leadership means and they wouldn't be untypical in that as I've described from earlier research in answering questions things got a bit ffascal at times as this quote I'm showing you here from Theresa May illustrates we will show leadership because that is what leaders do notice the word show it means leadership is somehow performative that is revealed if we used a different word to describe some of the things we might mean by leadership for instance good management or good decision making would we show good management would we show good decision making if we talked like that if we were sincere or maybe insecure that it could be said about leadership indicates how the word is no longer a description of phenomena but a statement of belief in a world view as such it was a concept that's right for, that was right for reframing now you might imagine that people with a background in critical leadership like me were thinking what we were thinking as the conservative party and the journalists were constantly bashing Jeremy Corbyn as not being a leader and suggesting to Theresa May was a leader faced with a strong and stable leadership focus from the conservatives the accusation Corbyn was not a leader the lack of questioning of what leadership meant the centrality of it in many discussions about which party to vote for and the socially disabling orthodoxy of leadership what should one do the dilemma on the clothes of leadership as falsely assumed by many people or seek to challenge that of course I don't mean the clothes literally you might conform on style but it would be not authentic to conform to false or disabling orthodoxies about leadership itself the chosen response was to tackle the issue head on to try to reframe leadership and reframe Jeremy Corbyn's leadership and to reframe Theresa May's leadership and to do this in a way that was in line with Jeremy's long held views on politics and on social change now Jeremy Corbyn had always said politics is not a personality contest but psychologists have shown if you don't give people a back story or something to help them guess one for you then they're going to assume one or take other people's ideas about who you are what you do, what you do so one either consciously frames and errates one's own life intention and situation or you have it done for you there is no frame or narrative free mode of existence in any form of public life he had resisted for a while but Jeremy now had to address his leadership as it was being made a central issue of the 2017 general election campaign so I worked with him and his team on what would become the first speech where he actually talked about himself he strongly believed leadership should be about service and recognising everyone has a contribution to make so our aim was to develop this idea so he could give a clearer explanation of that philosophy of leadership why he believes that and why it is an approach that was really needed at that time it was also a chance to try and put some of the previous acrimony behind the party I'm going to highlight a few quotes from the speech that show a reframed version of leadership in practice in terms of at least in terms of how it's described by a politician to an audience during a general election campaign so here's some quotes from his speech Stuffing Up for Britain April 29th 2017 whereas insecure leaders want to feel stronger by asking you to give them more power I recognise strong leadership as equipping you with more power this defines leadership as acts that enable others it also reframes the snap general election as not something indicating the strength of a leader rather it suggests that to ask for more power is the opposite of leadership strength some might recall that when announcing the election Theresa May asked for the nation to have more power in her Brexit negotiations but that was pure speculation or a fabrication that EU negotiators would really care how many votes the Conservative government had in the UK in reflecting on what he had learned over his political career Jeremy Corbyn said that I quote political leaders can if they want to create and preserve the space for others to organise and transform countries now that's describing leadership as providing opportunities for others to engage and to select a distributed and collective approach to leading change we also wanted to reframe the previous years of discord within the Labour party after he'd been elected leader that was key because some people were saying he couldn't even lead a united party let alone a country so he said I respect my critics when they make a reason case they're doing what I've often tried to do and that is to challenge leadership if leaders go unchallenged by damaging mistakes it's the job of leadership to hold open the space for dissent, new thinking and fit for purpose policy I've always believed in standing firm and empowering others to make up their minds and come on board when they're ready now this is the view of leadership this is the view that leadership is improved by reasoned dissent and therefore strength is about creating spaces for vibrant discussion and new ideas to emerge and he went on to describe how shutting down dissent is a dangerous approach and how it had backfired in British history in the past now the research on leadership that I've read has shown that senior role holders can help their groups organisations or countries in one key way anxiety management it appears that if people believe that the top person is predictable if not supremely capable but predictable then they're less anxious about their context and can plan and act it was somewhat smart therefore for the Conservative Party strategists back in 2017 to speak of stable leadership but there are other situations where predictability and stability do not help reduce anxiety there's the times when a group organisation or community or a nation needs a major change in direction so we wanted to really talk about that what is a reassuring form of leadership when the time when you need massive change we could seek a fragile calm and hope someone in power knows what they're doing and will guide us through that means looking to whoever's in charge and welcoming their reassurance we don't look further we don't ask questions I'm in this job because I believe there's a better way to respond it's about rejecting fake reassurances or simple slogans from government it's about sharing ideas and deciding upon real and lasting answers if you agree our times demand a response from all parts of society in all corners of our country then I'm proud to be your leader and if you want someone to hold that space open for you to help change the direction of your life in our country then I'm proud to be your leader therefore he was saying that the function of leadership in reducing anxiety should arise from faith in the collective and not in an imaginary superhero there are other things about leadership in the speech which you can access by the link in the video lecture notes below now of course it's difficult to know whether a speech is a good one or not or helps in the broader effort of refaming a debate but we saw some initial evidence of its reception the author of the book about Jeremy's rise to the leadership of the Labour Party tweeted his approval immediately and the newspapers noted it because it was the first time Jeremy Corbyn was really talking about why he was why he was leading and why he was right for that moment now of course one speech doesn't have that much effect on a campaign and Jeremy Corbyn didn't want to say much more about his own life or approach to leadership after that because he believed what's more important is the platform of policies the philosophy they represent and the social movement of people that support them and the weeks of the campaign the party increased its vote share by almost double what some of the opinion polls were indicating at the start winning the biggest vote share since World War II at the time in the summer of 2017 just after the election Jeremy Corbyn's approach and message was appealing to many particularly young he even became the biggest attraction at the Glastonbury Music Festival and he became famous around the world friends in Africa and Asia were saying congratulations to him not realising he's not actually won the election also saying congratulations to me and others even though he hadn't won but suddenly becoming an icon of a revived and hopeful left would pose interesting challenges if you're having a post-heroic view of leadership so how can you how can a senior roleholder and their colleagues manage a paradox where a leader's popularity might reduce people's search for their own agency building up their own agency and where the power of a movement becomes dependent on the reputation of the guy at the top or when your opponents regroup to chisel away at the image of your leader as the best way of undermining your movement any perceived dependence creates a huge vulnerability in any movement I stopped working for the leaders office on election day in June 2017 so I was not around to see how they were managing those challenges so now 2020, April a few years later the situation we face with the pandemic and its aftermath with climate chaos spreading invites us to learn and to practice leadership beyond the unsustainable concepts and habits that has brought us to this disastrous moment and that's why despite having gone very much full time on deep adaptation to climate change we all believe that working in leadership and leadership development and leadership advisory is important is very important in order to help people escape old narratives which are quite restricting in order to better engage each other to understand how we might reduce harm in the years ahead I do recommend that if you have time and I'll put a link to it in the slide notes in the video notes I recommend you read beyond unsustainable leadership where with Richard Little and Neil Sutherland I'm bringing a critical leadership scholarship perspective to bear on our environmental predicament and it's also where we go much more into the sociological background for some of the things that I've been talking about the main issue of course is not that leadership is a concept that's badly understood and deployed rather I've given you an example of it because any concept is socially constructed and exerts power on us and society although we might think we are an independent thinker we risk being neither fully free nor fully engaged in community if we don't understand the power of socially constructed concepts and discourse to counter that we can grow our ability to notice the framings and narratives we are told and we use ourselves and who is and who or what they're serving or influencing and that approach can be used when looking at medicine or governance or economics or climate or sustainability now when talking about this topic sociologists often use the term discourse I think I've probably used it once or twice in this lecture so it refers to the institutionalised patterns of thought expressed through language, symbol and behaviour which both embody and reproduce power and society critical social theorists look at discourse and power with a desire to free themselves and others from unconscious patterns of thinking which might privilege the few so that's me I'm one of them, that's what I do when I look at discourse and look at power I'm interested in people freeing themselves and others from unconscious patterns of thinking which don't help them Cognitive linguists have broken down that big picture discourse into smaller nuggets with the idea of frames which are sets of interlocking ideas which are ingrained in our minds frames associate words together to encourage us to look at phenomena in one way or not another for instance it's typical to say that jobs are created and lost it sounds normal to say that but it's actually quite arbitrary because the opposite of created is destroyed yet the media report on jobs created and lost not jobs created and jobs destroyed the choice of words is a choice of framing a situation because if you say a job is created there's a suggestion of an agency, someone had to create it so there's someone to thank for it but the opposite jobs destruction no that's not used and thus people don't ask who to blame if you're losing a job or losing something can mean displace it like your keys or to have an accident like losing a leg neither make sense if you think about it for losing one's job so when saying jobs are created and lost not created and destroyed or not jobs found and lost we're framing employment in economic situations in ways which allow praise when new jobs arise and remove responsibility or blame when jobs are cancelled example is a very simple one and everyday one to show how it's important and in my courses we explore the ideological work of some mainstream concepts and framings in order to help you think more critically as you consider your own your own future action as someone leading or not so we've come to the end of the lecture I just want to say that if you are taking a leadership course with me in the next days please make sure you do the pre-reading and the preparatory exercise before our live classes begin and either email it to me or my tutor and information on that will be on the course website I just want to end with a quick summary of what we've covered and some of the key points that we're going to build on in the course so leaderships are widely assumed a mythologised concept and as such that's not helpful I don't think and also it may mean that we assume things which are just really privileging some and disabling our own ability to inquire to learn and to effect change Secondly, with processes of reflection comparison and discussion we can develop our approaches to leadership so it is useful still to look at models and reflect on them and to talk about what we consider to be good or bad practices in leadership Third, our understanding of leadership can evolve so we look at a range of competencies and attributes for contributing to groups achieving significant outcomes and this is it you see once you unpack the mainstream notion of leadership see it as unhelpful you start to think well actually how do groups function well how can they change how can they achieve significant things how do you have a leaderful group and that's where we get to with this lecture now this is I think where we've got to it's that we therefore leadership is good leadership is a distributed act and it's emergent it's episodic and anyone in a group can lead in a moment and so it's how do you cultivate that in a group and that's what we're going to be looking at quite a bit in the course being leadership for sustainability adaptation or emergency or disaster recovery is to be useful then I think it really needs insights from critical leadership studies the kind of insights that I've shared with you in this lecture and then with that context we can really then dive into what might be called leadership for sustainability or leadership for deep adaptation which is what we'll be doing so thank you for being attention following this hopefully it's given you some sense of the philosophy behind the course at least in terms of the concept of leadership and I look forward to seeing you online and in some cases in person to take this stuff a lot, lot further both in terms of reading, philosophy experiential exercises and talking practical implications and efforts at really trying to put these ideas into practice in your own life and work and being supported in learning as you do that thank you