Leadership for the Disillusioned Moving Beyond Myths and Heroes to Leading That Liberates

We have been seduced by the idea of leadership and what it promises. Yet this very seductive power prevents leaders and their followers from finding new ways of doing the work of leadership. We expect our leaders to possess superhuman strengths, provide the answer to everything and never fail us. Our workplaces, from corporations through to community groups, are increasingly captured by the rhetoric that more leadership is what's needed it seems we just can't get enough. The problem lies where this illusion meets reality: while our appetite for leadership remains unexamined we remain vulnerable to seduction by bad leaders and bad leadership ideas. In Liberating Leadership Amanda Sinclair takes a critical view of the promises and prophesies our leaders make and instead presents us with a more positive and realistic alternative. She opens the practice of leadership to new possibilities. Rather than being custodians of the status quo, leaders and leadership have the potential to be challenging agents of social and personal change. Learning from Eastern philosophies, from new ideas about identity, power, the role of breath and bodies, we are shown how to do leadership in a more freeing way. By focusing on what our leadership is for, we are able to lead with less ego, more connection with others and more liberating effects. .

Amanda Sinclair is the foundation professor of management diversity and change for the Melbourne Business School at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Trials at the Top and Doing Leadership Differently and coauthor of New Faces of Leadership.