Creating Leaderful Organizations:How To Bring Out Leadership In Everyone

Description

The times demand a new style of leadership. Employees today are highly trained and independent-they can offer much more to an enterprise than simply their obedience. And with the relationship between worker and organization constantly changing, no one person will likely be able to lead alone. Creating Leaderful Organizations presents a paradigm of leadership tailored to our times, one that is based on mutual-rather than heroic-leadership.

It is not merely consultative, with leaders graciously allowing followers to participate in leadership, nor is it a stewardship approach in which the leader occasionally steps aside to allow others to take over temporarily. It is a revolutionary new approach that transforms leadership from an individual property to a collective responsibility. Raelin details how "leaderful" practice can accomplish the critical processes of leadership more effectively than any existing approach. And using actual examples from leading-edge organizations, he offers practical guidance for assessing your own and others' leaderful predisposition, preparing for leaderful practice, distributing leadership roles, and dealing with resistance to change.

About the Author

People call me Joe, and currently, I hold the Asa S. Knowles Chair at Northeastern University, where I am also Professor of Management and Organization Development. As the Knowles Chair it is my mission to conduct research on methods of learning that integrate experience in the world with experience in the classroom. These methods are likely to deeply involve learners in the construction of useful knowledge. Hence, from a leadership perspective, I am interested in creating communities of practice in which members are deeply committed to democratic and inclusive practices, dedicated to each others' development and devoid of impressionistic or inauthentic behavior and intentions.My most recent books attempt to establish a new form of leadership, called 'leaderful practice' in which everyone can participate in leadership, not just sequentially, but at the same time and all together, in other words, concurrently and collectively. The foundation book is called, Creating Leaderful Organizations: How to Bring Out Leadership in Everyone, and it now has an accompanying fieldbook loaded with exercises and cases and is called: The Leaderful Fieldbook: Strategies and Activities for Developing Leadership in Everyone.My latest book is the edited volume: Leadership-as-Practice: Theory and Application.