Abstract
In this ambitious book, the authors make the case for reflexive leadership. However, readers may be surprised by what exactly defines the premises and practices of reflexive leadership according to this work. The short definition of leadership here is: ‘influencing ideas, meanings, understandings and identities of others within an asymmetrical (unequal) relational context’ (p. 3). But unlike what may be expected, the book does not just argue for more and better of such leadership. On the contrary, the authors argue for reflexive leadership – by incorporating considerations as to when leadership may also not be the best solution to organizational challenges: ‘Being aware of different options and thinking carefully about having more or less of leadership or other ways of organizing are vital’ (p. 3), they stress.
As such, the book’s overall project is to argue for the potential of and show an alternative framework for reflexive leadership, that is, not fixating leadership matters with only positively connoted meanings but rather also considering the challenges and problematics inscribed in established ideas and beliefs regarding leadership – including one’s own. The framework developed includes various concepts for thinking about and doing reflexive leadership, for example, intra-reflexive and extra-reflexive leadership as well as offering a number of practical examples as food for (self-)critical thought. Hence, this book also offers a meta-reflection on today’s fascination with leadership. In the following, we first consider the building of the book’s framework; then, we turn to its main points and their relevance for practitioners and scholars interested in leadership; and finally, we dwell a little on the premise of the book and its appraisal of reflexivity in relation to leadership.
Building a book about reflexive leadership
Written to leadership scholars and students as well as practitioners related to the leadership industry, this work draws on 20 years of research in and consultancy work with leadership actors and issues. The authors pursue arguments for reflexive leadership throughout 14 chapters on 221 pages. During these pages, chapters 1–4 present the basic fundament of the book. This part defines the concepts of reflexivity and leadership, most notably the Extra-Leadership Reflections (ELR) that involves considering alternatives to leadership-centred ways of organizing work, and the Intra-Leadership Reflections (ILR) that involves thinking critically about ideas and practices within leadership-centered organizing of work. Furthermore, a ‘6 Modes of organizing’ model (6M) is also introduced as well as a ‘5 personas doing leadership’ model (5P), however, without being further unfolded here. Instead, the authors review established leadership theories, to which they position their framework as an alternative. This demonstrates their insights to leadership issues such as vague rhetoric and symbolism, identity, power asymmetry, and ideology, as well as it argues for the relevance of their, accordingly, more nuanced and critical approach to reflexive leadership.
In chapters 5–11, they unfold the concepts and use of their framework, including its concern with, for example, organizational culture, leadership-followership, power and authority, as well as group dynamics. During this, the authors address related dilemmas and paradoxes, thereby unfolding the potentials of critically approaching them through the ELR or ILR concepts. In that regard, the 6M model and 5P model are also developed and unfolded further. These are presented as useful when engaging in critical (self-)reflexivity about leadership practice and related issues. This part is followed by discussions on constraints and misfits of leadership practices and includes different empirical examples. Chapters 12 and 13 concern tensions between reflexive and unreflexive practices of leading and organizing work, including illustrations of the contradictions emerging in practice from such, as well as the interrelations between reflexive followership and leadership. The book is concluded in chapter 14 with reflections on the presented framework, and its implications are highlighted by some suggestions and traps for thoughtful leadership. During the whole book, the framework, models and main points are communicated by using both empirical examples and illustrative tables and figures, offering both the scholarly and the more practice-oriented reader different ideas and arguments for the case for reflexivity. This makes the book fairly accessible despite its complex and comprehensive subject matter.
The framework of reflexive leadership and its relevance to practitioners
As critical management and organization scholars, who teach at education programmes of leadership, management and organization, we welcome a critical, yet easily read book such as this one. Many of our students would benefit from reading it and their studies on and practices of leadership would most probably gain from it. A great gain alone would be the working of the intended effects of the opening premise of the book, namely, to critically reflect upon and question one’s own and others’ taken-for-granted and often positively connoted idea(l)s of leadership as always being a necessity. Understanding the use and consequences of such reflexivity in relation to leadership, we find incredibly important – and thus agree with the authors. This may help the reader to destabilize existing power relations, communication modes and organizing processes constitutive to the leadership issue in question. Another gain of the book, one could argue, is the authors’ ambitions of not just critically reflecting on leadership as theory and practice but also offering the reader some solutions to their problems. Not in terms of fixed and best-practice concepts, but rather in terms of thinking-technological concepts aiding the reader’s reflexivity concerning leadership. The framework, they develop in this effort, includes a number of concepts and models, as already mentioned. To many practitioners, we suspect, the concepts of 6M, 5P, ELR and ILR, high influential persons (HIPs) and low influential persons (LIPs) offer both ways to understand the complexity of reflexive leadership better, and a kind of lookup tool, readers can return to when in need.
That being said, the same potential of such a framework may also become its pitfall, namely, that the multiple concepts and models of the framework (including their no doubt funny abbreviations) may also be a little confusing to some, they may be hard to remember and to tell apart. Furthermore, and perhaps worse, is that the concepts risk becoming exactly the opposite of what they are critical towards, which are taken-for-granted abbreviated concepts that may be used for superficial rhetoric purposes, but then lack the practices of critical reflexivity and substantial thinking-work that they actually preach. However, this latter point is a risk in all (prescriptive) leadership theory – including books that take a critical approach like this one. And thus, this book’s concepts, like all other conceptual leadership frameworks, call for critical reflexivity about – in this case – its own version of critical reflexivity.
Reflexive questions about reflexivity in reflexive leadership
This leads us to a question we have reflected upon during our reading: namely, how to apply the book’s call for reflexivity on itself. To this end, we are somewhat puzzled by the contradictions of arguing for critical reflexivity as ‘… thinking outside the box’ (p. 202), while still leaving the reader inside a box – the framework of reflexive leadership – without any guidance for thinking outside the concepts and models that constitute this specific box. The authors advocate for reflexivity as ‘the ambition to carefully and systematically take a critical view of one’s own assumptions, ideas and vocabulary and to consider if alternative ones make sense’ (p. 14). However, the need for critical reflexivity, about how their framework constitutes particular conditions and possibilities for the reflexivity of the reflexive leader, is underplayed. Hence, the assumptions, ideas and vocabulary of the book remain more or less undisputed and thus without reflexive considerations about alternatives.
While we fully agree with the authors about the many good reasons for being reflexive about leadership, it would have been interesting to see them apply such a request about being critical reflexive on this very request itself. Of course, this would highlight the book’s build-in paradox of simultaneously requesting reflexivity (about all issues) and non-reflexivity (about the issue of reflexivity itself) – a paradox that risks paralyzing any book that calls for reflexivity. Nonetheless, instead of simply ignoring this paradox, the authors could for instance have added a ‘reflexivity trap’ to the traps that reflexivity risks falling into, which the book deals with at the end. Thereby, the authors might also have explicated their considerations of distinguishing between reflexive leadership as (implicitly) good and non-reflexive leadership as (implicitly) bad, while also arguing that ‘The good versus bad set-up is to be avoided, or at least minimized’ (p. 16).
On that note, let us stress that this book is both well-written and highlights many key problems of conventional leadership literature and practice, just as it offers a number of methods to deal with reflexive leadership in practice. As such, we praise the book’s overall ambition, although we could wish for a bit more self-critical reflexivity about reflexive leadership in their next edition. Because with its timely subject and its ambitious set-up, we see this book as a potential must-read in management and leadership education programmes and across the leadership industry. Moreover, as such, we do of course recommend it to any leadership-interested scholar and practitioner, as we hope it will engage them, us and the authors to participate in furthering critical reflexivity about reflexive leadership in theory and practice.