Journey around Leadership

Abstract

Ideas about leadership in education, as in other areas of professional practice, increasingly borrow from management and business thinking. In this article I provide a commentary and critique of contemporary leadership in the form of a narrative of my own experience as an educator in a business school. My experience as a woman teacher of largely male, adult management students has underscored my learning about and critique of leadership theory and my own aspirations as teacher and leader. Personal experience is interwoven with theoretical commentary to highlight the limitations of leadership discourses—too often disembodied, de‐gendered and de‐sexualized. By inserting my responses and feelings I also seek to subvert, or at least to add some different dimensions to, intellectualized and inert critiques of leadership. Learning about leadership, including engagement, reaction and contestation, is not just a cerebral undertaking, but emotion laden and thoroughly embodied. I sought to reflect these qualities in this article.