Leadership as art: Variations on a theme

Abstract

FromMax Depree’s Leadership is an Art (1989) to Michael Jones’ Artful Leadership (2006) to Oba T’Shaka’s two volumes of The Art of Leadership (1990–1991), the rhetoric that leadership is an art is alive and well. However, with a few exceptions such as Keith Grint’s The Arts of Leadership (2001), the moniker ‘leadership as art’ is used rather indiscriminately, indicative of everything from ‘skillful practice’ to ‘trendy title for a book’. In this special issue we offer six articles that each work with the idea of leadership as art, not as a loose rhetorical turn, but as a starting point for some rigorous and interesting thinking. Our impetus for generating this issue was curiosity about the consequence of taking the notion of ‘leadership as art’ seriously. How might doing so inform what we recognize as leadership? What consequences would result for the ways in which we understand the role of followers or context in leadership’s enactment? What would it imply about the ways in which leaders might be developed? Why might conceptualizing ‘leadership as art’ be important? The six articles presented here create a surprisingly consistent argument in answer to this final question. In short, we live in a complex world, which cannot be fully understood solely by reference to scientific forms of logic and sense-making. The arts, and arts-based practices, provide different ways of both describing and relating to that complexity, thereby offering novel ways of responding to it. This possibility has been noted by a number of organizational theorists in recent years, for instance Karl Weick writes: