Raelin-2016

Leadership-as-Practice: Theory and Application

Interview with Joseph A. Raelin

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Joseph Raelin is Asa Knowles Chair of Practice-Oriented Education and Professor of Management and Organizational Development at Northeastern University. His work is currently focused in two areas: work-based learning and the development of a new paradigm for leadership he calls “leaderful practice.” In addition to his work as an organizational consultant, Raelin serves on several boards and as an editor of several journals and book series. The recipient of several prestigious research awards, he is the author of numerous papers, books, and conference presentations. 

Howard Youngs is a Senior Lecturer in educational leadership at Auckland University of Technology (AUT) in New Zealand. His research focuses on shared and distributed forms of leadership and how these constructs can assist our understanding of practice labeled as leadership. For further reading please refer to his referenced work in this article. Howard has presented on Understanding Shared Leadership-as-Practice Through the Application of Social Network Analysis Tools at the 2013 Oceania ILA conference in Auckland and more recently at the 2015 ILA global conference in Barcelona.

Howard Youngs: Joe, thank you for making yourself available to talk about leadership-as-practice and your new edited book. But first, a little bit about yourself. What have been some significant points on your journey leading up to the publication of Leadership-as-Practice: Theory and Application?

Joseph Raelin: I also subscribe to the humanistic premise that anyone affected by a decision should be involved in that decision. Some readers may recall my earlier book, The Clash of Cultures: Managers Managing Professionals, where I tried to re-establish a mutual, respectful relationship between professionals and those who are assigned to manage them. I also spent some time on collective learning, which requires viewing knowledge as fluid and impermanent rather than fixed. Rather than seeing learning as hierarchically provided by those who know to those who don’t, I saw learning as arising from a contestation among engaged actors. In the leadership domain, I called for creating leaderful organizations in which everyone could be involved in leadership not just sequentially but concurrently and collectively; in other words, at the same time and all together. 

When it comes to leadership-as-practice, I am challenging some traditional views of leadership that have relied on the grandeur of particular traits and behaviors of gifted individuals who are accorded power over those called “followers,” who are told to take their place in line. Historically, that has been the starting point for any discussion of leadership. However, I am proposing that we view leadership as collective action emerging from mutual discursive, sometimes recurrent, and sometimes evolving patterns in the moment and over time among those engaged in the practice.

HOWARD: Thank you, Joe. There are several significant points in there. At the end of your response, you came to a point of making sense of what leadership is and what it is not for you. How has that been shaped across your life?

JOE: I seek to release leadership from its role-driven, romantically-based influence relationship. We do not have to be dependent on particular individuals to mobilize action and make decisions for others. We can have leadership without pre-establishing the occupants of the leadership roles. I see leadership as a process of co-creation. The effort is intrinsically collective. The parties to the practice engage in semiotic, often dialogical, exchange. When the participants are genuinely committed to one another, they display an interest in listening to one another, in reflecting upon new perspectives, and in entertaining the prospect of changing direction based on what they learn. When you don’t require pre-specified outcomes, practice can actually precede agency and focus on a process inclusive of the participants’ own communal shared and exploratory discourses. I like to say that to find leadership, we must look to the practice within which it is occurring.

HOWARD: The leadership-as-practice, L-A-P, movement appears to be very timely for the leadership field. Why do you think this is? Why this book right now?

JOE: I think the book is indeed timely because we are at a moment in leadership research when both researchers and practitioners are thirsty for new models of leadership that are more practical, far-reaching, and reflective to help us — in an increasingly collaborative world — move beyond the standard individualistic approach that retains a classic directive mentality. Fortunately, there are many other allied traditions that have joined us, even preceded us, in this critical movement. For example, there are the shared and distributed models that speak to leadership as a mutual and plural activity although, compared to L-A-P, these approaches tend to keep the standard leader-follower roles intact while attempting to distribute power more fairly. Of course, in this case, Howard, I am mindful of your own work critiquing distributed leadership, in which you question whether or not this distribution is as fair as might be thought. There is also the relational leadership approach which is probably our closest cousin, the difference being that we incorporate materiality as a significant part in the process of production not simply because practices always imply the use of tools and objects, but because the latter truly make a difference in the course of action. In addition, the relational approach tends to be largely what is called entitative, whereas the L-A-P model is predominantly process-oriented. Entities are stable, controllable things that stand alone or are in subject-to-subject or subjectto-object relationships. In our process approach, humans and their socio-material elements co-constitute as an unfolding set of fluid emergent practices.

HOWARD: So for the leadership developers, leadership educators, and leadership researchers who are members of ILA, why should the L-A-P movement be of particular interest to each of them?

JOE: I think our movement is incredibly important to ILA practitioners and researchers alike. Perhaps most critically, I fear that our over-reliance on an individual heroic model of leadership will only continue to dampen the energy and creativity of people in our organizations and communities. I’m not sure we know, furthermore, whether leadership has a distinct impact compared to structuring or reward systems. And, if it were to have an impact, what would be the ultimate effect on those who would be called followers? Are they to remain in a followership state? If so, for how long? If they continue as followers, what does it say about their own prospective agency, or are they in a permanent state of dependency or helplessness? If we are uncertain or dissatisfied with leadership, the L-A-P model allows the parties committed to a practice to enter an authentic dialogue to reproduce or transform the very practice in which they are engaged. And, in so doing, they are creating leadership.

HOWARD: Thanks, Joe. As you were saying that, it brought back some memories from my own personal experience. When I was a school leader, a deputy principal, a number of us would attend conferences and I remember listening to speakers and if that speaker or researcher or academic did not understand the complexity of our day-to-day practice, we lost interest and were turned off. That is something that has continued to be important over the years and now as I engage in research and in postgraduate teaching. The whole L-A-P movement really resonates, particularly for those of us who have come from a very strong practitioner background. When I started reading your book, I noted straightaway how it was organized into four clear paths: background, embodied nature, social interactions, and application. Can you provide an overview of how these parts link together and yet also provide some distinctiveness so the multiple perspectives emerging within L-A-P are captured?

JOE: Sure. Before I do that, I just want to make one comment about your experience as a school administrator. Certainly in the United States, and maybe it is the case in Australasia as well, we have a problem with engagement — I suppose I should say disengagement — in the workforce. We need to know why it is that employees, the so-called followers, seem to be turned off and why they become especially turned off when they’re promised the opportunity to participate in an organization in some kind of coleadership capacity. The promise is not always followed by legitimate involvement. The L-A-P movement is strategically designed to address this gap between this espoused theory of engagement and actual practice.

HOWARD: Yes, I agree.

JOE: So with that foundation in mind, we carefully focused on particular themes to give a well-rounded view of the L-A-P movement. As you mentioned, there are four parts: background, embodied nature, social interactions, and application. In the background section, the focus is on the comparative elements as well as some of the philosophical and ideological traditions that underlie L-A-P. In the embodied nature section, I suggest that it is not cognition in its isolated form located within the mind of a prime instigator — call him or her the leader — that mobilizes leadership. Rather, leadership occurs from an interaction with the environment through both individual and collective sensorimotor processing. This section also covers questions of identity, materiality, and interpretation. In the social interaction part, the authors are careful to distinguish the nature of the interaction which occurs in leadership practice as an activity which is more than just an exchange between individuals. It is often an in-the-moment intra-action — not inter, but intra-action — out of which a dynamic unfolding may emerge in some form of leadership agency. The focus here is on the conversational dynamics that reorient the flow of practice. In the last part, we take up three important applications of the L-A-P movement, namely questions of diversity, methodology, and leadership development.

HOWARD: In each of the four sections of the book, the authors refer to other chapters in their section and sometimes to chapters in other parts of the book. As the editor of the book, how did you manage it so that this eclectic connectedness could emerge as someone reads through the whole book?

JOE: Thanks for noticing this, Howard. At the outset of the project we endeavored to practice what we were preaching and vowed to collaborate as much as possible in the production of the book. So at a number of conferences at which we presented in the last year or so, the chapter writers became intimately familiar with each other’s work. Then, during the production of the chapters, the writers sent each other their drafts, and in my editing, when I saw an unexplored chance for a mutual inquiry, I didn’t hesitate to put the authors in touch with one another.

HOWARD: I would read a chapter, think it was really well argued, and then sometimes, after dwelling on it, a question might arise. But then I’d find my question was answered in another chapter. There seems to be something for everyone who has an interest in leadership, whether their focus is philosophical, sociological, developmental, applied, or methodological. And yet, in addition to this, I found in the book there are some key strands that appear across the four parts. One is ontological, where leadership is viewed as a consequence of collective activity rather than the cause of the activity. What are the implications of this for leader and leadership developers, coaches and facilitators?

JOE: You raise the challenge that we faced in trying to integrate and weave the strands and chapters together. We tried to address this by agreeing on some informal guidelines. First, we agreed that the overall tone of our contributions would be as narratives which, though conceptual in tone, would also make good use of examples and applications. We also sought to be consistent in our L-A-P referencing and in our wording. In particular, we made an effort to avoid referring to “leaders” since in L-A-P we do not wish to romanticize particular individuals. Rather, we wanted to highlight the opportunity for collective complementary practices among a constellation of individuals engaged in agentic activity.

As time went on and we began to engage with each other online and face-to-face at conferences, we agreed on some additional parameters. First, we agreed that we would distinguish between practices and practice, especially as guided by Barbara Simpson’s chapter, “Where’s the agency in leadership-as-practice?” and as embellished in Lucia Crevani’s and Nada Endrissat’s introductory chapter, “Mapping the leadership-as-practice terrain: Comparative elements.” We think of practices as referring to specific sequences of activities that may repeatedly recur, whereas practice refers to emergent entanglements that tend to extend or transform meaning over time.

Secondly, we were guided by Viviane Sergi’s chapter, “Who’s leading the way? Investigating the contributions of materiality to leadership-as-practice” and Brigid J. Carroll’s “Leadership as identity: A practice-based exploration,” where we committed to considering the full range of activities and accessories of those activities in L-A-P. This meant that we would examine the socio-material artifacts, the symbols, the technology, the physical arrangements, the language, the emotions, and the rituals each brought to bear to establish identity and understand the meaning of the practices or practice in question

HOWARD: What you’re saying here really cuts across the shortcomings of the leader-follower ontology and the leadership industry’s reliance on solo heroic leaders to bring transformation to their organizations and the individualism that can be apparent in competency frameworks and appraisals of staff.

JOE: That’s right. As I said earlier, in some respects practice occurs first, before any agency. Out of that practice, leadership may or may not emerge, where leadership is referring perhaps to a change in trajectory that leads to a redirection of attention or even a reconfiguration of the relations among the parties in the practice. In many cases, this effect is not intentional at the outset. People may be just getting together to work on something. But, at any point, a redirection may occur and that very occurrence is a case for agency that produces leadership. It doesn’t come out of the mind of any one of those people and certainly not necessarily from the one who has position power at that moment.

HOWARD: Thanks, Joe. I took notes while reading “Methodologies to discover and challenge leadership-aspractice,” the chapter by Stephen Kempster, Ken Parry, and Brad Jackson. No doubt those names will be quite well known to ILA members. In their chapter, they made the point that the emerging L-A-P movement has the opportunity to theorize from the ground up. What do researchers of leadership need to consider if they choose to engage with the L-A-P movement in terms of epistemology and ontology?

JOE: Many who use a critical realist perspective, as in the case of the Kempster, Parry, and Jackson’s chapter on methodology, would focus on ontology first. But other chapter writers such as Kenneth Gergen and Lone Hersted in “Developing leadership as dialogic practice,” like to focus on meanings, interpretations, and text through social constructionism. What’s most critical is that we focus on the practices in situ as they are occurring as well as on the collective beliefs and co-constructions that arise to guide subsequent individual and collective action. Such a process-oriented approach requires slowing down the action sufficiently to study the discernible practices and interactions. The challenge for us in the L-A-P field is that practices are often tacit, making them hard to capture through interviews, for example. There is also the materiality element and lastly practice is recursive so there needs to be a long-term component to see its unfolding and emergent nature.

I can give you an example of how leadership research might change in a L-A-P world. Research questions would necessarily broaden beyond such classic shibboleths as leadership requiring an influence relationship. L-A-P is interested in other constructs such as mutual adjustment, shared sense-making, dialogue, and collaborative learning. So the emergent research orientation would resist closure on the familiar categories of leadership that are often individualistic and controlling in their account. Moreover, when surveyed or interviewed, respondents are often initially referred to as leaders, which predisposes them to cultural norms and scripts regarding the behavior of “being in charge.” Their resulting commentary often incorporates a manner of discourse attending to this honorific role. The same could be said in reverse of those considered followers, a role associated with dependence and compliance.

HOWARD: Yes, and I picked up, in relationship to the in situ, Brigid Carroll’s comment that there is a lack of observational studies in the leadership field. I also picked up that rather than doing the quick in-and-out sort of studies based on interviews and focus groups, leadership researchers need to prolong their presence in organizational contexts, not only to observe but also to get a feel for the ebbs and flows of practice over a period of time to try and capture some of those moments as they occur.

JOE: I think that we tend to almost require an emic perspective rather than an etic one. So L-A-P researchers, in some respects, take the insider’s point of view. Some sort of intimate connection is established between the researcher and the participants in the practice, and sometimes the researcher becomes totally involved and engaged in the practice. From there, there are multiple ways to proceed methodologically. Maybe it’s just a matter, as in the case of ethnomethodology, of reporting out the practices. Or maybe after the fact, it would be a case of reporting out the interpretations that the researcher suggests might be going on in that episode, which could be balanced against how the participant sees it, and lead to a dialogue not only among them but among other stakeholders and interested parties. It’s a very different perspective than an etic model where you take models from the outside and, in some respects, impose them on what’s going on within the action.

HOWARD: This point leads very nicely into my next question, which is for the ILA members who have a particular interest in the philosophy of leadership. I think they will find the book very engaging due to the clarity evident and the positioning of each chapter writer. Are there any key philosophical aspects of L-A-P we haven’t discussed that you would like ILA members to think about?

JOE: I am particularly intrigued by questions of political and ethical philosophy, especially those raised by Philip Woods in his chapter, “Democratic roots: Feeding the multiple dimensions of leadership-as-practice.” The critical question to me is whether or not L-A-P is more predisposed to democratic practice compared to other models of leadership. Woods believes that it is because – relying, as L-A-P does on a sense of connectedness with others – L-A-P cannot be based on a philosophy of dependence in which followers without discretion follow the “right” leader who is assumed to be the beacon of moral rectitude. Rather, L-A-P observes a philosophy of what Woods calls “co-development,” in which people discover and unfold from within themselves. It seeks to engage people in critical dialogue in which they question the language and the practices that bear the imprint of social domination. On the other hand, though characterized by flexible peer decision-making processes, our so-called era of postbureaucracy and so-called post-heroic leadership also comes with greater use of such control methods as electronic surveillance and monitoring. Under these conditions, there is a chance of a resumption of the iron cage of standard bureaucracy characterized by vertical accountability. We must also recognize that participatory spaces are imbued with power relations that in some cases cause suppression of voices and self-muting among those disenfranchised from the dominant discourse. Through its double-loop tradition, L-A-P challenges the very assumption of the necessity of the dominant leader. Further, not requiring pre-specified outcomes, practice can be inclusive of participants’ collective activities.

HOWARD: Joe, thank you for that response. In relation to the point about checking our assumptions when we’re looking at philosophical aspects, we also need to check our assumptions around the transferability of knowledge into other cultures, and particularly into indigenous cultures. So that creates yet another whole frame that the L-A-P movement could benefit from, but could also provide some benefit to.

JOE: Yes, it brings a number of issues to bear here. First, for those readers that are unfamiliar with the double-loop reference, it refers to the work of Chris Argyris and Donald A. Schön, e.g., their1978 book, Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective. In a single-loop inquiry, there’s only a questioning of the procedures that are being used, as in the case of a thermostat that requires increasing the temperature because it’s cold inside. In the case of a double-loop inquiry, there’s a question of what Argyris calls the governing values of the system. And so, in some respects he would say, and I would endorse, that with double-loop learning there’s at least some assurance of participation for those who are sometimes left out of the conversation. So, this double-loop inquiry is an insurance against overlooking the contributions of those from other cultures and how they can shape our understanding of collective practices.

In some of the especially indigenous traditions, we find more collective activity than we do in some of the developed world. I would point to, for example, the tradition of Ubuntu in South Africa, which basically states that I am who I am because of the contribution of others. In some of these traditions, there is an opportunity for an engagement into practices that could be extremely instructive to those of us in, let’s call it, the Western world. And even in the Western world there is significant divergence between those cultures that are quite individualistic, such as the dominant culture in the U.S., versus those cultures, for example, in the Scandinavian countries, which tend to be much more accepting of a collectivistic orientation. We have a lot to learn from each other, and the double-loop method of inquiry can help us make inroads into that understanding.

HOWARD: I agree. There’s so much that we can learn from other cultures. As an example, in New Zealand, we have this notion of relationship through shared experiences and working together with a collective sense of being, it is called whanaungatanga.

With whanaungatanga, the collective identity comes first rather than individual identity, and yet individuals are not lost within this due to the focus on strengthening each other. It is within this collective that individuals find their place. For me, that’s where I find resonance with the tikanga (culture) evident in whanaungatanga and the leadership-aspractice movement. I think the L-A-P movement opens the doors for us to move beyond an overt leader-centric or individualized way of thinking about practice that can position some as being superior. This is where other cultures in our world can help those of us who work in the leadership field see beyond our own default lens and see things afresh.

Leading on from this, if you could add to your book, what additional chapters would you be looking for and how can others contribute to and critique leadership-aspractice?

JOE: From a structural point of view, it would be valuable to identify the settings in which L-A-P is more naturally mobilized, perhaps in more complex relational environments, such as in social networks or within communities that require coordination across a range of diverse social actors.

More generally, we need to know whether changes in bureaucracy, such as the adoption of more organic, horizontal, boundaryless, sociocratic, and holacratic configurations, might lead to more collective forms of practice. Though L-A-P tends to focus less on personality than other leadership models, we are more likely to find practice leadership occurring among position leaders who are more predisposed to collaborative agency and willing to forego their own ego gratification for the benefit of the group. Some managers, for example, might encourage the dispersion of control through a commitment to a participant-directed praxis.

Leadership development is another area that will require a lot more attention, even beyond what David Denyer and Kim Turnbull James cover in their chapter, “Doing leadership-as-practice development.” If we are interested in developing leadership along practice lines, the entire face of leadership development will need to change. Rather than locating it away from the office at pristine offsites, leadership development will need to return to the very setting where the practices are going on. Rather than learning best practices and skills or competencies using case examples, participants will need to learn how to address and solve their own problems in their own settings, such as via action learning. Further, they will need to confront these problems with those who are directly and mutually engaged.

Leadership development thus requires an acute immersion into the practices that are embedded within the lived experience of the participants. The engagement would likely need to occur within a group that is attending to its own work but perhaps using novel forms of conversation that would be aimed as much at learning as at task accomplishment. By learning, I refer to the participants focusing on themselves, on the dilemmas they may be facing, and the processes that they use. Any training provided would be delivered just-in-time and in the right dose to be immediately helpful to those involved.

HOWARD: Building on that, what other contributions do you hope the L-A-P movement will make to the leadership field in the next few years?

JOE: Although L-A-P is allied with a number of other constructionist approaches to leadership, it is the one that is most committed to changing the dominant view of the leadership relationship as constituting as an influence relationship between leader and follower. Those of us working within the movement hope to sway possible adherents to the practice view, a perspective that sees leadership as a social, material, and jointly accomplished process involving a contestation among mutual inquirers sharing their intersubjective meanings.

L-A-P should also contribute to the ongoing critique of verticality in organizational and network structure. Organizational relationships and the conversations that ensue are as likely to be lateral, across a range of individuals connected with each other, as they are to be vertical through the transmission of instructions. As people contribute to accomplish the work of the community, they exert a leadership that is not only collective but concurrent. They participate together and at the same time. Accordingly, it is likely that leadership in the moment will have democratic inclinations that may in turn benefit from an open acknowledgment that useful outcomes can ensue from public engagement.

I would also like to make a plug for the L-A-P movement’s capacity to change how we view learning in organizations. My hope is that in due course we will come to view practice as a perfectly acceptable place to learn to lead. Learning is vital to leadership when we view leadership as a process and as a practice. Viewed in this way, leadership can become self-correcting. As practitioners in leadership engage in learning with each other, they commit to reflecting on their own actions and consequently are better able to reconstruct their activity on behalf of their mutual interests. In addition, if the engagement is based on the equal contribution and access of all the involved actors, it may propel our democratic tendencies since it endorses public free expression that is not reliant on any one single individual to mobilize action and make decisions on behalf of others. Rather people act out of their own craftsmanship when and where needed. Their engagement is not based on any benefits extrinsic to the work. It arises from the sheer enjoyment of accomplishment.

HOWARD: Thank you, Joe. Quite often in leadership development, we focus on people needing to reflect on previous practice, which is important, but I believe the challenge is to have a transformative learning shift so people are better able to reflect mid-practice as it’s actually occurring.

JOE: Very, very much so. While the after-action review is important and valuable, the practice of reflection in the midst of action can be so insightful and timely. In that way, especially with good facilitators, we can work on some of those expressions that get in the way of productive discourse. In so doing we can truly engage those who are trying to work through some of the difficult entanglements and complex problems in which they find themselves. That’s what I mean when I say that this kind of leadership development is, in some respects, catching people in the very midst of being themselves while working together, but introducing language that can help them reflect more productively in action.

HOWARD: Yes. I like that. The way that I sometimes say it, is having leaders learn to be present in the present.

JOE: Yes, indeed.

HOWARD: So Joe, is there anything else we haven’t covered that you would like to say to the ILA readers?

JOE: Your questions were very much to the point and I think all my colleagues on the book will be grateful that you probed so deeply into the questions of practice. Again, speaking on behalf of my co-authors, we appreciate the opportunity to inform the ILA’s members about this new movement and we hope that people will give it a chance by taking a look at the book or some chapters in the book. Hopefully they will find it a refreshing, new, vibrant way of thinking about leadership that is very different from some of the traditional models that have seemed to dominate the leadership research landscape through the years. We hope that the L-A-P model will free people up to expand their way of thinking about leadership and make it more flexible and amenable to change to allow it to serve our own mutual interests.

HOWARD: Thank you, Joe. It’s been a privilege hearing you unpack not just the book but leadership-as-practice. The book really helps make sense of, what for many will be, a new frontier. It makes a huge contribution to the leadership field and those who are in it.