Supporting public sector leaders and teams
Leading
Heifetz, Ronald., (1998). Leadership Without Easy Answers
In this book Ron Heifetz, who teaches at Harvard University, argues that there is a difference between authority and leadership behaviour and that by restricting the exercise of leadership to legitimate authority, as the conventional conception substantively does, we largely discount leadership that challenges the legitimacy of authority or the system of authorisation itself.
He goes on to argue that leadership work is largely adaptive work (making progress on adaptive challenges) and consists of the learning that is needed to address conflicts in values or gaps between values and reality. This kind of work, in his view, requires changes in values, belief or behaviour that can only be achieved through the mobilisation of learning that comes from the exposure and orchestration of conflict.
Heifetz, Ronald. A., Linsky, Marty. & Grashow, Alexander., (2009). The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World
A genuine fieldbook (written from the field and for the field!) with practical tools and descriptions of approaches based on the research and experience in teaching and practicing adaptive leadership of Ron Heifetz and his colleagues
Kets De Vries, Manfred ., (2009). The Leadership Mystique: Leading behavior in the human enterprise
Manfred Kets De Vries, who teaches in the leadership program at INSEAD, seeks to bring the person back into the organisation. In this book he brings a clinical approach, he is also trained as a psychoanalyst, to a range of familiar, and some not so familiar, leadership themes: emotional intelligence, resistance to change, failure, resilience, the change process and the roles leaders play. In the final chapter he argues for the development of a new kind of organisation (one he calls authentozoic) that is characterised by autonomy, interaction and recognition.
Linsky, Marty. & Heifetz, Ronald. A., (2002). Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading
Owen, Harrison., (2008). Wave Rider: Leadership for High Performance in a Self-Organizing World
Harrison Owen is the originator of a facilitation process called Open Space Technology. Observing that most of the really useful and productive conversation at meetings and conferences took place in the coffee breaks Owen progressively created a process that designed-in these kinds of conversation.
In this book he applies his now considerable experience of this process to the question of how to lead within complex and self-organising contexts and systems. He likens leadership in these kinds of contexts to the riding of a wave, arguing that no wave rider is in control of the wave.he sets out ten steps for the “care and feeding of self-organising systems”.
Quinn, Robert. E., (2004). Building the Bridge As You Walk On It: A Guide for Leading Change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass
Sinclair, Amanda., (2008). Leadership for the Disillusioned: Moving Beyond Myths and Heroes to Leading That Liberates
In this book Amanda Sinclair argues that people call for leadership because they feel unable to do the challenging work of thinking about how to move forward together. She also proposes that the conventional conceptions of leadership, of the heroic, visionary kind that have been largely appropriated by business, have generally failed to succeed. She goes on to explore ways in which leadership can be a liberating force and proposes a number of practices, including mindfulness, identity work, exploring personal history and better understanding power dynamics, that would, in her view, contributed to the development of a more spirited and less-ego style of leading.
Wageman, Ruth., Nunes, Debra., Burruss, James. A., & Hackman, J. Richard., (2008). Senior Leadership Teams: What It Takes to Make Them Great (Center for Public Leadership). Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press
Williams, Dean., (2005). Real Leadership: Helping People and Organizations Face Their Toughest Challenges