Public leadership development facilitation and the crossroads blues

Abstract

The article seeks to make sense of the choices facing the public leadership development facilitator, in design and in-the-moment programme decisions. The challenge is posited as one of situating knowledge of facilitation practices in a critical relationship with the public sector leadership literature and the critical leadership development literature. The article positions public leadership development facilitation as sitting within three pressing dilemmas, or crossroads, concerning public leadership theory, critical leadership development scholarship and facilitation scholarship. A narrative ethnographic methodology is adopted to explore the constructions of a specific public sector leadership development facilitator as a means of analysing facilitator choices in action. An interpretation of how the facilitator frames and constructs public leadership in relation to the constructions of participants is offered. The article situates facilitator choices as highly political, sitting contextually between the idealism of the public sector literature and the social identifications of participants. The authors offer two dominant forms of facilitation choices (framing and adaptive) as a heuristic for facilitators, practitioners and scholars who wish to reflect further on the role of leadership development in the public realm.

How do managerial techniques evolve over time? The distortion of “facilitation” in healthcare service improvement

“…However, our data show that whilst facilitators, in theory, can rely on a wide range of tools and techniques to enable improvement (Smolović Jones, Grint, and Cammock 2015), in reality, their agency is severely constrained by the context they work in. This can be explained by the facilitators' relative lack of power as well as by the strict compliance of healthcare organizations to the target-focused policy imperatives operating at the institutional level.…”

Making up leaders: Reconfiguring the executive student through profiling, texts and conversations in a leadership development programme

“…Another research stream running parallel to the regulation-focused research into leadership development seeks to recognize and explore the agentic spaces in which programme participants, but occasionally also instructors and facilitators, create, craft, adapt and pursue their leadership identities. Rather than advocating voluntarism, these studies point to instances and episodes where participants resist and even reject the dominant host organization or educator assumptions (Carroll and Nicholson, 2014; Gagnon and Collinson, 2017), actively negotiate or co-create identity constructs and processes with educators (Iszatt-White et al, 2017; Smolović Jones et al, 2015) and use epistemic, aesthetic and collective resources to re-narrate the entire process of leadership development itself (Carroll and Smolović Jones, 2017). The majority of this research casts leadership development as the provision of a ‘space of action’ (Carroll and Levy, 2010) where participants and instructors can confront their identity choices, make identity judgments, fashion identity alternatives and more or less deny identity impositions, well knowing that all of such identity work carries organizational and personal consequences.…”

Retroduction, reflexivity and leadership learning: Insights from a critical realist study of empowerment

“…Building on this interest in power, the study also engages with a contested area of debate regarding the agency of individual leaders. For example, a key concern of critical scholarship in leadership learning is the need to highlight the possibility for oppression in individual-focussed development, while other contributions have made the case for the individual as a potential site of emancipation (Smolovic Jones et al, 2015). Rather than adopting an ‘either-or’ orientation regarding these different perspectives, the study supports the case for a leadership learning process which aligns with the argument that a focus on the personal can offer important insights into wider social and political issues (Mills, 2000; Swan, 2010; Watson, 2008).…”

“…This study’s focus on the former (the leader as the primary unit of analysis) is designed to inform the latter by exploring the interplay between the individual leader and their context through the application of its reflexive method, as well as testing the boundaries of agency and restraint. The study serves to encourage a shift to more contextually intelligent ways of viewing the world through an approach which recognises – and works with – the complex positioning of practitioners in relation to leadership (Smolovic Jones et al, 2015).…”

“…The participants on this programme are senior civil servants based in Whitehall and arm’s length bodies charged with communicating government policy, providing information about government activities and programmes to the public. Adapting the method developed in this study for this pedagogical context complements a call for leadership development facilitators to create strategies of ‘reflexive engagement’ (Smolovic Jones et al, 2015: 406) while further illustrating the important and on-going role that reflexive practice has in enhancing workplace learning (Matsuo, 2013). The application of the insights generated by the research project in a professional learning environment also serves to introduce retroduction into debates on reflexivity in leadership pedagogy.…”