The Phenomenology of Leadership

Abstract

Teaching people about leadership is different from creating leaders. Teaching leadership uses a third-person approach to impart someone else's knowledge, which grants learners limited direct access to the being and actions of effective leaders. In contrast, creating leaders entails a firstperson phenomenological methodology, which provides direct access to what it means to be a leader and what it means to exercise good leadership in real time, with real results. The distinctiveness of the first-person "as-lived/lived-through" approach lies in its capacity to disclose the hidden contexts that shape the ways of being, thinking, and acting that are the source of the leader's performance. When these contexts become unveiled, it allows for the creation of new contexts that give leaders more space and more degrees of freedom to lead effectively as their natural selfexpression. A phenomenological inquiry into leadership does not study the attributes of leaders, but rather the fundamental structures of human "being" that make it possible to be a leader in the first place. Because the phenomenological "facts" of lived experience reside in language, creating for oneself what it is to be a leader entails mastering a special language (that includes terms like intentionality; thrownness; being-in-the-world; clearing-for-action; absorbed coping; hermeneutic; and, break-down) from which leaders can orient their being, thinking, and actions. Learning to be a leader is not first and foremost about the acquisition of knowledge or certain personal attributes. Rather, only when leadership becomes an as-lived/lived-through experience does it grant access to its actual nature and essence.

Leadership and the Limitations of Language

“…In contrast, leadership has more recently been defined as an exercise in language that results in the realization of a future that wasn't going to happen otherwise (Erhard, Jensen, & Granger, 2011;Souba, 2014). The first perspective sees leadership as the purview of a small group of people at the top of the organization while the second one extends leading to anyone.…”

“…In other words, whatever leadership is-its value, its purpose, its roles, and its attributes-this meaning is not given before language in and by some detached, prelinguistic domain and then subsequently labeled with words (Souba, 2014). Rather, language itself, always already operating in our lives, is constitutive of leadership, providing us ready access to it.…”

“…In this article, we present three characteristics of language that contribute to this duality. Following Souba (Souba, 2014), it is our contention that being a leader is inextricably linked to using language to reframe people's challenges such that more effective ways of being and acting are the outcome. In this way, the leader takes advantage of the power of language.…”

'a woman's place' : exploring the leadership journeys of women in government using interpretative phenomenological analysis

“…Being a leader is not theoretical; it is experienced from a first-person point of view (Souba, 2014). Because IPA relies on the first-person, "aslived" perspective, using an IPA approach acknowledged that being a leader is not "computational, linear, or formulaic" (Souba, 2014, p. 78); rather IPA recognized the opportunity to understand how a leader experiences leadership.…”

“…Being a leader is more than a hypothetical theory-it is a first-person lived experience (Souba, 2014), and there was a need for research that provided "women administrators a chance to learn from other women's work experiences while helping them make sense of their own lived realities" (Burnier, 2003, p. 52). Unfortunately, the "accounts of women's experience as public administrators and leaders have been slow to find their way into the literature of public administration" (Burnier, 2003, p. 37).…”