Citation:
Donna Ladkin, Leading Beautifully: How Mastery, Congruence and Purpose Create the Aesthetic of Embodied Leadership Practice, The Leadership Quarterly, Volume 19, Issue 1, February 2008, Pages 31-41
Abstract:
This paper explores the territory of leading as an embodied activity through the
lens of the aesthetic category of ‘the beautiful’. Its starting point is that
although much of the literature about effective leadership practice focuses on
leadership behaviours, little is written about the way in which those behaviours
are actually enacted. The musician, Bobby McFerrin serves as a case study for
identifying three key aspects of leading beautifully: mastery, congruence
between form and content, and purpose. These are further considered through
reference to the concept of beauty as theorised by the philosophers Plato and
Plotinus. The paper then considers how ‘leading beautifully’ might differ from
other conceptualisations of leadership and discusses the particular insight it
brings to understanding the nature of leading as a relational phe