The Embodiment of Leadership Bookcover

The Embodiment of Leadership (BLB 2013)

Editors: Lois Ruskai Melina, Gloria J. Burgess, Lena Lid Falkman and Antonio Marturano (Jossey-Bass/Wiley, 2013)

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Covering leadership in the arts and humanities, this volume integrates critical theory with authentic leadership development, exploring the notion that leadership is both a discursive practice and a performative identity. Each year the International Leadership Association publishes a book that captures the best contemporary thinking about leadership from a diverse range of scholars, practitioners, and educators working in the field of leadership studies. In keeping with the mission of the ILA, the International Leadership Series Building Leadership Bridges connects ways of researching, imagining, and experiencing leadership across cultures, over time, and around the world.

Praise for The Embodiment of Leadership

Read this book to experience an artistic and more robust sense of leadership, to rise to the challenge to gain alignment in mind, body and spirit, and to heed the call to heal the shadows we as leaders sometimes cast over our collective humanity. Read this book to become more whole.

Shann Ray Ferch Professor of leadership studies, Gonzaga University

For once leadership experts consider the mind-body problem from the perspective of the latter—the body. Those with an interest in how the body is brought to bear on the exercise of leadership, would do well to explore The Embodiment of Leadership.

Barbara Kellerman James MacGregor Burns Lecturer in Leadership, Harvard Kennedy School

The Embodiment of Leadership goes beyond the banal by using our body experiences as the point of departure in deciphering the leadership conundrum. Anyone interested in the study of leadership would do well to pay attention to this book.

Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries Distinguished Clinical Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change, The Raoul de Vitry d'Avaucourt Chaired Professor of Leadership Development

Leadership is a social construction. The Embodiment of Leadership presents a multifaceted approach to understanding how we, as a society, define, create, and contend with leaders and leadership. Serious scholars and students of leadership need to read this.

Ronald E. Riggio Kravis Leadership Institute, Claremont McKenna College

This path-breaking book extends our view of leadership theory and practice by seeing leadership as 'performance' and 'physicality' and by doing so provides a new and robust leadership framework for practitioners and scholars alike.

Georgia Sorenson Visiting professor of leadership studies, Carey School of Law, University of Maryland

This book presents unconventional ideas, creatively explored with great sympathy for the subjects of enquiry: quite a unique tone for a book on leadership; something new is happening. Leaders who are fed up with idealised images of what they ought to feel and do, will recognise their actual experience here, and words given to what has hitherto been almost improper. It will do more for leadership development than could ever be imagined in any number of competency models.

Jonathan Gosling Professor of leadership studies, University of Exeter Business School, United Kingdom

This timely collection 'embodies' the important research and development work that is required to create a more human understanding of leaders and a more humane practice of leadership.

Brad Jackson Fletcher Building Education Trust Chair in Leadership, The University of Auckland Business School

Between the covers of The Embodiment of Leadership readers will find contributors from around the world who provide an extraordinary synthesis of interdisciplinary concepts to craft a new lens of the body's place in leadership. With it scholars and practitioners will discover hidden dimensions of the processes, development and relations of leadership and see anew their familiar dimensions.

Richard A. Couto Distinguished senior scholar, Union Institute & University

From examining the way in which Michelle Obama takes up her role as First Lady to what we can learn about leading through attending to dance, this volume offers a much needed and exciting perspective on leadership as an embodied practice. Its challenge to traditional ideas about what it takes to be a leader literally made my spine tingle!

Donna Ladkin Professor of leadership and ethics, Cranfield School of Management, Cranfield University, United Kingdom


Table of Contents

Introduction - Lois Ruskai Melina

  1. PART ONE: LEADERSHIP THRESHOLDS – Gloria J. Burgess
  2. The Anatomy of Leadership  –  Stephanie Guastella Lindsay
  3. Dramatic Leadership: Dorothy Heathcote's Autopoietic, or Embodied, Leadership Model  – Kate Katafiasz
  4. Leadership in the Time of Liminality: A Framework for Leadership in an Era of Deep Transformation  – David Holzmer
  5. Seeking Alignment in the World Body: The Art of Embodiment  – Skye Burn
  6. PART TWO: Leaders Are Their Bodies  – Lena Lid Falkman
  7. (De/Re)Constructing Leading Bodies: Developing Critical Attitudes and Somaesthetic Practices – Maylon Hanold
  8. Dollmaking as an Expression of Women's Leadership – Kimberly Yost
  9. Leadership Embodiment and Resistance: The Complex Journey of Latin American Pentecostal Women Pastors  –  Nora Méndez and Fernando Mora
  10. Michelle Obama's Embodied Authentic Leadership: Leading by Lifestyle – Elizabeth D. Wilhoit
  11. PART THREE: Leadership By and Through the Body – Antonio Marturano
  12. Shall I Lead Now? Learner Experiences of Leader–Follower Relationships through Engagement with the Dance – Julie Burge, Ray Batchelor, and Lionel Cox
  13. Embodied Learning Experience in Leadership Development – Perttu Salovaara and Arja Ropo
  14. Professionals Are Their Bodies: The Language of the Body as Sounding Board in Leadership and Professional Communication  –  Helle Winther
  15. From the Ground Up: Revisioning Sources and Methods of Leadership Development – Kathryn Goldman Schuyler