TITLE:
The Phenomenology of Leadership
AUTHORS:
Wiley W. Souba
KEYWORDS:
First-Person, As-Lived, Existentials, Ontology, Direct Access, Language
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Leadership,
Vol.3 No.4,
December
16,
2014
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 first-person 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 self-expression. 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.