Relational Leadership

As organisations become less hierarchical and projects grow more complex, a different approach to leadership is required.  Where leadership once succeeded through control, motivation and grand visions, leadership today is more about “activating systems”: enabling collaboration, decision-making and processes to function so that potential is translated into results.
Today, leadership is increasingly about bringing out the best in what already exists: people, competencies, knowledge and collaborations. It is about creating space for potential strategic networks to emerge and develop—both internally and across and beyond the organisation.
Ultimately, a project’s success depends on whether it creates value for customers, citizens and end users.  Leadership should therefore focus on generating relevant value for the target group.  That value is created collectively through collaboration.  The most important tool for this is relationships—not only internal relationships within the organisation, but also strategic relationships with other stakeholders who can help advance the task.
What we give significance to in projects becomes significant.  We must therefore be conscious of how we design processes and structure concrete meetings, so that what creates value is what we actually bring into being together.

Theoretical framework

Professional development in the creative industries has received surprisingly little academic attention. As Linda Hill at Harvard Business School has put it:

Many have studied innovation. Many have studied leadership.
But few have studied how you actually hold a leadership role while innovating.

This gap is central to my work.

I have therefore embarked on a PhD journey at NIODA in Melbourne, Australia. My research explores how professionals experience — and sustain — a successful balance between professional obligations and creative drive and ambition.

My research is theoretically embedded in a critical, hermeneutic tradition drawing on psychoanalysis, critical social studies, and organisational theory.

My understanding of the need for identity workspaces is informed by professional development research by Herminia Ibarra and Gianpiero Petriglieri, as well as the psycho-social methodology described by Lita Crociani-Windland and the Lacanian readings of Philip Boxer building on the work of Jacques Lacan.

My work with leaders and organisations further draws on insights from Peter Senge, Amy Edmondson, Robert Kegan, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Roger Martin, Ed Catmull, Erin Meyer — and many others.