Unleadership: The Remarkable Power of Unremarkable Acts

Leaderly acts and practices from unexpected places are often overlooked and yet have remarkable power. These spontaneous acts are in sharp contrast to those of formal leaders in governments and leading corporations. Global events like the Covid-19 pandemic and the climate crisis light up these differences. This book delves deeper, exploring these leaderly acts and practices more fully and beyond extraordinary events. The authors describe these as ＂unleadership＂, a term defined in this book as a set of acts and practices that are undertaken in a spirit of spontaneity and generosity for social good. Four dimensions of unleadership are identified in this book: paying it forward, living with the unknown, catching the wave, and confident connecting and collaborating. Unleadership exposes the potential that is unleashed when members of the community discover their own power to act and reclaim what they have delegated to their leaders. Based on extensive research, the authors highlight the flourishing of alternative forms of leading that encourage rethinking ideas of leadership and followership. They provide practical guidance to organisations and practitioners for enriching their leaderly capacity and cultivating unleadership practices to co-exist with and complement leadership practices. Unleadership is an invaluable resource for leaders and managers in public and private organisations as well as students of leadership and organisational development.

Selen Kars-Ünlüoğlu is Senior Lecturer in Organisation Studies in the Bristol Business School at the University of the West England. Her research seeks to understand how organisations manage their intangible assets (knowledge, capabilities, networks) for learning and innovation. In researching these issues, she is committed to attending the everyday, and as such her work is informed by interpretative phenomenology and practice-based approaches. She has published in Innovation: Management, Theory and Practice, International Small Business Journal and Journal of Management & Organization. She does executive teaching with national and international organisations of all scales, with a specific focus on middle managers’ leadership development in the areas of leadership of teams, and leadership of change and innovation.

Carol Jarvis is Professor in Knowledge Exchange and Innovation in the Bristol Business School at the University of the West England, where she plays an active role in the design and delivery of leadership development interventions. Working from a complexity perspective and focusing on lived experience, her current research interests include leadership of innovation and practice-led learning. She has published in Management Learning and Entrepreneurship Education and Pedagogy. Prior to her career in academe, she ran her own management consultancy practice for 20 years and is an experienced team and individual coach.

Hugo Gaggiotti is Associate Professor in Work and Employment in the Bristol Business School at the University of the West England. He writes about work displacement, professional transfiguration and liminality in organizations. His research adopts an anthropological approach, mostly producing ethnographies. He is currently leading a British Council-Newton Fund Impact Scheme research project on ways of preventing women organisational vulnerability in the US-Mexican borderlands. His work has appeared in, among others, the journals Culture and Organization, Leadership and Entrepreneurship Education and Pedagogy.