Abstract
‘Leadership has been a blank canvas on which we paint the fantasies of imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy’ (Liu, 2020, Redeeming Leadership, p. 125).
For many years now, it has been widely acknowledged in academic circles if not in the society in general that there is something wrong with leadership. Scholars have questioned the traditional understanding of a leader as an autonomous, charismatic and powerful individual who single-handedly guides the followers to a brighter future. We have asked whether leaders are indeed autonomous (Ford and Harding, 2011), whether their power derives from their own personalities and expertise (Spillane and Diamond, 2007), whether they benefit their followers (Wray-Bliss, 2013) and even whether they exist at all (Kelly, 2014). We used these critiques to imagine different, better, more ethical and more responsible ways of both thinking about leadership and doing it. The creativity of the leadership scholars has exploded with arguments for reflexive (Alvesson et al., 2016), servant (Brown and Bryant, 2015), distributed (Bolden, 2011) and relational (Cunliffe and Eriksen, 2011) forms of leadership, among many others. All these proposals grappled with the question of how members of organisations achieve progressive change, how they understand, create, distribute and deploy power, and how they imagine and organise relationships between and with each other.
If you are a scholar who picks up Redeeming Leadership in hope of finding a contribution to the line of theorising described above, you may be somewhat disappointed. If you are a practitioner who hopes to learn how to be a better leader, you may also find this book lacking. The reason is that Helena Liu approaches leadership from a drastically different perspective. She does not aim to create a new understanding of what leadership is, or is not, or what it can be. Rather, she is concerned with ‘how people characterize, negotiate and enact what they call “leadership”’ (p. 8). The red thread that runs through the book is that leadership is the ‘canvas on which we paint our fantasies’.
Leadership is our fantasy of what is best about us, about who the best of us are, what they do, what they say and what they look like. It is on the canvas of leadership that we paint our dreams of heroism, of salvation, of connection, service, protection, care, achievement and progress. But these dreams have a habit of turning into nightmares. A friendly face turns demonic, a quiet street that we walked a hundred times becomes a death trap. Leadership is no exception. Our fantasy of ‘the best’ is simultaneously a source of exclusion, erasure, silencing and other forms of violence.
Helena Liu devotes the first half of her book to the examination of leadership as a nightmare. Redemption, arguably, is a Christian notion, and the way to it is through an honest and unreserved confession. Redeeming Leadership accomplishes this by bearing witness to the different nightmarish aspects of the leadership fantasy. The conceptual structure for this exposure is provided by anti-racist feminist theorising that argues that our communities and minds are currently shaped by interlocking imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist and patriarchal power structures. The present hegemonic conception of leadership is that of white masculine dominance. Even when leaders purport to be protectors and givers of progress, this conception acts to exclude, silence and ultimately exploit those who do not conform to it. The simple inclusion of women into the ranks of ‘leaders’ or celebration of individual differences through diversity initiatives do nothing to achieve tangible change. On their own, these actions engage at best only with one of the four aspects of the nightmare and end up reinforcing oppression as a whole.
In addition to exposing the violence produced by the current leadership fantasy, the anti-racist feminist perspectives provide the theoretical tools for resisting and building alternatives to this fantasy. Helena Liu devotes the second half of the book to exploring how anti-racist feminisms exorcise all four demons of leadership at once. One key to this is the recognition of the complex and varied nature of oppression. The other is the building of bridges across marginalised communities while simultaneously engaging with their differences. ‘Rather than serve extant structures of domination, an anti-racist feminist practice is committed to social transformation and grounded in radical solidarity and love’. (p. 163).
Redeeming Leadership also extends the hand of friendship to the presently dominant communities. Helena Liu addresses the question that many white privileged male and female audiences ask when presented with the effects of intersecting forms of oppression: ‘What can we do?’ An entire chapter is generously assigned to the discussion of white allyship.
Instead of being a text about better leadership, Redeeming Leadership is a text about how we can nurture our sociological imagination through a ruthlessly honest reflection on our dreams of leadership and the nightmares that lurk within them. It demonstrates how dreams are sources of both violence and the strength to resist, and that to escape the former, dreaming must be done with an engaged consciousness that recognises the complexity of social reality and promotes the freedom and power of others.
A note on matters more mundane but also important: This text is written with both lay and academic audiences in mind. The language is accessible and not interrupted by multiple citations, making the text suitable for students who advanced past the first year of undergraduate studies. At the same time, extensive footnotes provide plenty of interesting material for more advanced scholars who are interested in exploring leadership, anti-racist and feminist literature in more depth. In either case, this text would be an excellent addition to the readings lists of leadership courses in management schools. This addition, however, is likely to be problematic. The challenges of white fragility and other reactions that protect the established imperialist-white supremacist-capitalist-patriarchal status quo are likely to surface in classrooms where anti-racist feminisms are brought in to reflect on leadership. However, this should not discourage us as educators from acknowledging our classrooms as political spaces and engaging in an open discussion of these politics.