Craft Mastery: Towards A Theory of Artful Leadership Action

Date: 9 August 2013 Time: 11.00 am

Abstract

Leadership is an art. This conception of leadership as art has recently been addressed seriously in academia in a variety of different ways (cf Ladkin & Taylor, 2010). Hansen and colleagues (Hansen & Bathurst, 2011; Hansen, Ropo, & Sauer, 2007; Taylor & Hansen, 2005) have argued for an aesthetic approach to the phenomena, one that is based in direct sensory experience and felt meaning, one that is comfortable with the subjective, and inter-subjective nature of such experience, one that is always contextual, one that may be more concerned with artistic truths and divergent generalizability (Taylor, 2004) than with scientific conceptions of validity and reliability. This stands in stark contrast to the more scientific methods that have dominated social science research in recent times. Just as we have tended to try to understand leadership in a scientific way, there has also been a tendency to judge leadership in terms of the instrumental goals of the organization, whether that is winning a war or making enormous profits. However, if we are to approach leadership from an aesthetic perspective and take seriously it’s fundamental craft nature, we need a different standard. Crafts in general have an instrumental purpose and we do not judge them solely on the instrumental results, we also judge them on their aesthetics – what I call artfulness.
Similarly we can care about leadership action not just because it gets the job done, but because it is “working beautifully” (White, 1996). I offer a model of the characteristics of the craft process of leadership that lead to artfulness. The model of artful leadership action (figure 1) focuses on five characteristics, 1) staying with your senses,2) embodied sensemaking, 3) passion, 4) collaboration, and 5) domain knowledge, with the explicit causal relationship that the greater that characteristic is, the more artful the process will be.

Presenter:

Dr. Steven S. Taylor is an associate professor in the WPI School of Business in Worcester, Massachusetts, the author of the book Leadership Craft, Leadership Art, the editor of the journal Organizational Aesthetics, and a playwright whose work has been performed in England, France, Poland, Canada, Denmark, New Zealand, Italy, Australia, and the USA.