Centre for Leadership Studies

Although wisdom might be considered by some sceptics to be a quaint concept in a post-industrialised, instrumental, and secular world, it deserves serious consideration. The article proposes that the concept of wisdom be reintroduced into educational and developmental programmes, especially for managers and leaders. Mindful of the potential naiveté of transplanting systems of thinking from one epoch to another, the article examines the relevance of premodern thought to the post-modern condition. Based on Pierre Hadot’s radical reinterpretation of classical Greek texts, the meaning of ‘philosophy’ and wisdom in the ancient world are explored. The concepts of wisdom, virtue, and enacted ethics derived from this reinterpretation are then applied to an ethnographic case study involving a senior executive. This study indicates how Stoical ‘wisdom of the moment’ has potential relevance for understanding contemporary leadership practice.

This paper follows research and development work undertaken at Lancaster University Management school on how leaders learn from difference, learn from each other and learn from practice through a training program called Lead2lead (www.lead2lead.net). This programme takes leaders through a 'leadership exchange' where they receive leadership coaching, training in observation skills, and then partner up and shadow each other before being debriefed and coached to deepen the learning from this experience. Since our first research on the management exchange programme (Western and Gosling 2000), which continues into its sixth cycle as part of the International Masters in Practicing Management (www.impm.com) we have developed and refined our method. This paper is both an update on our progress and concludes with a critique of the notion of 'leadership development'. This research highlights the difficulties in developing leaders to get beyond a technocrat or measurable, reductionist way of thinking and engaging. Whilst Development is the dominant discourse in training these days there are many reasons why leaders and developers resist and fall short of that aspiration. Drawing on psychoanalytic and existential theory this paper offers some insights into this paradox.