In­tro­duc­tion to Lead­er­ship: Con­ven­tion­al and Crit­ic­al Per­spect­ives

Course content

Leadership has become an organizational and cultural mantra, as well as a staple feature of the business school curriculum. The job market demands that students develop leadership skills, while leadership-speak has infiltrated many other corners of everyday life, including personal development, interpersonal interaction, gender relations, politics, even moral discourse and spiritual/religious belief. Popularized approaches like transformational, servant, authentic, and spiritual leadership elevate the skills and characteristics of individual leaders over organizational and relational leadership processes, and often stress that leaders must develop their inner, emotional selves in order to inspire their followers.

Such approaches to leadership have become big business, a subject of much pop-psychologizing and commercial promotion by big name leadership gurus like John Maxwell, Sheryl Sandberg, and Simon Sinek. These promotional influences make it imperative that students question the popularized, conventional wisdom about leadership, and decide for themselves whether a given approach to leadership can actually help organizations and/or the people who work in them to pursue activities and achieve goals they consider important.

This course will help students to become critical consumers and informed practitioners of leadership by analyzing popularized approaches to the subject, and by critiquing the assumptions behind them, as well as the sources that generate them. The curriculum will consist of a series of mainstream and popularized leadership texts chosen for the way they exemplify key leadership issues and debates that students will face in the course of their careers. Select theoretical and critical sources will provide alternative perspectives on these texts and help students understand their broader significance.

The course therefore cultivates three key capabilities emphasized by the CBS Nordic Nine--No. 2, analyzing data with an appreciation of ambiguity; No. 5, clarifying leadership values; and No. 6, thinking critical and constructively.