Ken Otter

In this paper I present a perspective of global leadership and some ideas of how to develop it. To begin I provide some background on how this perspective took shape. In early 2002, I was asked to teach a course titled: Global Context for 21st Century Leadership to a group of students who entered a newly formed master’s program in leadership for working professionals from public, private and not-for-profit sectors at Saint Mary’s College of California (SMC). At the time I was given a very short course description from which to design this course. The first sentence of the description read as follows: “The practice of leadership in the 21st century will require a consciousness that recognizes that we do not live in isolation, but rather are part of a global community. ” I saw my task as to design the course so students could see the life and work in a broader context, and for this perspective to influence their practice of leadership positively. At the conclusion of the course, I rec...

Expert organizations practice and apply knowledge-intensive expertise, such as in medicine, law, and engineering. In a world characterized by increased volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA), expert organizations must learn to adapt to changing conditions while continuing to execute their expertise. Whether in small-scale professional service firms, such as a medical practice, or large-scale organizations, such as a regional hospital, key to effective adaptation is cultivating capacities for learning, experimentation, and collaboration (Hanson and Ford 2010). In this paper, I explore the role leadership can play in cultivating the adaptive capacity in expert organizations, focusing on healthcare organizations by drawing upon one single-in depth case study.

This article explores the challenges for individuals and organizations of adding coaching to the repertoire of managers. In complex and dynamic environments, a manager becomes responsible for developing people for continuous learning, which transforms him or her into a manager-as-coach. However, the resulting expanded capacities and skills require a manager's ability to navigate a new ambiguity in roles and identity; this article uses the metaphor of “wearing multiple hats” to represent the challenges that managers face when they add coaching to their repertoire. To prepare them to do so, the development of a manager-as-coach should go beyond an instrumental approach to embrace a transformation learning approach that includes not only skill acquisition, but shifts in values and mindsets. Additionally, organizations should be supportive by promoting a more distributed and horizontal culture of leadership.

This exercise aims to familiarize students with the underdiscussed topic of the role of context in coaching through a physical activity. It consists of a group sculpture—a combination of socio-drama, systemic constellation, and social presencing theater— drawing from a coaching case of an ethical dilemma, using the placement and arrangement of participants to represent the stakeholders and context (economic, legal, sociological, etc.). The visual and embodied representation aims to raise awareness and develop understanding of the invisible—but often felt—contextual factors at play in coaching, to generate reflection about their influence, and to offer insights on how to identify and embrace them. This activity is primarily aimed for coaching educators and supervisors, but a slightly adapted version could expand its benefits to a more general audience of managers and leaders.

Expert organizations practice and apply knowledge-intensive expertise, such as in medicine, law and engineering. In a world characterized by increased volatility, uncer- tainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA), expert organizations must learn to adapt to changing conditions while continuing to execute their expertise. Whether in small-scale professional service firms, such as a medical practice, or large-scale organizations, such as a regional hospital, key to effective adaptation is cultivating capacities for learning, experimentation, and collaboration.  In this paper, I explore the role leadership can play in cultivating the adaptive capacity in expert organizations, focu- sing on health care organizations by drawing upon one single-in depth case study.

This paper posits that in order for leadership coaching to realize its potential as a method for leadership development and to mature as a coaching specialty, a more robust engagement with the field of leadership and leadership development is needed. It describes the author's journey of exploring the link between his knowledge of leadership and of coaching to enhance his own practice in leadership coaching. This description serves to highlight areas in need of attention in the present state of leadership coaching as it is presented in the literature. It concludes by positing that leadership coaching education programs are ideal locales to address those needs, specifically by convening a shared inquiry among practitioners, scholars and educators on identifying the important links between the fields of leadership and leadership coaching and helping coaches incorporate them as an integral part of their understanding and practice of leadership coaching.

Despite the interdisciplinary nature of leadership and the growing scholarly engagement in the field, leadership studies continues to lag behind other academic disciplines in incorporating newer paradigms of inquiry in its scholarship. The emerging scholarship in relational leadership is helping to change this. It has brought more attention to underlying paradigms in conceptualizing leadership theory, practice and development. In turning toward relationality as the primary orientation for life and leadership naturally calls into question prevailing modernist assumptions about the nature of reality, how we come to know it, what is worth knowing and what means we employ in order to know—the basic beliefs of paradigms. In this paper I introduce a participatory paradigm of inquiry as a more suitable paradigm for relational leadership. This paradigm widens the lens of leadership and offers a more complex and expansive frame in which to conceptualize and practice leadership. This expansion has important implications for how leadership is researched, conceptualized, practice, and developed.

This paper presents a perspective of global leadership and how to develop it in higher education. It tells the story of how the experiences of teaching a course entitled: Global Context for 21st Century Leadership in a Master of Arts in Leadership program, which is oriented around Joseph Rost's (1991) " Post-industrial Paradigm of Leadership, " contributed to the development of a global leadership perspective and a planned global leadership program. The paper asserts that leadership in a global context must have both an inner and outer orientation. It describes how complex systems theory and constructive development theory provide two generative maps to guide people in their understanding and development of global leadership. The paper concludes with a sketch of the planned program in global leadership in partnership between Saint Mary's College and the Global Leadership Institute in Beijing, China. In this paper I present a global perspective of leadership and some ideas of how to develop it. To begin, I provide some background on how this perspective took shape. In early 2002, I was asked to teach a course entitled " Global Context for 21st Century Leadership " to a group of students who entered a newly formed master's program in leadership for working professionals from public, private, and