Becoming a leader: Going with the flow

Having been a British army officer and a business consultant, the author came to academia with a personal understanding of what he believed leadership to be. Yet, in formulating ideas for research, he realized that he had never reflected on how he came to that understanding, how it shaped his approach and how it might have constrained it. Given his wish to research leadership through the experiences of others it seemed sensible to first investigate his own. What emerges is a journey from leadership understood primarily as a linear, leader-follower dynamic, to a more indirect and fluid understanding of influence and collective action, mirroring a broader cultural shift from heroic to post-heroic formulations of leadership, which was anticipated in the first half of the last century by Mary Parker Follett and whose ideas provide a framework for this exploration.