OA

Process and practice of leadership and service: understanding the conditions necessary to support trust and good governance through episodes of leadership-as-practice

A practice orientation to leadership in public organizations, (for elected and appointed officials), disrupts the servant leadership orientation. This paper explores what happens when scholars and practitioners shift the focus from individual leaders to exploring the role practice and process has in enabling conditions more aligned with advancing institutional trust and good governance. A focus on centering the “leader” in a public space is problematic for trust building and maintenance of public spaces. The Leadership-As-Practice (L-A-P) model centers the process and practice of shared accountability and collective engagement (Carroll, Levy, & Richmond, 2008). Nurturing accountability and maintaining a trusting relationship among the public and the leader in formal positions is predicated on “leaders” being knowledgeable and ‘correct’ for public work. Public officials are expected to create a container in which they can be held, and they can also hold others accountable - a premise of their service. Yet this is not a global reality nor is it fully realized in many democracies, today. When public servants are anointed the leaders, accountability becomes not merely a space clearing gesture by the one in authority, but the system itself, constituted in the gesture, and the very mechanism of clearing the space. L-A-P is the leadership paradigm to disrupt. This paper proposes that the field of leadership studies needs to shift understandings of public service leadership away from the “individual” - in terms of role and with title and authority - to exploring processes and practices that support good governance and advance institutional trust building. The “practice turn” refocuses attention on the processes and practices that support and enable conditions that build trust and good governance. A collective practice model of leadership that centers process and practice, in place of a servant leadership model that centers individual people in formal roles, is more closely aligned with what is required to advance trust and good governance in Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS). Practice-based approaches to leadership focus on the process and practice conditions that advance change (Kliewer, 2019). The practice-based approach to leadership redirects how the field should consider the role and the mechanism available to people to enable leadership in the advancement of trust and good governance. This requires collective reorientation of the relationship we have and aspire to have among the public and the officials who are elected and appointed to govern/serve. In Sub-Saharan Africa, practice-based approaches to leadership learning and leadership application are taking place in meaningful ways. This article highlights cases from Kenya, Somalia, and Namibia where process and practice approaches to leadership are enabling participatory work more closely aligned with advancing trust and good governance. The work highlights a collective practice approach in public spaces. While less predictable, these collective and practice-based models have advanced progress on complex national issues, starting with local, community-engaged initiatives. The examples we will highlight from the region are of approaches from throughout Sub-Saharan Africa that refine public leadership through a collective and practice lens.