The Communities It Takes to Develop a Leader

The title is a play on words that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. Here the development of leadership practice is explored as an everyday relational activity—there are no heroics or grand plans. The chapter covers the local communities that include the University and the Business School, businesses, high schools and a local prison. It also reaches back in time to trace foundational experiences and influences of those involved. The chapter takes the voices of three people whose worlds are interconnected, focusing on the development of one particular person’s leadership practice. We hear the three voices in extended contextual interview conversations which share positive and negative experiences. We see that developing leadership practice has a persistent and determined ordinariness about it. The hard work of developing this practice focuses on relational interactions that exist in a spirit of improvisation, offering opportunity and reflecting on recently lived experience. There is a ‘generosity of spirit’, in other words a motivation that extends beyond the transactional of doing something with an expectation of a defined outcome, that is hard to put your finger on.