The Wounded Leader : How Real Leadership Emerges in Times of Crisis

Rating:
Summary: An important, redemptive, eminently practical book!!
Review: "The Wounded Leader" is a wonderful new work for school leaders--however embattled we/they may find our/themselves in any particular context or at any particular moment. It is an eminently wise, provocative book, whose thesis is amply documented and very well illustrated by the various core narratives it offers its readers.
"The Wounded Leader" is about the healing power of stories and story-telling. For me, its subtitle gives a better sense of what this book is about: "How Real Leadership Emerges in Times of Crisis." Drawing from a diverse array of inspired sources (from Heifetz and Kegan and Gardner and Bennis to Parker Palmer and Daniel Goleman, e.g.), Ackerman and Maslin-Ostrowski masterfully synthesize an analysis of "how school leaders respond to and make sense of their wounds." Stressing the meaning-making and redemptive power of narratives, the authors show how the stories we tell ourselves and each other about the challenges we face ultimately inform and reveal who we are. The most successful leaders, they imply, are the most authentic ones. "Leadership," they write, "has been described as the capacity to be totally and utterly oneself, to be able to show up fully, to express oneself, and to share this self with an organization that one cares about and wants to influence. If this is the case, then wounding at its worst means leaving the self outside the school, becoming a hollow stranger to oneself and one's leadership altogether."
By framing "crisis [as] an emergent occasion for transformation," Maslin-Ostrowski and Ackerman reveal how we can be changed and tempered enough to learn and grow from our leadership wounds. Its fundamental message is thus profoundly affirmative and reassuring. Moreover, the book (at less than 150 pp.) is a slim (i.e. user-friendly!) volume written in readily accessible prose, enlivened by many aptly chosen narrative anecdotes. I recommend that educational leaders have a copy handy to review and refresh themselves at all times--either on our bookshelves at work or on our bedside tables at night--in order to help us regain our bearings whenever our leadership going gets toughest.

Rating:
Summary: An important, redemptive, eminently practical book!!
Review: "The Wounded Leader" is a wonderful new work for school leaders--however embattled we/they may find our/themselves in any particular context or at any particular moment. It is an eminently wise, provocative book, whose thesis is amply documented and very well illustrated by the various core narratives it offers its readers.
"The Wounded Leader" is about the healing power of stories and story-telling. For me, its subtitle gives a better sense of what this book is about: "How Real Leadership Emerges in Times of Crisis." Drawing from a diverse array of inspired sources (from Heifetz and Kegan and Gardner and Bennis to Parker Palmer and Daniel Goleman, e.g.), Ackerman and Maslin-Ostrowski masterfully synthesize an analysis of "how school leaders respond to and make sense of their wounds." Stressing the meaning-making and redemptive power of narratives, the authors show how the stories we tell ourselves and each other about the challenges we face ultimately inform and reveal who we are. The most successful leaders, they imply, are the most authentic ones. "Leadership," they write, "has been described as the capacity to be totally and utterly oneself, to be able to show up fully, to express oneself, and to share this self with an organization that one cares about and wants to influence. If this is the case, then wounding at its worst means leaving the self outside the school, becoming a hollow stranger to oneself and one's leadership altogether."
By framing "crisis [as] an emergent occasion for transformation," Maslin-Ostrowski and Ackerman reveal how we can be changed and tempered enough to learn and grow from our leadership wounds. Its fundamental message is thus profoundly affirmative and reassuring. Moreover, the book (at less than 150 pp.) is a slim (i.e. user-friendly!) volume written in readily accessible prose, enlivened by many aptly chosen narrative anecdotes. I recommend that educational leaders have a copy handy to review and refresh themselves at all times--either on our bookshelves at work or on our bedside tables at night--in order to help us regain our bearings whenever our leadership going gets toughest.