“Dialogue – possible between leader and follower?” - Ashridge

Some emerging themes
It is still very early on in the process of gathering data through co-operative
inquiry. Below is a list of emerging themes in relation to the inquiry question
around the construction of leadership and dialogue, and then some points on
how dialogue might be enabled and disabled particularly in a leadership context.
At the moment they seem to be relevant and important and have surfaced
through the group discussion:
Constructions of leadership and dialogue:
• Leadership during the moments we are together as a group is seen as
shared. This is seen to mean the ‘implicit permission to change
something which is the implicit permission to lead something”. So
leadership when discussed explicitly has been most commonly seen as
occurring when a change is instigated in topic but also in energy in the
group. This kind of shared leadership is rarely experienced outside the
group; one participant has reflected on a number of occasions that the
group managed to have more meaningful dialogue in its first meeting than
his management team have had in five years and this in part is down to
the predominantly shared model of leadership being held in the group;
• In connection with this, dialogue both in the group and outside of it is
seen as involving risk; involving a person taking a risk to challenge
someone with care or by disclosing something important to themselves.
Dialogue is recognised as such if conversation occurs at a number of
different levels involving the heart and emotion as well as cognition. In
addition it seems that dialogue requires speaking with ‘right intention’; but
the question of what is ‘right’ is still being explored;
• Power has been reflected upon very frequently and is regarded as an
enabler and disabler of dialogue. When considering experience outside the
group, it is often in the first instance understood negatively rather than
positively, in other words power over rather than power with. Within the
group there is perhaps a more complementary understanding of it. Power
is defined as the ability to make something happen;
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