The Philosopher Leader: On Relationalism, Ethics and Reflexivity—A Critical Perspective to Teaching Leadership

The issue of teaching from a critical perspective is particularly important and challenging at the Executive MBA level, where students are senior managers in influential positions and often deeply enmeshed in prevailing managerial ideologies, structures of control and systems of power. Questioning taken-for-granted systems can be perceived as threatening and needless, especially when one's career is dependent on the current system. Therefore one of the major challenges of teaching leadership from a critical perspective lies in persuading students of the need to think differently about leadership, organizations and themselves as leaders. The challenge can become particularly acute if the EMBA programme is based on conventional pedagogical premises and as a result, students come into the course expecting to be given tools to simplify their lives in the form of leadership principles and techniques. I will offer one way of thinking about leadership, drawing on the philosophical themes of relationalism, ethics and reflexivity. I begin by setting the context of the article in my experience of teaching an Executive Leadership course on a conventionally taught Executive MBA programme. I go on to introduce the three themes, which emerge from my interests in phenomenological philosophy, and examine their relevance and value to leadership and CMS, before discussing how each theme relates to the idea of a philosopher leader.