Art and Leadership

Küpers, W. (2004). “Art and Leadership”, In: Burns, J. M, Goethals, R. R & Sorenson, G. J.
(2004), Encyclopaedia of Leadership, Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE; 47-54.

Introduction
Can and how can art and leadership be related to each other? Conventionally art and
aesthetics seems incompatible with corporate situations and relationships. It seems evident
that there are unbridgeable differences between aesthetic and economic modes of thinking and
acting. Subjective experiences of art and aesthetics are not fitting into the economic
imperatives of an objective-oriented rationality, with its orientation towards control and
pursuing the goal of maximizing profit. As supposed irrational, art and aesthetic processes
have been seen as irrelevant, and have been repressed or neutralised. Confined to “paradigm
of modernity” art have been excluded or placed a subordinate or economical functional role
(e. g. investments in works of art which often require individual engagement on a high
hierarchical level). With the postulate (and myth) of dominant rationality followed by
conventional understanding of organisation and leadership theory and practice aesthetic
realities, expressions and effects have been banned from everyday-life. In some ways art and
aesthetics represent the “other” of the functional, purpose-rational and utility-oriented
economical reasoning and leadership acting. Viewing the two worlds of art and leadership,
artist and leaders in such a superficial stereotypical manner shows that they have very little in
common. According to this view, the two differ in motivation, in methods of operation, in
responsibility, and in interaction with others.
However, under the surface of the seemingly different and opposite, there exist genuine
similarities. According to Abraham Zaleznik (1992) “business leaders have much more in
common with artists, scientists and other creative thinkers than they do with managers.” In
contrast to the more instrumental and purpose-driven management, leadership can be
interpreted as an art form, in and of itself (De Pree 1989; Vaill 1991). It is characterized as
much by its artfulness as its skills and technical sites.
Much artistic form and processes are unrecognized as such because they address issues and
preoccupations of everyday life more implicitly. For explicating and realizing them more
consciously, we need to push the limits of aesthetics by looking at the intersection of art and
daily life (Novitz, 1992). Therefore it becomes necessary to rethink the conception of the
relations between “art” and life, in a way that considers more adequately the role that “art”
and “enacted aesthetics” play in the performed lives of organisation and leadership. Aesthetic
experience then is present in the everyday that include work-settings, hence part of everyday
organizational life (Sandelands & Buckner, 1989).
With this pragmatic perspective, “art”, and aesthetic-like processes can be seen as manifest in
leadership practice and as instructive for analyzing aesthetically-rich experiences as a source
of potential value for leadership every-day-life and development.
Recently, there has been a growing interest in aesthetics in recent years by organization
theorist (e.g. Gagliardi, 1990, 1996; Linstead & Höpfl, 1999/2000; Ramirez, 1991; Strati,
1990, 1992, 1999, 2000). Several significant streams of research indicate that aesthetically-
rich experiences can have value for organizations and leadership. Beyond the use of art as a
artifacts or metaphor for different aspects of organizational and leadership life, participation
in and interpretation of artistic practices have been advocated by theorists and practitioners in
a variety of contexts. Analyses of organisational skills (Strati, 1990), narratives (Alvarez &
Merchan, 1992; Czarniawska, 1997), intuition (Isenberg 1989; Agor 1984; Parikh et al. 1994),
improvisation (Hatch, 1999; Weick 1993; Vera & Crossnan, 1999; Moorman & Miner, 1998),
innovation (Harris, 1999; Austin & Devin, 2003); are only a few examples.
Understanding Art and Aesthetics
Etymologically deriving from the Greek “aisthesis”, aesthetics refer to expressions which
designate embodied sensation and perception altogether (“aisth” = feel), prior to any cognitive
or artistic meaning. The Greek verb “aisthanomai” denotes the capacity to perceive with the
senses, sensing through physical sensory perception. According to Gregory Bateson's (1979:
17) aesthetic experience means being responsive to the pattern that connects, giving the
subject a feeling of wholeness and of belonging to an expanded reality.
Phenomenologically art and aesthetics are constituted by embodied-perceptual, emotional-
responsive and expressive-communicative relations (Merleau-Ponty, 1962; Küpers, 2000).
Aesthetic knowledge and relating is that which comes from embodied and perceptive faculties
of hearing, sight, touch, smell and taste. Thus aesthetics refers to the sensibilities actionable to
support the human perception.
With this it implicitly aesthetics relates to experiential and transformative processes. This
implies that “essence” and value of art are not in artifacts per se but in the dynamic and
developing experiential activity through which they are created and perceived (Dewey, 1934).
For having such kind of an aesthetic experience an „aesthetic attitude“ has been proposed as a
basic requirement (Stolnitz, 1969). The aesthetic attitude is an openness and attentiveness to
experience an object or process aesthetically. It suggests that there is a certain way to look,
hear, feel and perhaps imagine an object or process that lends itself to a more profound
experience. The aesthetic attitude is qualitatively one of detachment from purpose. Thus to
experience an object or process truly aesthetically is to experience it for its own sake, and not
for any practical or ulterior motive. The aesthetic attitude is thus characterized by
disinterestedness, and distance from an instrumental relation to the object or process. With
this aesthetic experiences have a value in itself and not only a means for some other purposes
or experiences.
However, despite the romantic ideal of appreciating art for arts sake, people cannot ignore
who they are and where they have come from in their experience of art. In the pragmatic spirit
of breaking barriers between imagination and reason, it can be argued that art can be
experienced simultaneously for its social, moral and intellectual value, and not just for e. g.
beauty's sake. An aesthetic lens simply shifts the attention to that which is sensuous and
pleasing in an object or process, a focus that does not deny or exclude other valid aspects of
the perceived. As for the existence of an aesthetic attitude, it is important to place emphasis
on the attentiveness and openness that one must have in experiencing and object or process
aesthetically.
The form and contents of aesthetic experiences are response-dependent, qualitative or
expressive dimension of the object or process (Carrol, 2001: 51). Aesthetic responses
(eliciting e.g. emotional responses by encountering employees), can then be followed by
aesthetic interpretations (e.g. intuition, implicit knowledge of leaders), aesthetic judgments
(e.g. engaging in leadership decision making) and aesthetic communication (e.g. offering a
vision as leader), carrying a tremendous transformational potential.

Critical, utopian, and pragmatic dimensions of art

The transformational potential of aesthetic processes – both as creation and/or reception refer
to its capacity for questioning the sense of the real critically and gaining a sense of the
possible constructively. Hence, they artistic processes and experiences irritate productively
(dystopic) and offer an visionary power (utopic), and with this access to creative changes for a
different shaped practice (pragmatic), to be outlined in the following.
Art's non-rational elements give it the power to go beyond instrumental rationality. What
leaders can learn from art is that reality extends beyond conscious rationality. By using the
fantastic they may elucidate assumptions and neglected visions. Therefore, art can
deconstructively contribute to unsettle the taken for granted meaning.
Being dystopic, art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experiences, a dimensions
in which the experiencing subject no longer stand under the law of the established reality
principles. The encounter with art makes perceptible, audible, visible and expressible that
which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, heard, seen or said in everyday life. With its
revisioning estrangement art can help for creating awareness for and casting different
perspectives on familiar or new phenomena. The „estrangement-effects“ (Brecht) of art can
free normalized ways of thinking that blind to the strangeness of the familiar, by breaking the
habits of organized routine and see the world ‘as though for the first time’ that is, coming to
see the normal and familiar in a novel way. In this way, art dishabituates the routine habitual
way of seeing things, providing a sense of new possibilities particularly when old solutions
are no longer effective.
Because genuine artworks and aesthetic process are autonomous in the sense that they afford
disinterested experiences - that is freedom from distraction by personal associations, fear,
economic preoccupations, and removing or detaching from practical affairs - they provide
demystyingly a sense, that what is “normal” could be different, that it could be ruled by
different orientations and principles.
With its utopian potential aesthetic experience provides those involved (e.g. leaders) with a
taste of qualities of experience, typical not accessible or available in corporate and capitalist
contexts, dominated as they are by exchange value and instrumental reason, the profit motive
and the performance principle. By “dissociation of sensibilities” (T. S. Eliot) and being
“unreal” art awakens experience to the possibility that things could be otherwise; carrying an
emancipatory opportunity to allow play, imagination and sensibility free rein. An aesthetic
experience is elucidatory released to examine particulars without the pressure to classify them
under a general concept or purpose that is openendely.
By use of metaphors as a tool to explore realms of „as if“ and with imagination it becomes
possible to probe the particular for its possible meanings, constructing alternatives, and is
open to divers and vagrant sensations rather than attempting to corral the experience under a
single determinate concept, including the sort that would be useful or serve a purpose. Being
valuable intrinsically in aesthetic experiences and deployed imaginations, there is a freedom
from any pre-given or fixed sort of interest: moral, practical, financial etc. and also freedom
from the governance of concepts. Allegorically, it represents an antidote to the encroachment
of rationalization, identified by Weber with modernity, as a site of resistance against exchange
value and instrumental reason (Carrol 2001: 51).

Pragmatic aesthetic experiences and processes in and for leadership

Leadership can typically be defined today as non-coercive, accepted influence—that is, the
exercise of interpersonal influence in a given situation, directed toward the attainment of
goals or objectives. For getting extraordinary things done, leadership is challenging the
process in organisations by e. g. searching for opportunities and experimenting and taking
risks, inspiring a shared vision by envisioning the future and enlisting others, enabling others
to act by fostering collaboration and strengthening others; modelling the way by setting the
example and planning small wins; encouraging the heart by recognizing contributions and
celebrating accomplishments (James et al., 1987). For most of these leadership activities art-
like processes are relevant.
Seen as a perceptual practice, aesthetic processes are a pervading part of the fabric of
organisations` and leadership everyday activities, experiences, responses judgments and
communications. As an embodied and emotional interaction these imply evocative processes
of creation and imagination (Alvarez & Merchan, 1992), which always concerns the
interweaving with prior experiences and sensory faculties of aesthetic understanding.
Aesthetic experience includes a form of sensory knowledge, a form of expressive action and a
form of shared communication (Gagliardi, 1996: 566). These art-like forms of leadership
invariably not only reflect the life within organisation, but can also be used for attempts to
perceive this very life differently and may trigger an alternative practice within it. Therefore,
aesthetic processes of leadership need to be considered as how they are making and remaking
„persons“, “structures” and entire “worlds” in an ongoing process of (inter-)relating and
creation. Embedded in contextual relations, aesthetic processes “author-is” - (Cunliffe, 2001)
or constellate the way leaderships and its inter-relation with employees and structures are and
unfold.
In the following, creativity, envisioning and imagination, art of leadership as performance,
symbolic leadership and improvisation are taken as examples of how art as `applied
aesthetics` and leadership are or can be intertwined.

Creativity and Creative Leadership

Etymologically the word creativity stem from the Latin word „creare“, to create, which in
turn is related to the indo-European word „kere“, that is ´to make something grow (Weiner,
2000, p. 8).´ It today’s context, creativity can be seen as a social construction, and as such,
cannot be an unitary, universal or fixed trait given to a chosen few and creativities, vary in
time and space.
Within a changing business world characterised e. g. as post-fordist economic environment,
work and leadership is dispersed into intensified interpersonal relations and creative activity
in non-routine settings. This in turns requires 'creative' forms of labour, and workers who are
able to produce and leaders to manage it. It is this that leadership seeks to reproduce, instil or
evoke and it is this that explains the intensified quest of creativity (Richards, 1999).
„Creative Leadership“ has acquired buzzword status in recent years. An increasing number of
seminars on creative leadership are held at executive programs and trade fairs; text-books
used in MBA programs deal explicitly with the phenomenon; recruitment ads for managerial
positions give elaborate job descriptions stressing the necessity of creativity; and, perhaps
most importantly, managers have begun to describe themselves as being ‘creative’ leaders
(Ericsson, 2001). Leaders are seen and see themselves as ‘homo creativiticus’, as creative
actors, who are ‘causers’ of creativity. Creative leaders do not only take an active part in the
(re)production of a creative field, but also (re)affirm their own creative identities: the creative
becoming of theirs is an act of (self) consecration. This gives them a social capital of
legitimacy (Bourdieu, 1984) that allows them to define creativity. The way creativity is
constructed, thus, seems to depend on how creativity is organized, and vice versa.
Critically one can ask what happens to the creative potential if it is aligned and adapted to
appropriateness and orientated toward particularly business (financial) objectives. What
would it mean that the artful leader, while maintaining a sense of reality, is challenging reality
through a gesture of creativity that transforms its very foundation?

Envisioning and imagination

One important task for leaders is to offer and instill visions, describing concepts and ideas
through exciting images. Pictures fill in the conceptual void when words fail to express what
leaders are trying to relate. Envisioning and imagination can be interpreted as the capacity to
intuit possibilities; to imagine what has yet been brought into the tangible world of form that
is illumination of the future. It can serve to arrest attention and invoke sensitivities and
imagination and artful expression, which may effect various positive ramifications in the life-
world of an organisation. Core practices to sensing and actualizing emerging futures entails:
first of all creative perception, that is seeing differently, and furthermore sensing, refering to
turning the perceived into emerging patterns that inform future possibilities, and finally
presencing, which describes the accessing of inner sources of creativity and will (Jaworski &
Scharmer, 1999-2000: 14; Senge et al, 2004i).
With an artistic sense of imagination leaders can develop the ability of feeling wonder and
awe and to fantasize. That is to see something that is not real or present, to see new
possibilities and paths. It is the capacity to imagine new possibilities for action that allows
leaders to respond to unfamiliar and surprising circumstances or information. This implies to
use one’s emotions and think metaphorically, and read life experiences for their meaning.
Practically imaging calls for literacy in making and using of all kinds of images – pictures,
stories, metaphors, visions – to make sense of information and communicate effectively.
With this, imagination is that faculty, which organizes the vast array of embodied experiences
into schema and structures that enable leaders to achieve coherent, patterned and unified
representations of the world around them. It is indispensable for their ability to make sense of
experience, and to find it meaningful. Thus imagination provides the basis for deep and
creative exploration and is an essential element for any sense-making. Imagination thus
renders the world meaningful through deep and intimate understanding of a complex world.
Integrating emotional and rational capacities, imagination helps to find connections, draw
inferences, and solve problems.

Art of leadership performance

Performance can be understood as learned, learning and recreated constitutive acting and
achieving of all kinds. With this performance are an inter-related process of enactment. From
such a broader view, performance of leadership in particular can be understood as a “site” or
medium of intentions and stage for dramaturgical expressions. If organisations (Linstead &
Höpfl, 2000, Jeffcutt et al. 1996) and leadership (Starrat, 1993) can be interpreted as a
performance art (Vaill, 1991) and “drama”, a significant study of the “stage” upon which this
is enacted, the plot, setting, theme, construction of character and roles and interaction,
failures, or conflicts in daily life (Goffman 1959, 1967) becomes possible. Thus, seeing
organisations and leadership through a dramaturgical lens can open up for a new view of
organisational and managerial every-day life. With this leading becomes a performing art
(Mangham 1990). Leaders as performers are actors who play roles with a „theatrical
consciousness“ (Mangham & Overington 1987: 221) in the theatre of organisations. They
perform characters, who are acting out the life stories behind them (Bentley, 1972: 59) in a
theatrical event (Sauter, 2000).
This does not mean that “theatre” is equal to organisational and leadership life nor vice versa.
Organization and leadership, as a theatre in which performed dramas occur is neither a closed
system or a-contextual play nor an a-historical entity. On the contrary, it is fundamentally
influenced by the organisational history and culture. Using the theatrics metaphor and
understanding performed processes (metaphorically) as part of the concrete “life-world” in
organisations and leadership, can help to gain deeper in-sights of the factual enactment of
meanings involved.
This requires, understanding that the sense-making of performed (artistic) realities is inherent
in daily practices of leadership themselves. In performances, we find that enactment in
organisations and leadership emerges from the fluid, but pragmatic inter-relationship situated
at work. With this, performed action can actually mean different things, at different times and
to various agents and diverse relational constellations.
Pitcher (1997) had identified three types of leaders: Artists, who are people-oriented, open-
minded, intuitive, and visionary; Craftsmen, to whom the adjectives humane, dedicated, and
wise best apply; and Technocrats are detail-oriented, rigid, methodical, self-centered, and,
when left in control, pose a serious threat to corporate competitiveness. The power struggles
between these types are dramas being played out in companies everywhere. According to
Pitcher, whether the story has a happy or an unhappy ending depends entirely upon which
type gets top billing
Symbolic Leadership
Formal positions in a rational-legal hierarchy may be insufficient for successful leadership, as
it does not insure symbolic power. As symbolic power is based on a perception of credibility
forms of “impression management” represent efforts to manage and control how others
perceive someone (Goffman, 1959), here the leader. These efforts are tightly bounded by the
interactive negotiation context (especially the aesthetics of relevant audiences) and the various
tools possessed by leaders as they engage in impression management. Symbolic leadership -
having the power to construct reality - can be interpreted as the conscious deployment of
symbolic power in an attempt to influence others in an intentional way. Symbolic leaders try
to frame experience by providing plausible interpretations of experiences.
Furthermore, communication as one main activity of leaders is based on the persuasive
transfer of symbols and symbolic interaction, which allows for the creation and development
of (personal and organisational) meaning. Accordingly, leadership is symbolised, that is
establishes specific leadership acting and meaning by techniques and artifacts, and leadership
symbolises, that is created or alters reality and its meaning by a staged dramaturgy.
Aesthetic processes create and structure the acting and interpretation of leadership
performances by giving symbolic form, style, significance and value. For this rituals and
stories can be used to signal responsibility and negotiate meanings, confirm core and shared
values as well provide opportunities for social bonding and integration, which all are urgently
need particularly in times of change.

Improvisation
Improvisation is an aesthetic competence which becomes more and more important in the
current context business world of complexities and ambiguities. Improvisation is a situational
process and artistic performing action taken in a spontaneous and intuitive fashion (Crossan,
1998: 93), being highly contingent and flexible upon emerging circumstances; design and
action (Weick, 1998). Improvisation stresses the importance of „adapting“ while acting and
reflecting-while-doing, rather than just following plans (scripts, routines, standard processes
etc).
This practice, where composition and execution converge, requires mindfulness and being
responsive in real time, here and now, as the real world with its problems and opportunities
unfolds, tapping into the realities of re-active forces. In other words, improvisation depends
highly on the ability to go with the flow of the situation, to make the best use of the entities
and energies present – not to impose control. It is an ‘ecstatic’ experience, an irruption, which
is characterised by a sense of immediacy, suddenness, surprise and transgressing pre-
determined of plans and predictability in order to seek opportunities. This implies, that
improvisation – as an ‘authentic’ temporality (Ciborra, 1999) and practice of an “aesthetics of
imperfection” (Weick, 1995a) - defies measurement and method. Although it surfaces and
vanishes ‘on the spur of the moment’, improvisation can be purposefully prepared and
triggered. Therefore improvisation is a „disciplined craft“, which skills can be learned through
continual practice and study, and applied to situation (Crossan et al. 1996: 25). Kao (1996)
notes that improvisation is a blend of discipline and art, that is being able to move between
with e. g. that which is established and that which is new; form and openness; critical norms
and standards and experimentation, the security of the familiar and innovation or expertise
and freshness and naïveté.
Effects of improvisation refer to its altering usage of structures in creative ways that enable
the re-configurating of structural foundations of performance (Hatch, 1999: 5), not only
reading the world in a novel way but favoring discovery and engaging into truly
entrepreneurial action (Kirzner, 1979) and to engage people and groups (Lowe 2000).
Accordingly, improvisation has been suggested as a model for strategic decision-making
(Perry 1991; Eisenhardt 1997) and change management (Orlikowski & Hofman, 1997) – e.g.
as a means of circumventing intra and inter-organisational political resistance - in situations of
time pressure, change and uncertainty (Crossan et al., 2002) particularly without having
optimum information and resources. Furthermore, while improvising, leaders learn from real
events and test imagined solutions on the spot. In this way, improvisation facilitates the
synthesis between learning and imagining (Chelariu et al., 2002).

Practical implications
As we have seen art and aesthetic processes can contribute beneficially the practice of leaders.
But how to enhance a leader’s aesthetic capacity through artistry and art practically and what
are the requirements to support artistic processes?
To practice artistic forms of leadership requires special encouraging and fostering attitudes
and conditions, like valuing creativity and risk-taking in-between leeway and limits,
practicing operational flexibility and tolerating uncertainty.
There are no ready-made recipes of artful and creative leadership. But leaders can be
facilitators of aesthetic processes and their employees` creativity, by adopting practices, like
considerate and supportive supervision and the provision of complex challenging jobs that
offered high levels of personal satisfaction; encouraging involvement, giving positive
feedback and supporting skill development as well as offering appropriate rewards structures
(Amabile, 1997; Cummings & Oldham, 1997; Kao, 1989). On an organisation-wide level, this
entails supporting e.g. an intrapreneural culture (Pinchot & Pinchot, 1999) may substantially
support the realisation of a more arts-friendly environment and aesthetically responsive
organisation.
For themselves leaders need to learn from and cultivate the artist’s facility for finding
fascination, allure, and attractiveness and being entranced in everyday events and things. In
addition to social and emotional intelligence a kind of “artistic intelligence” is required, which
integrates the former as an employment of wisdom. Besides direct encounters with works of
art, cooperation with artist, and engagement in artistic processes, it will be essential to
integrate art into leadership education and development.

Art and Leadership education and development

From the leadership development perspective – today's ever-increasing demands in business
for imagination, creativity, and innovation show that current and future leaders can learn a lot
by getting involved in artistic processes. Leadership education in addition to scientific skill
and providing knowledge requires providing and evoking artistic capacities as part of the
curriculum. Integrating art, artist and artistic process into training can serve as sensual, visual
or conceptual media and catalysts for educating future leaders. Artistic oriented leadership
education stimulates deep learning (Quinn, 1996) in concert with innovative or generative
learning, to extend beyond words (e.g., texts, lectures, and discussions) and contrived
experiences (e.g., simulations and role-plays). Also for leadership development, art and
leadership are close in actual practice (Howard ,1996, Smith, 1996 Palus & Horth, 1996). For
enhancing creativity in leadership e.g. practical improvisational theatre techniques (Koppett,
2001) or play-shops or artistic excursions (e.g. for experiencing dance, music, theatre, poetry
and literary arts and visual arts or architecture. For attaining a creative leadership, embodied
aesthetic competencies can be developed e.g. by engagement of the senses (making sense as
enliving senses), cultivating a sensitive perception, experimenting with imagination or
physically making artifacts (pottery, drawing, photography) as well as the mindful use of
games, story writing and story-telling and forms of collaborative inquiry.
Conclusion and Perspectives
As we have seen, aesthetic experiences of artworks and aesthetic processes can be used as
instructive guide for fashioning everyday experiences and lives of leaders and leadership
differently. It can contribute for releasing those qualities and competencies, much needed in
current and future business world. Aesthetically reflective and artistically oriented leaders
enlarge their sense and practice of what is possible in managing to lead, more creatively.
In addition to providing multiple ways of knowing, experiencing and integrating arts into
leadership can aid social coherence, practicing emotional competencies and encourage critical
thinking and visionary capacities.
Leadership inspired and guided by art integrates learnable qualities of “artful making” (Austin
& Devin, 2003) which release, collaboration, ensemble and play for dealing with complexity,
embracing ambiguity and uncertainty and innovate reliably under deadline pressure. Art
facilitates working with overlapping or multiple meanings, contributing thereby also to our
toleration for ambiguity.
With all this art and aesthetic process incorporated into leadership help to maintain a system
of cooperative effort as one basic function of Chester Barnard’s (1938) or Peter Drucker’s
(1969) effective executive, well-versed not only in the analytical and logical-rational but also
in the non-logical and intuitive processes of leading. Moreover, as authority positions will not
last if they are not based in the character of communication by virtue of which contributors
accept it, aesthetic and creative aspect of the executive function is the highest exemplification
of responsibility.
Facing the mentioned potentials one has also to see limitations, ambivalences and threats of
art and aesthetics in the context of leadership. One limitation lies in the character of artistic
processes themselves: Artistry can be disruptive, deconstructive, deceptive, delusional,
fabricational, and just plain boring or wrong. Furthermore, a problem with art and aesthetic
processes is that they are often idiosyncratic, and evanescent and tend to be non-calculative
and unpredictable.
That is also why leaders can block aesthetic processes in organisations and creative actions
(genuine creativity) proposed by their subordinates. Following strong vested interests,
reorientations towards integrating more aesthetic processes threaten their status and power
position. Moreover they will catch the blame if practices, strategies, and goals prove wrong.
Thus retaining their favoured positions and approved practices they are blocking changes
towards more artistic processes.
Furthermore, besides the aforementioned innovative dimensions art can also serve
conservative interests. It can be use used affirmational for validating and reinforcing already
practiced actions, beliefs and events. An aesthetication occupied with a functional
appropriation can be manipulating means or replacement for authentic leadership.
For realising the potentials of integrating accomplished art and context-sensitive leadership
fully, the very understanding of leadership itself requires to be innovated. What is needed is a
kind of transformation of leadership towards an aesthetically responsive ‘leader-follower-
ship’ based on a relational understanding of those involved. With this the individual “persons”
of “leader” and “follower” and their situated context become the emergent ‘products’ of
relational processes. Considering a relational intelligibility in place of leadership it will be
possible to shift attention to what transpires between people, not what is “contained” within
them (Sampson, 1993).
Based on such relational understanding then an genuine authentic transformational
leadership” (Bass, 1998:. 24) can enact to a mutual interest in developing the potential of the
other and the organisation as a whole by activating “social synergy” for the collective well-
being. Thus by taking into account art and aesthetics, an integrative and more inter-related
and “holistically” oriented understanding of the leadership practice can be attained.
Essentially, learning and practicing art by and aesthetically-rich experiences of leaders can be
a source of potential transformation and value and added values for organizations they are
responsible for. In the future, leaders who understand how artists work and develop a sense of
artful practice themselves will have an advantage over those who don't.
The path towards integrating art and leadership is more circuitous and spiral-like than linear
because the very nature of artistry transcends the myopic, one-best-way approach that
characterizes much of conventional leadership today. Therefore, integrating art and leadership
respectively leaders-follower-relationship requires to be understood itself as a work of art, as
an open-ended life-long process of experimentation and unfoldment.
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i
Senge’s et al. (2004) concept of ‘presencing’ blends the two words ‘pre-sensing’ and
‘presence’. Thus, it means to pre-sense and bring into actualized presence future potentials for
individuals and collectives. For them, bringing into this presence is at the heart of their
suggested social technology of freedom for which leadership is the capacity to shift the inner
place from which a system operates.
In embodied presencing leaders and followers, respectively their practices are ‘bodying forth’
their being and becoming as an interrelational mediation. This bodying presencing cannot be
conceived as a static property of a presence in objects, but as a living doing as it vibrates,
shimmers and pulsates the atmospheric life-world of leadership and organisation (Küpers,
2014).