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Traditional paradigms of leadership have celebrated decisive top-down control and analytical decision making. But times are changing. The world is becoming more connected, complex, fluid, and interdependent.

Leading people in this age requires empathy, collaboration, curiosity, and creativity. It’s more about designing elegant solutions than mandating feasible ones. It’s more about becoming optimistic beacons of change than authoritative custodians of the status quo. The leaders of tomorrow are not commanders, they are innovators; and in that, they have a natural ally in designers – the poster children of innovation.

This chapter focuses on how leadership can leverage tools and frameworks usually associated with design to innovate, solve complex problems, motivate teams, inspire people, and nurture the next generation of leaders. It discusses design methodologies – user-focused design, lean, design thinking – as potential approaches to optimizing organizational leadership. We elaborate these ideas through real-world examples.

The chapter also offers actionable tips and techniques that designers use to respond empathetically and elegantly to complex human needs, which are rooted deeply in behaviors and attitudes, governed by complex interactions, and therefore, hard to grapple through a purely analytical approach.

It debunks the myth that leaders need to be creative similar to designers to apply Design Thinking. Applying design approaches and practices to organizational leadership is not just about its leaders becoming more creative. It is definitely not about the person at the top coming up with the grand answer. It is a collaborative effort that brings people from all levels together in pursuit of a common goal.

Addressing the challenge of continuously strengthening our own leadership begins with considering our self-efficacy, our belief in our capacity to carry out desired actions, and its influence on our agency, our actual capacity to carry out desired actions. Our agency grows when “nudged” along by our self-efficacy. However, this requires insight into what is happening around us, achieved by looking to the following two leadership horizons:

Presence, how much we notice and attend to what is happening, with empathy, for all stakeholders.

Vision and values, why we do what we do, how we see ourselves, and who we aspire to be.

Beyond what these two leadership horizons offer separately, together they influence the stories we shape in our “storied space,” the place we each occupy in which the events of the past and the possibilities of the future converge in our ever-unfolding present. We constantly draw together emerging insights to keep making new meaning and ideating possibilities best matched to addressing emerging challenges. As our understanding sharpens, we narrow our options to the best fitting one, shape it into a prototype, and test it in action. Throughout this, we constantly monitor the resonance of our self-efficacy and agency to keep the actions we intend undertaking realistically sitting at the threshold of what we can nearly accomplish.

Rather than mapping a fixed blueprint, this design approach offers rigor and agility, enabling our agency to grow organically, culminating in leadership fit for purpose, including a sound capacity to strengthen our own leadership, by design.

For several decades, leaders have recognized that the ethos and language of our social, business, and governance structures have become barren, too small, and insufficient for the many challenges and opportunities facing contemporary leaders and the myriad contexts in which they serve. “Designing Leadership Like Jazz” addresses these concerns.

“Designing Leadership Like Jazz” is about understanding the centrality of leadership formation in shaping, or designing, leaders as well as understanding leadership as an art. In this chapter, I identify what leadership formation is and is not. Drawing on the language of jazz music and related arts, I also surface strategies and lessons that can be used by anyone who leads or aspires to lead. Not only can the lessons be applied by anyone who leads or aspires to lead but they also can be applied anywhere, at any time, and in any context. The lessons apply to us as individuals, in intimate relationships with family and friends, in community settings, in workgroups, among team members, in organizations and institutions, and in nations.

Sequestered in their boardroom, Morgan Donne, the CEO of a struggling financial services company, recounts their past successes. Determined to help her inner circle remember what it is like to be part of a winning team, she invites them to share a story about their strengths. Morgan begins. Then the CFO shares his story.

This chapter illustrates how human-centered design (HCD) principals can activate Fe+Male leadership synergy inside an organization. We explore how it is possible to: foster a favorable environment and culture that values gender inclusivity; ends blatant discriminatory practices to which many organizations are blind; fortify the confidence of highly capable women and men; and reconcile the divergence of views, communication, and unique leadership styles between men and women leaders. We look at the experiences of women inside organizations along with the beliefs, aspirations, challenges, and needs of women. The chapter provides an HCD guideline for the reader to align the current modus operandi in their own organization for better gender synergy.

We know that complementary male and female styles of leadership create invaluable synergy, and that organizations with more women on board and senior management positions will, on average, outperform organizations without women at top positions. However, women, especially at the top echelon, are sorely lacking in numbers. Without more women around – real synergy is impossible. Increasing transparency, policies such as “disclosure of the gender pay gap” and advocacy by senior leaders will continue to break down some of the barriers and biases, but statistics across all industries and countries show that we are a very long way off and need a new approach to end this dilemma.

How can HCD increase the percentage of female leaders at the table and the chance for gender synergy? In this chapter, you learn facts to fight fiction and influence mindsets that are limited by biases. This chapter introduces four specific target areas to advance Fe+Male synergy. Although most men (based in democracies) intellectually agree that men and women are equal and are highly offended when their sanction for equality is brought into question, most are completely blind to how daily actions (many unintentionally) perpetuate the state of inequity. The biggest leadership issue is getting the whole organization aligned with the principle as well as a visible manifestation of gender synergy.

Roland Joffé, the film-maker behind the significant critical hits The Killing Fields (1984) and The Mission (1986), employed a hypnotic aesthetic, which unflinchingly depicted violence and brutality within different cultural contexts. In 2007, he used a no less impressive aesthetic in a similar way, although this film, Captivity, was met with public outcry, including from self-proclaimed feminist film-maker Joss Whedon. This was based upon the depiction, in advertisements, of gendered violence in the popularly termed ‘torture porn’ subgenre, which itself has negative gendered connotations.

We aim to revisit the critical reception of Captivity in light of this public controversy, looking at the gendered tensions within considerations of genre, narration and aesthetics. Critics assumed Captivity was an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the torture horror subgenre, and there is evidence that the film-makers inserted scenes of gore throughout the narrative to encourage this affiliation. However, this chapter will consider how the film works as both an example of post-peak torture horror and an interesting precursor to more overtly feminist horror, such as A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) and Raw (2017). This is seen through the aesthetic and narrative centralizing of a knowing conflict between genders, which, while not entirely successful, does uniquely aim to provide commentary on the gender roles which genre criticism of horror has long considered implicit to the genre’s structures and pleasures.

Participative budgeting can benefita firm by incorporating subordinates’ private information into financing and operating decisions. In the managerial accounting literature, studies of participative budgeting posit superiors that range from passively committed to highly active participants, some of whom are permitted to communicate, choose compensation schemes, negotiate with subordinates, and reject budgets. This paper synthesizes and analyzes experimental research in participative budgeting with a focus on the role of the superior defined in the research design, and on how that role affects budget outcomes, subordinate behavior, and in some cases superior behavior. We demonstrate how superior type influences economic and behavioral predictions, and likewise affects budgeting outcomes and the interpretation of the results. This paper is intended to further our understanding of how superior type affects behavior in participative budgeting studies, and to facilitate the choice of superior type in future research designs.

Prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, women did nearly three-quarters of the world’s unpaid work. As institutional supports, including in-person school and community-based care for children, the elderly, and the disabled vanished early in the pandemic, many women’s caregiving responsibilities increased. In some cases, opportunities for paid employment disappeared due to layoffs and furloughs, while in others, paid work was no longer possible without access to the missing institutional supports. Either way, access to needed supports – financial, practical, and social – was diminished. The lapse of needed supports also had severe impacts on subgroups of women, including pregnant and post-partum women. A range of considerations – vaccine safety, social interaction and infection risk, disease severity – have posed serious challenges for pregnant and post-partum women. Across the board, women’s need for continuous access to better social, financial, and practical supports at home, in the community, and in the workplace was made even more evident by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Paradoxical leadership (PL) is an emerging perspective to understand how leaders help followers deal with paradoxical demands. Recently, the positive relationship between PL and follower performance was established. This paper builds on and extends this research by interpreting PL as sensegiving and developing theory about mediation in the relationship between PL and adaptive and proactive performance.

The paper develops a new measure for PL as sensegiving and provides a test of the mediation model with data from two different sources and two measurement times in a German company.

Multilevel mediation analysis (N = 154) supports the mediation model.

The paper presents sensegiving about paradox as a core element of PL, which informs the choice of change-readiness as mediator. This study also develops and validates a scale to measure PL in future research.