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The paper discusses the “narrative practices” utilised by women leading in a small sample of Early Years services in the North East of England. These Early Years settings are presented as an alternative site for studying women's experiences of leadership. It examines the way in which these women use narrative strategies and approaches to work in collaborative, community based services for young children and their families.

The study is drawn from a larger study into narratives of professional identity and their relation to interactional contexts. The study follows an interpretive paradigm, and used narrative and participative methodology and methods to work with a small number of participants purposively sampled from cohorts of the National Professional Qualification in Integrated Centre Leadership (NPQICL). Participants were involved in reflective conversations about their leadership supported by interactive, visual methods in five extended sessions over the course of twelve months. Data from the larger study which related to the theme of “narrative practices” was subsequently coded and interpreted to inform this study.

Data coded as “narrative practices” led to the establishment of three high level categories of narrative practice found in the study. These are summarised in the metaphors of “tent making” (creating and using symbolic and narrative space with others), “skilled dancing” (improvising, and remembering with others) and “orchestration” (reflexive attuning). Data suggests that women involved in the study drew on their experience and values to develop sophisticated narrative practices that were particularly adaptive, ethically sensitive and sustainable – often in spite of “official” masculine leadership cultures.

This specific study only draws on narrative accounts of three women leaders in Early Years services and as such is not intended to generate generalizable theory. The intention of the study is to conceptualise women's leadership as narrative practice, and in so doing to direct further study into these practices as aspects of effective leadership.

The study develops new ways of conceptualising and interpreting women's leadership practices and opens up opportunities for further study in this field. Access to this material also provides individuals (including women leading in UK Early Years services) and opportunity for reflection on their own leadership practice.

This study is unique in using a form of highly participative, reflective methodology to consider women's use of narrative in leadership interactions in the UK Early Years sector. The study is the first in this sector to look at this specific topic using aspects of Ricoeur's (1984) narrative hermeneutics and in so doing generates new questions about women's narrative practices.

This paper approaches manager's storytelling as a means for promoting organizational aims and for constructing leadership, and examines the intentions of managers in this process. We focus on the context of storytelling and the content of the stories told by managers in order to identify areas of influence on subordinates. Storytelling in relation to building a narrative identity for the manager is also studied.

This is an exploratory empirical study that draws on 13 thematic interviews with Finnish managers working in different fields. A qualitative thematic analysis is used in order to analyze the data.

As a result of the study we found that managers tell stories in order to evoke leadership characterized by six areas of influence: motivation, inspiration, defusing conflict, influencing superiors, discovering a focus and constructing trust. According to the findings, the managers see stories as an effective means of building trust between leaders and their subordinates. It was also found that managers can use stories self‐reflectively and as a means of self‐development.

Storytelling can empower leadership and support interaction with subordinates. One application of this study is informing elements of leadership development such as business education programmes for managers and future managers.

Narrative leadership is a highly valued but still under‐researched approach to leadership. This study seeks to fill this gap in the research by providing an empirically based contribution to the field, emphasizing the intentional nature of storytelling.

The purpose of this phenomenological study is to explore leader identity development experiences of emerging adults at a large Midwest university and how retrospective family storytelling (Koenig Kellas, 2018) plays a role in the sense-making of the leader identity process. Through a unique, three-phase qualitative and narrative inquiry approach, this research further explores LID sense-making through retrospective family storytelling.

Qualitative phenomenology and narrative inquiry approach. Data collection consisted of three different data sets: (a) two semi-structured interviews, (b) leader artifacts and (c) journals.

The stories told by the emerging adults described how key messages influenced their identity within the context of leader identity development and their college experiences. Furthermore, a key finding in the narratives exhibited the stories emerging adults recalled in the sense-making of their leader identity centered on persevering, overcoming hardships and interpersonal connections and relationships. Findings from this research contribute to LID literature for leadership educators, researchers and practitioners in leader development.

The research presented in this article advances LID by using a narrative approach to explore the role of family narratives in identity development. Further, it approaches qualitative work with rigorous data collection and analysis processing using a cross-case analysis to develop leader identity archetypes. This study directly impacts those who work with emerging adult college students and supports the development of college student leaders.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the knowledge base on the ways in which assistant principals view their roles, and on the potential challenges involved in a distributed leadership model.

The study employed a narrative capture method, in which assistant principals from two large urban school districts were asked to relate and self-interpret two leadership stories through a web-based narrative capture form. A total of 90 stories were collected from 45 assistant principals. Participants rated their stories based on a set of leadership indicators (including method of decision making and type of teacher interaction present in the story, among others); the results were analyzed statistically.

Overall, participants tended to view their roles in terms of instructionally focussed leadership. However, leadership challenges emerged in several areas of leadership practice, including operational management and teacher professional development (PD). Demographic factors were found to influence leadership perceptions and practices.

This study begins to fill the empirical gap on assistant principal leadership roles, practices, and perceptions. Further research, using other methods (e.g. observation), is needed to collect evidence of in situ leadership practices of assistant principals, and how those practices impact and relate to school objectives for teaching and learning.

The study sheds light on the leadership development needs of assistant principals and on the importance of ongoing, tailored PD, based on factors including where leaders are in their careers and how they envision their roles.

This paper contributes to nascent scholarship regarding assistant principal school leadership.

The purpose of this article is to introduce a narrative framework for leadership education as a lens for exploring how emerging adults make sense of their leader identity development. This narrative framework, called Communicated Narrative Sense Making (CNSM), looks at identity through storytelling processes. Emerging adults in higher education have different experiences and come to a new awareness of themselves in a context in a variety of ways. Part of this development process is establishing an identity as a leader. We propose a narrative framework as an approach for exploring the experiences and sense-making processes of leader identity development in emerging adults.

This paper examines how a classroom designed process of constructing narratives about oneself, a group, and others helps students develop an authentic leadership voice. We begin by describing the theoretical framework behind our paper, which includes an overview of the notion of authenticity and the linkage between narrative and authentic leadership. Next, we provide an account of a transformative class called Leadership and Storytelling. Following this is a response to the question that inspired our paper: What was it about the course that made it such a meaningful leadership experience for students? The authors offer three key ingredients to the nature of this powerful classroom experience: space, authorship, and taking students to the edge of knowing. We conclude with an exploration of how others can incorporate narrative into their own work to become better leadership educators.

There is a growing body of literature signaling the relevance of race in leadership development, but many conventional models do not prompt exploration of this social identity. The omission of race in leadership curriculum is disadvantageous for all college students, but among White student leaders, it may be a continuance of White privilege. The purpose of this constructivist study was to explore how White student leaders make meaning of their racial identity, and corresponding privilege, through a relevant leadership framework. Racial caucusing was employed as a method to prompt discussion and gather narratives from four White student leaders. Findings from this narrative inquiry study indicate how the confluences of race and leadership can advance self-awareness among White student leaders.