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Teachers are an adaptive group of professionals and in this chapter, we explore the ways that teachers can develop themselves as leaders, even in the absence of strong support or leadership. We explore the manner that these skill sets and strengths can be cultivated, providing lived examples of how the authors have developed themselves. The ways that teachers can follow in the footsteps of the authors is outlined in clearly defined steps. By drawing on previous literature, we provide seven strong claims of developing middle leadership knowledge and skill sets beyond your school. Much of this development and community development work that develops and sharpens leadership skills can be explored through online fora and social media tools. These tools allow skill development, professional learning, and exposure to a broad range of education stakeholders and groups; for future pathways in school leadership roles and leading beyond school gate.

School-level leaders should not be expected to be mired in emotional turmoil and sacrifice their own health, happiness and well-being to do their jobs effectively. While the emotional aspects of school-level leadership have continued to evolve and become increasingly complex since the turn of the twenty-first century, the supports available to these individuals remain outdated, ineffective, and moribund. If mentoring, anonymous telephone support lines and other ‘old school’ approaches for supporting school leaders were still effective, they would not be struggling to deal with the emotional aspects of their work and workload. Further, there is a need to provide ‘just-in-time’ supports that are available to school-level leaders when concerns arise. Absent structural changes, isolated and individualized approaches to self-care cannot mitigate the challenges principals face or the physical, mental and emotional toll associated with their work and workload. Communal strategies and policy levers are recommended in an effort to go beyond mindfulness and other (potentially) individualistic and neoliberal approaches to self-care. This chapter also explores how principal preparation programmes and other formal professional learning opportunities are an untapped resource in terms of strengthening school-level leaders' emotional regulation capacity and building a general appreciation for the emotional aspects of school-level leadership.

Higher education has begun to attend to the importance of collaboration and self-awareness for educating sustainability leaders. However, there has been limited discussion on how to design a pedagogy that supports the development of these competencies, particularly the development of self-awareness. In this chapter, we introduce an experiential pedagogy in which students and faculty work together to develop self-awareness as the basis for sustainability leadership. We present three pedagogical principles that support the emotional learning that is foundational for sustainability leadership: student self-discovery, faculty as co-learners, and a developmentally focused learning environment. We demonstrate how these three principles work together to enable students and faculty to grow their self-awareness, providing the foundation for sustainable leadership. We conclude with a discussion on how management educators can learn from this case to develop sustainability leaders who have the self-awareness and relational competency to lead positive, inclusive organizations that are committed to sustainable business practices.

This conceptual work synthesizes the experiences of Black men who are collegiate athletes and introduces new theoretical considerations on the formation of their leadership identities in predominantly white institutions. This scholarship focuses on historical understandings of how race and gender influenced the creation of the current Black man in collegiate identity. This work expands on Du Bois' (1903) concept of double consciousness, Fanon's (1952) views on Blackness, and Bertrand Jones and colleagues' culturally responsive leadership learning model (2016). Collectively, the three frameworks highlight the significance of leadership in the development of Black men who are student-athletes. The conclusion includes implications and recommendations for future research as we work to support and develop Black men beyond their athletic identity.

One of the two main tasks of innovation leadership, a practice to inspire and enable creativity and innovation in organisations, is to construct a creativity-enabling organisational environment. One form of this main task is using developmental interactions, like mentoring, as innovation leadership practices. A hackathon is one type of innovation contest with three designed phases: pre-hackathon, hackathon event and post-hackathon, involving multiple stakeholders with distinct roles, such as hackers and mentors. In a hackathon, the central activity of mentors is to support the hackers’ innovation process, especially in idea creation and concept development. The mentor role has not been focal in hackathon studies; thus, this chapter addresses the role, impact, and ways to acknowledge the mentors as an integral, contributing innovation leadership practice in hackathons. As an empirical study, this chapter presents the results of a public sector case in a Swedish multi-disciplinary municipality conducting intra-organisational hackathons in three different collocations. The chapter contributes to the literature on innovation leadership at the team level with mentorship in innovation contests in the public sector context by revealing the dual-role tension of innovation leadership in mentor activities in the hackathon event phase from both the hackers’ and mentors’ viewpoints, and the necessity of mentor-benefitting training in pre-hackathon phase.

Precise and accurate observation, what we see, and the perception of emotion, what we sense and feel, lead to a more reliable evaluation and thus to better management of complex situations. Therefore, perception, observation and judgement are critical success factors in fostering innovation leadership at individual and team levels. This chapter outlines how these aspects need to be considered to facilitate the discovery, reflection and implementation of new ideas and solutions. We look at scientific areas such as neuroscience and positive psychology and apply the research to different professional areas. Based on this, we introduce ‘Coaching with Art’ as a method to train perceptiveness as a quality for self and team leadership to better cope with the challenges and opportunities of innovation processes.

This chapter explores middle leadership identity through the real-world accounts of how two middle leaders construct and develop their leadership identity and how this impacts the way their middle leadership is practiced. Leadership identity, an internal narrative of oneself as a leader which is practised professionally in context, represents a concept that is best understood as being unique to an individual, enduring over time, and a consequence of human experiences. Middle leadership is often the first promotion for teachers from teacher to leader and, as such, how middle leaders perceive themselves as a leader and how this formative process of leadership identity underpins middle leaders’ practices can make a significant impact on a leader’s decision making, professional relationships, behaviours, and actions. This chapter is co-authored by two researchers and two middle leaders with the intention of understanding middle leader identity development and its influence on middle leadership practices. Using interviews, middle leaders’ stories of identity were co-composed and re-storied to construct each middle leader’s narrative. This chapter concludes with a discussion on the influences of identity for middle leaders and considerations for leadership development.