Amanda Sinclair - Doing Leadership Differently
Amanda Sinclair,
Doing Leadership Differently:
Gender, Power and Sexuality in a Changing Business Culture
Pp. xiv + 208. Paperback ISBN 0 522 85149 5
A couple of years into our careers, most of us experience not so much a passage rite as a minor crossing of the tramlines, the first changing of the guard among the people in power above us. Thus in universities, the professor who has voiced criticisms at faculty meetings takes over as Dean, the senior lecturer becomes head of department. The transition is managed by enfolding the appointee in an aura of ‘leadership’, which usually includes wearing a suit and reciting humourless monologues about strategic planning. Amanda Sinclair is unimpressed by the form of leadership that is perpetuated by these modern-day Emperor’s Clothes. It is not simply that the archetype favours men, but rather that it reflects a specific form of ‘heroic masculinity’ (p. 37). Thus although Sinclair’s reflections stem from research into the glass ceiling syndrome based on interviews with successful businesswomen, she would not regard her book as a feminist manifesto. ‘Until we unravel and expose the links between being a leader and enacting a particular form of manliness, then, in gender and racial terms, leadership will remain the domain of a homogenous elite.’ (p. 175) This is a reissue of a book first published in 1998. The publisher has overruled Sinclair’s wish to put a J.M.W. Turner landscape on the cover (it appears as a frontispiece). Turner, she explains, was a leader because he helped us see our world in a new light.