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The purpose of this paper is to foreground place as a critical and central concern for public leadership research, development and practice.

This invited essay draws on the author’s own research and development work engaging in collaborative place-based interventions with academics, policy makers and practitioners.

Place is one of six heuristic lenses in a Leadership Hexad that has been developed to interrogate and better understand leadership in a multi-dimensional manner. Place can provide an important theoretical and practical fulcrum for bridging both collaborative governance and collective leadership and public and political leadership as well as facilitating cross-sectoral leadership.

This essay argues that more time and effort should be invested into researching and developing place leadership to complement the already extensive efforts to promote collaborative governance and place-based policy initiatives. Place leadership development should be genuinely cross-sectoral in its ambition and should focus on developing emerging and established leaders from the public, private, not-for-profit and indigenous sectors to tackle place-based problems and opportunities.

This essay draws on experience undertaking academic research and conducting leadership development that draws from and feeds into policy and practice. It utilises research from geography, leadership studies, public management, public policy and political science to gain a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between place and public leadership and how this can be harnessed to improve economic and social impact.

The purpose of this study is to present a systematic assessment of the distinctive challenges and opportunities associated with creating leadership within the realm of social enterprise. A modified and expanded form of Grint’s leadership lenses heuristic framework (i.e. person, position, process, performance, purpose and place) is used to examine and highlight what is particular about creating leadership in social enterprises by virtue of their distinctive missions, strategic contexts, legal forms and organisational structures and cultures. Based on this initial exploration, five research priorities are identified to better understand and then develop leadership practice in the social enterprise realm.

An enhanced heuristic framework for systematically examining leadership within the social enterprise research literature has been applied, drawing on the leadership practice literature. The application is illustrated through six instrumental case studies.

While there are a number of similarities between leading in the social enterprise realm and leading within the private, public and not-for-profit sectors, the levels of complexity, ambiguity and the lack of an established theoretical and practical knowledge base makes creating leadership in the social enterprise sector that much more challenging. On the positive side of the ledger, the fact that the purpose is at the core of social enterprise means that it is relatively easier to use the purpose to create a basis for common meaningful action, compared to leadership within the private and public sectors. Related to this, given the strongly local or “glocal” nature of social enterprise, a ready opportunity exists for leaders to draw upon a place as a strategic resource in mobilising followers and other stakeholders. The novel, uncertain and pioneering nature of a social enterprise is also arguably more tolerant and accommodating of a leadership mindset that focuses on posing questions regarding “wicked” problems compared to public, private for-profit and, indeed, traditional not-for-profit sector organisations.

As far as we can ascertain, this is the first systematic attempt to examine the distinctive challenges and opportunities associated with creating leadership within the social enterprise realm. The application of the heuristic framework leads to the identification of five key inter-related lines of empirical research into leadership practices within social enterprises.

The purpose of this paper is to consider a challenge to an occupational jurisdiction in the British police. Historically, street cops have defended the importance of operational credibility as a way of sustaining the value of experience, and inhibiting attempts to introduce external leaders. This has generated a particular form of policing and leadership that is deemed by the British Government as inadequate to face the problems of the next decade.

The project used the High Potential Development Scheme of the British police to assess the value of operational credibility and the possibilities of radical cultural change. Data are drawn from participants on the program, from those who failed to get onto the program, and from officers who have risen through the ranks without access to a fast-track scheme.

Most organizational changes fail in their own terms, often because of cultural resistance. However, if we change our metaphors of culture from natural to human constructions it may be possible to focus on the key point of the culture: the lodestone that glues it together. Operational credibility may be such a cultural lodestone and undermining it offers the opportunity for rapid and radical change.

The scheme itself has had limited numbers and the research was limited to a small proportion of the different categories outlined above.

If we change our metaphors for culture and cultural change – from natural to constructed metaphors – (icebergs and webs to buildings), it may be possible to consider a much more radical approach to organizational change.

Most assessments of cultural change focus on those charged with enacting the change and explain failure through recourse to natural metaphors of change. This paper challenges the convention that cultural change can only ever be achieved, if at all, through years of effort.

The paper aims to explore the processes by which individuals make attributions about a leader's personality and effectiveness based upon information contained within a photograph of a leader's face.

A mixed methodology approach is taken which combines an individual survey with a follow‐up focus group conducted with five classes of MBA students. In the survey, respondents were asked to rate the photographic images of ten CEOs for personality traits and leadership effectiveness that were apparent in the face; in the focus group, they were asked to reflect upon the processes they had utilized in order to make their attributions.

The study demonstrated that the vast majority of the participants actively used the face to attribute personality traits of the leaders as well as their ability to lead. The survey revealed that perceived leadership effectiveness was positively correlated to perceived extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and narcissism. The focus group revealed three strategies that were used when placing these attributions on a leader. These were drawing on explicit facial traits, using the leader's non‐facial traits and general appearance, and telling stories about the leader.

This was an exploratory study set up in an artificial laboratory‐like environment featuring a limited and homogenous collection of CEO photographs and involving a limited and relatively homogenous group of participants. However, it does show that the face is an important and rich source of information from which individuals can make detailed attributions about a leader's personality and their potential leadership ability. The functionality of making such attributions as well as its moral and ethical basis needs to be properly examined and discussed.

The study highlights the leader's face and the visual portrayal thereof, as a potentially important, yet rarely analyzed, aspect of leadership. It foregrounds photographs of leaders, most notably those taken of CEOs, as organizational artifacts that have been largely ignored but worthy data sources. Leadership scholars could profitably focus upon both the production and consumption processes associated with the visual portrayal of leadership.

This article argues that the default preference for interpreting situations as critical and the associated decision‐style of command often undermines our attempts to address wicked problems adequately. As a result, ‘leadership’, defined as persuading the collective to take responsibility for collective problems, is often regarded not just as difficult and dangerous, but as ‘the enemy of the people’. Not only are we likely to be addicted to command but we are also likely to be allergic to leadership.