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In the collective or distributed leadership models that are now increasingly dominant in the literature about leadership in public services, the role of the “practitioner as leader” takes on powerful significance. The purpose of this paper is to address a gap in this corpus of research, which is a critical analysis of what constitutes the role of the practitioner leader, and the strengths and limitations of these informal leaders as agents of organisational change.

The paper develops a critical comparative analysis of the role of ordinary teachers and doctors as leaders, as a way of gaining purchase on what comprises and shapes the role of practitioner leader and the potential of this form of leadership to be a driver for quality improvements in the public sectors of education and health.

Traversing traditional academic divides and comparing medical and teacher leadership provides a clearer picture of how professional and organisational culture strongly influences the roles that practitioner leaders can take up and the influence they can wield. This comparison also shows that building capacity of practitioner leadership in the public services should be approached as an expansion of professional identity, rather than an “added extra” for keen few.

Importantly, this critical comparative review indicates that practitioner leadership is best understood and fostered as a particular ethical stance, rather than a special form of power or knowledge and that it occupies an interstitial space in between formal leadership structures and ordinary practitioners. This is both its strength and its weakness as a form of leadership.

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) exhibit limited understanding of their business processes. This lack of understanding limits the potential of these businesses and is a direct contributor to the high failure rates of this sector of the economy. Research has suggested that existing BP methods to not support SMEs in gaining an improved understanding of their processes due to the high complexity and resource intensity of these tools, more suitable for deployment within a large business context. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper reports on two qualitative case studies of medium-sized financial entities that employ a new approach, the critical process targeting method (CPTM), to improve their understanding of their processes.

In reviewing these two case studies, the authors find that the CPTM can be considered a useful tool in improving process understanding in SMEs, and can lead to the achievement of strategic goals. This paper, however, also describes a number of practical limitations that were encountered when employing the CPTM within the SME context.

This new contribution to theory adds significant and critical support to academia and practice in business process understanding where current methods are found to be too resource heavy for even some large organisations. These two case studies have also provided support for struggling management teams being overwhelmed by the need to understand business processes within their organisations. Published literature and the case study experience both suggest that medium-sized entities have difficulty understanding their business processes.