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To open your heart to others is a physical act of leadership. It can include crying and inspire hugs. In this chapter, I explore what it means to open your heart, why doing so is an act of leadership, how to do it, and why it is difficult to do. Opening your heart to others is both the simplest, most natural thing in the world, and tremendously difficult at the same time. It means sharing a part of ourselves that others will recognize as real and true, and important in a way that feels incredibly vulnerable. Opening your heart is a way of creating and working with the connection between people. Actors have long recognized that the single biggest barrier to achieving the kind of connection that comes from opening your heart is playing status games with each other. The challenge for the leader is to transcend the status game and stop playing it in a way that doesn’t damage their status as a leader. I offer an example of how Frank showed real leadership by overcoming his fear and opening his heart to his employees.

Although within the leadership literature there is a body of research concerning the physical attributes of leaders, close examination reveals that much of it offers a rather surface level of analysis. A number of studies, for example, attempt to correlate leaders’ height with their success, and attempts have been made to identify a relationship between leaders’ performance and their attractiveness. In this book, a range of scholars from differing perspectives delve below the apparent level of physicality to highlight its paradoxically ‘invisible’ aspects including: the impact of gesture, the way in which the physical is intrinsically interwoven with the social and the contradictory nature of bodily taboos. The book shows how each of these aspects plays an important role in the creation and maintenance of leadership relationships.

This chapter introduces three tussles we and our authors have faced in navigating this territory. Firstly, we have worked hard to find forms of writing which ‘point towards’ the experience of physicality. Realising that written language can never ‘be’ that experience (just as Magritte demonstrates with his painting, ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ that the reproduction of the pipe is not the pipe itself) we have encouraged authors to contribute first-person accounts, in-depth case studies focused on individuals and even activities which involve the reader in order to evoke a sense of the physical. Secondly, we have endeavoured to distinguish the ‘inside-out’ phenomenon of ‘embodiment’ from the ‘outside-in’ occurrence of ‘physicality’. Finally, our authors have worked to reveal the mutual entanglement of social and material worlds, such that paradoxically, the physical reveals itself to be ‘in flow’ and continually in a process of ‘becoming’. After describing how we have sought to resolve these challenges, a taster from each chapter is offered. The chapter concludes by reasserting the importance of recognising the physical nature of the connection at the heart of human relationships experienced as leadership.

Members of an organization that had undergone revolutionary, punctuated equilibrium type change were asked to tell the story of that change. Senior managers tended to make sense of the change as discontinuous, while individual contributors tended to make sense of the change as incremental. Three theories of individual sense‐making; individual agency, personal relevance, and strategic perspective are developed to suggest why individuals made sense of these changes differently.

Dirty work involves contacting “polluting” substances; engaging in unpleasant tasks; and dealing with disvalued people, beings, or other objects. As Hughes (1984) observes:(E)very occupation is not one but several activities; some of them are the “dirty work” of the trade. It may be dirty in one of several ways. It may be simply physically disgusting. It may be a symbol of degradation, something that wounds one's dignity….(I)t may be dirty work in that it in some way goes counter to the more heroic of our moral conceptions. Dirty work of some kind is found in all occupations. (p. 343)