Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Hosted by Maureen Metcalf

Conversations with global thought leaders on leadership, culture, and innovation—designed for executives navigating complexity and building resilient organizations.

Revitalizing Leadership – Putting Theory & Practice into Context

Episode Description

Brad Jackson challenges a common failing in leadership scholarship: proposing universal prescriptions that ignore organizational context. His central claim is simple but consequential, that context always matters in leadership practice, and that effectiveness comes from adapting to a specific environment rather than applying one-size-fits-all formulas. Director of the Policy Innovation Hub at Griffith University, he explores how leaders and followers should shape purpose, values, roles, and behaviors to fit their particular setting, bridging the persistent gap between leadership theory and real-world application.

Key Takeaways

Context always matters, so universal leadership prescriptions often fail in practice.
Effectiveness comes from adapting to a specific organizational environment.
Purpose, values, and norms should be developed to suit the particular context.
Roles, responsibilities, and behaviors for leaders and followers are shaped by contextual needs.
Bridging theory and practice requires taking context seriously rather than seeking formulas.

Why This Episode Matters

Executives come away with a useful corrective to one-size-fits-all leadership advice, and a reminder to adapt purpose, values, and roles to their own organizational context.

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Featuring

Brad Jackson

Episode Topics

Culture Change • Governance & Oversight • Leadership Capability & Maturity

Podcast Air Date

February 5, 2019

Episode Duration

47min

Watch the episode

Season 5

Episode Number 4

Episode Content:

Theory is one thing. Practice is another. That’s just as true of leadership coaches and their theories as with any science. Guest Brad Jackson understands that, and works to put leadership theory into real-world contexts so it can be truly useful.

That’s the focus of his book: Revitalising Leadership – Putting Theory and Practice into Context. It argues that the universal prescriptions favored by most leadership scholars ignore the reality that context always matters in leadership practice. He puts our attention on the key challenges for leadership in different organizational contexts. From developing a specific purpose for leadership to formulating the values, norms and domains of action, putting leadership in context is tremendously useful – shaping the role, responsibilities, rights, behaviors and attributes relevant to leaders and followers.

Produced in partnership with the International Leadership Association: https://ilaglobalnetwork.org.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

How Do Leadership & the Environment Connect? – with Rian Satterwhite & Kathleen Allen
Workforce Education: A New Roadmap – with William Bonvillian & Sanjay Sarma
The Essentials of Theory U with Otto Scharmer

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Resources:

You can find Brad’s book on revitalizing leadership on Amazon at https://amzn.to/3SLJhT6. For a breezy read, check out his other book, A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Studying Leadership.

Our host, Maureen Metcalf, posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI. Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Books we’re reading for fun or personal development right now include:

Becoming Superman: My Journey from Poverty to Hollywood by J. Michael Straczynski
Own the AI Revolution by Neil Sahota
Time and Chance by Kim Campbell
Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, the Man Who Created Nancy by Bill Griffith

NOTE: As an Amazon partner, we may make a small commission from books you buy through these links.

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The Illusion of Leadership: Neuroscience Finds Who’s Really in Control with Gary Weber
Self-Awareness: The #1 Predictor of Leadership Success with Belinda Gore
Global Leadership: Research, Practice, & Development with Allan Bird and Joyce Osland

Guest(s):

Brad Jackson

Guest(s) Bio:

As director of the Policy Innovation Hub and Professor of Social Innovation at Griffith University, Brad Jackson’s research explores the relationship between leadership and governance practices; cross-sectoral leadership processes; the role of communication in strategic leadership; and the application of aesthetic and geographic perspectives to leadership research, development and education. He has taught courses in leadership and ethics; leadership and change; organisational behaviour; cross-cultural management; management learning; leading social enterprise and qualitative research methods. Prior to re-joining Victoria University of Wellington, Brad was the Fletcher Building Education Trust Chair in Leadership and Co-Director of the New Zealand Leadership Institute at The University of Auckland Business School between 2006 and 2013. During his original term with Victoria between 1999 and 2006, he served as Head of the School of Management and the Director for the Centre for the Study of Leadership among several appointments.

Transcript