Brigid Carroll on creating and anchoring a new approach into leadership

“I was born in Dunedin, but we moved to Wellington and then on to Auckland when I was still young. I loved reading from an early age, and ultimately completed an MA in English. I focused on language, marginality and patterns of exclusion in my thesis. It’s funny, because I still research language and marginality, but now of course it’s around people’s work and leadership lives and identities.

“My love of leadership probably came from my early experiences of leadership. And like many people, these were experiences of not getting it right – of not having the presence or impact that I wanted and the context required. I was head prefect at school, but I didn’t understand enough how to mobilise others, or that leadership required fine-grained attention to relationships. So I think my interest came from realising that there was a bigger part of the picture that I hadn’t connected with.

“After completing my MA, I taught English at Avondale College, eventually becoming the head of the English department at Rangitoto College. I was one of the youngest teachers in the department at that time. It was a well-established and successful department of very competent teachers who had been working for 20-30 years, and I never really knew how to break into that circle. That was my second experience of getting into a position of leadership, but not understanding how to pull things together in a way that transcends personalities and relationships.

“I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to do an MBA in New York, and a member of the faculty there gave me an article about using literary methods to understand work and organisations. It was a Damascus moment: in two seconds, I knew I was going to undertake a PhD in this area of research.

“My PhD wasn’t on leadership per se. I studied identity and power, and looked at professionals like teachers and lawyers who never identified as managers, weren’t trained to be managers, but ended up becoming managers. I was interested in how you negotiate that whole identify shift. Obviously, that’s my own journey too – so it was a very easy jump from there into the area of leadership.

“My PhD supervisor was part of the team teaching leadership classes for the MBA and because I knew how to teach, I was shoulder-tapped to join them. That was my first formal move into leadership, and I really enjoyed it. Leadership was that whole missing jigsaw puzzle piece: how to mobilise others to engage, bring their ideas and energy and create something that’s better than anything an individual can do.

“The New Zealand Leadership Institute was formed as I was finishing my PhD. It represented a commitment by the University of Auckland to support leadership in New Zealand, and its mandate was a ‘virtuous circle’ of researching leadership and developing leadership. I loved leadership development, because it was a move into working with practitioners. As a researcher, I had to find ways to turn complex concepts into simple heuristics, stories and practice – and that is a relevant and enticing challenge for an academic.

“I was never particularly interested in researching at the level of the individual leader; I quickly gravitated towards how leadership shifts between different leadership actors. I focus on how you build relational and social capital, how you navigate a system, how you mobilise others. That’s exactly what was missing in my early experiences of leadership. In essence, I studied my own experience gap.

“It's a very different kind of leadership development and in the early days of the institute, that was a very significant change from the mainstream of development. But now it’s the kind of thing that most organisations want: how do you navigate complexity? How do you not only create a collective culture of leadership, but also sustain it? How do you lead when there is so much ambiguity and uncertainty? That has been the big thing that we have had to rethink amidst global crises like the pandemic: how do you lead without the answers?

“Leadership today is akin to being in a room with twenty people, all with different versions of understanding. The leader is a facilitator who has to create a conversation and also a direction out of that conversation, helping people to be comfortable with moving out of diverse viewpoints into ways of acting.

“A lot of the work I do is around how you stop seeing something as an individual trait and instead as a collective process. For example, I’m working on a piece on accountability: it’s a very individualistic notion normally, so if you’re in a shared leadership situation, how do we share accountability? Can we have collective accountability, and what does that look like?

“I’ve recently done a paper on Greta Thunberg, not as someone who leads but as someone who represents the voice of youth, activism and learning and someone who is ‘materialised’ through different media and spaces in quite a unique way. She’s interesting because she has no positional hierarchical power whatsoever, hence raises the question of how do youth have power? I’m interested in how youth lead while they are still young, because we need their energy and radicalism now. So that paper looks at how you can lead without power – without having an organisationally defined place in the world.

“A lot of emergent and younger researchers work in the centre, and they want to study leadership in areas like climate change and the environment. Part of the centre’s mandate is to do work or research on topics that really matter – it’s about making impact. So as director of the centre, I get to create a space for these researchers – bringing in my resources and experience to support them. It’s a real joy.

“The centre also focuses on governance, which is a new area for me. We’re looking at the ‘site’ of the board, which is the site of leadership as well – and has become a contested site of high interest and significance to many contemporary issues in the world today. The idea of the centre is to bring leadership and governance together in the context of today’s significant governance challenges, and to create an impact that way.

“I enjoy working with the Centre for Executive and Professional Development (EPD), because it means I can still work in leadership development. I work on the C-Suite programme, which targets those who are transitioning from team or area roles into that executive space. This requires thinking very differently about the kind of leadership required.

“I love teaching; I always have. I love designing ways for people to get hands-on with the concepts and material, and then facilitating a discussion that creates insights. When you’re developing leadership, you have such impactful ingredients: you have a self, you have others, you have a purpose, and the dynamics of how you create something that didn’t previously exist in relation to that purpose is always really absorbing. Whenever there is a room of people trying to achieve something that goes beyond what you’re doing now, it’s magic.

“I love the fact that my way of research, which is using people’s words to understand how they are thinking and operating, has become a more established way of doing leadership studies. I feel I’ve made a difference in gaining legitimacy for non-traditional ways of doing research.

“The field I’m most associated with is called leadership as practice – I wrote one of the original papers on it in 2008. It argues that leadership research is too driven by conceptual models, and we need to explore the messy complexity of what people are doing and put that into the heart of our research. I’m really proud of co-creating and anchoring a new approach into leadership.

“I’m at the stage now where I can look at individuals we have worked with and simply admire the human spirit and the fact that people do still want to make a difference together with others. No matter how topsy-turvy the world has been (and certainly is now), and how fraught organisations, institutions and societies are, there’s still a spirit and an energy and a desire to make them better. And that’s easily the most rewarding piece and what gives me hope for the future, even as there seems more and more to challenge that hope.”