Leadership in Context

How does leadership become understandable within a particular cultural, organizational, and social context?

This question connects my coaching, research, and writing. It concerns how people come to recognize authority, interpret responsibility, and decide what good leadership requires. It also concerns the room they have to act when those expectations conflict.

My interest developed through work in education, organizational leadership, and international executive coaching. My doctoral research gave language to tensions I had encountered in practice. Those questions continue to develop through the people I work with and the situations they bring.

Leadership unfolds before audiences: colleagues, employees, boards, customers. People interpret what a leader says, how they act, and whether their actions fit expectations of authority, competence, and trust. Their responses help shape what happens next. This is the organizational theater explored in my research, a shared performance with real consequences.

From this perspective, a difficulty with leadership can involve the part someone is expected to play. An executive may be asked to invite challenge while maintaining an appearance of certainty. Someone who questions an established practice may encounter resistance that cannot be understood through their communication skills alone.

Coaching can help make these expectations visible and explore the possibilities and consequences of responding differently.

Huizinga’s understanding of play adds another dimension. Play brings a world into being through shared participation, boundaries, and rules. Its seriousness depends on people’s involvement. Questioning the rules can therefore disturb something that participants value and rely on.

I find the magic circle a useful way to think about what coaching can make possible: a temporary space in which familiar expectations can loosen enough for exploration. We can try another way of describing an encounter, consider an unfamiliar position, or give an apparently unreasonable thought room to develop. The conversation can produce possibilities that neither of us brought into it.

There is a tension here. Coaching has its own rules and expectations, including the expectation to demonstrate useful results. An exploration can become a rehearsal for an already accepted image of the successful leader. The coach’s questions, interpretations, and professional authority help shape that process. Examining our participation matters too.

Metis, often translated as cunning intelligence, brings attention to resourcefulness in unfolding circumstances: recognizing an opening, sensing a moment, finding an indirect approach, or responding inventively when a plan no longer fits. Such judgment emerges through encounters with people and events. Its value depends on the situation and its consequences; ingenuity also requires ethical scrutiny.

For my clients, these perspectives open a particular kind of inquiry: where does a familiar leadership role help them, where does it constrain them, and what room exists to act differently? We explore the rules they depend on, the expectations they might renegotiate, and the responses that become possible as circumstances change.

We agree what progress would mean and examine changes in decisions, behavior, and relationships. Research and feedback inform that assessment. As our understanding develops, we may also need to reconsider the original question or the criteria for progress.

This gives coaching a role in developing judgment and imagination within organizational life. It creates room to work with the uncertainty that leaders encounter, while keeping their responsibilities and the consequences for others in view.

My professional life began in special education, first as a teacher and later as a school principal. Alongside that work, university study gave me opportunities to examine how people learn and develop. Vygotsky’s attention to language, social interaction, and the cultural conditions of development provided an early theoretical foundation.

My experience in education brought me close to the relationship between a person’s possibilities and the circumstances in which they were expected to learn. Organizational responsibility added questions about professional judgment, institutional expectations, and the consequences of decisions. Subsequent experiences and research changed and extended my understanding.

At de Baak, a Dutch institute for leadership development and entrepreneurship, this interest entered a different setting. We spoke of the human side of business. Working with colleagues on industry guides, I explored sectors where technological and economic developments were opening new possibilities. Questions about innovation and entrepreneurship were closely connected to questions about people, leadership, and organizing.

The emphasis on autonomy, creativity, and finding one’s own voice appealed to me. Over time, I became increasingly interested in the expectations carried by those ideals. What did we mean by authenticity? How did certain qualities come to define good leadership? What happened when an invitation to be oneself became an expectation to behave in recognizable ways?

My subsequent publications extended this inquiry through education, philosophy, film, and leadership development. I examined how schools are recognized as excellent, how leaders navigate expectations of authenticity, and the possibilities and paradoxes of play in leadership training. Writing on pedagogy brought questions about knowledge, creativity, and care into this continuing exploration.

Those questions continue to develop through my international coaching, including my work with IMD Business School and John Mattone Global. Familiar leadership language can carry different expectations across organizations and cultures. Understanding what responsibility, trust, or initiative means requires attention to the people and circumstances involved.

My own leadership experience keeps that inquiry connected to the need to act. Decisions have consequences, stakeholders have competing interests, and complete understanding is rarely available. The significance of a perspective becomes clearer through what happens when people work with it.