Weary of the harsh realities of people management? Leadership development as cultivating a taste for muddy situations

Practitioners face a wealth of perspectives on leadership, each highlighting different dimensions to attend to as a leader. Contemporary literature, for instance, emphasizes aspects such as authenticity, vision, relationships, and being a servant leader. Regarding the process of becoming a leader, it suggests a path involving changing roles, rebuilding one’s identity, and becoming a quiet servant of one’s followers. However appropriate, these prescriptions often fail to address the misplaced expectations of practitioners, mostly lack of preparedness for people management, for its gritty realities and frustrations which sometimes resembles being dragged in the mud. This study proposes a framework whereby enactment of leadership necessitates adequate motivation and expectations. As leaders behave in patterns of cognitive, emotional, and appreciative perceptions, it proposes to approach leaders’ development as an issue of aesthetics, of taste development. The framework identifies different possible aesthetics of leadership, and suggests that the most operant aesthetic of leadership would taste less of grandiosity than of hardships.