You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The stimulus for this paper has been a sensed link between recent developments in child psychotherapy, associated with the work of Anne Alvarez at the Tavistock Clinic and current experiences of working with chief executives and others in leadership positions.
Alvarez' work has drawn attention to the importance in psychic development of the ways in which the interaction of mother and baby establishes a sense of lively presence, “complex, varied and constantly changing … pleasurable but in a demanding way”. This sense of presence both stimulates development and serves to modify the impact of absence. In these ways it acts as both an origin and a precursor of thoughts.
The paper explores a number of ways in which the idea of the modulation and regulation of presence challenges and extends our understanding of leadership, especially in contemporary organisations. It suggests that part of the function of leadership under conditions of radical uncertainty, contextual and structural, is to make present, through interaction with others, an idea of and a feel for enterprise of the organisation which can ground and recover the exchange and enactment of thought. It proposes that this function modifies and adds to the preoccupation with both the directional and the containing aspects of leadership which have informed much of the discussion of this topic within our tradition.