Models of Leadership: Lessons from Plato


Speaker


Abstract

Leadership is something we all experience, whether by being leaders ourselves or being led by others. As a leader your role might seem quite humble: you don't have to be a CEO or a minister of state; you could be leading a small team charged with a specific task within a much larger organisation. Leadership might be thrust upon you unexpectedly: during a meeting you might find that you are the only one advocating a particular position, but the others find it sufficiently attractive to follow your lead. And leadership is not the preserve of business, politics, or the military; nor is it confined to the workplace: music, drama, sport, church, even family, all provide settings in which people lead and are led.

In this new study, Dominic Scott,  who teaches ancient Greek philosophy at Oxford, & Ed Freeman, who teaches business ethics at the Darden School, University of Virginia, develop seven leadership models: the shepherd, the doctor, the navigator, the artist, the teacher, the weaver and the sower. All these models derive from Plato's famous dialogue The Republic.