An Existential Approach to Leadership Challenges

In An Existential Approach to Leadership Challenges, Monica Hanaway progresses us forward from a brief, introductory understanding of existential thought to considering how this approach can positively address the practical leadership challenges our twenty-first century leaders face today. Hanaway presents a practical framework to tackle the greatest challenges in leadership, such as creating an inspiring and authentic vision, recruiting, retaining and developing staff and dealing with conflict. In Part I, she presents an overview of existential thought and what existentialism can bring to leadership, helping resolve issues of uncertainty, authenticity, relatedness, freedom and meaning making. In Part II, she explores how to work practically with an existential leadership approach, showing how existentialism can help communicate a vision, examining the vision statements of existing businesses as case studies and explaining the importance of this in recruiting, developing and retaining staff. Finally, she explores how the existential approach is beneficial in preventing, managing and dealing with conflict, defining what conflict is and introducing existentially informed conflict coaching and psychologically informed mediation practice. Combining philosophical and practical thinking, Hanaway has made existentialism an accessible resource for all leaders. This book will appeal to future leaders in practice and in training, and anyone in a leadership role. It will also be of interest to academics and students of coaching and coaching psychology, as well as to those interested in applied philosophy and psychology.

Monica Hanaway is an executive and leadership coach, business consultant, mediator, psychotherapist and trainer. She is the author of The Existential Leader (Routledge) and runs training programmes on this approach. She is passionate in her mission to bring existential thought beyond the academic arena into the business world, believing it has much to offer leaders in these uncertain times.

Introduction; Part One: What Do We Mean by 'Existential Leadership'?; Chapter 1: What does it mean to be 'existential'?; Chapter 2: What does it mean to be a Leader?; Chapter 3: The challenge of finding a new type of leadership for the 21st century; Chapter 4: What challenges does existentialism bring to leadership?; Part Two: Working Practically with the Existential Leadership Approach; Chapter 5: An existential approach to creating, communicating and implementing a vision; Chapter 6: An existential approach to recruitment, retention and development of staff; Chapter 7: An existential approach to preventing, managing and resolving conflict; Conclusion