The pedagogical potential of identity work in leadership education – Controversies, confessions, and conclusions

Decades of interest in responsible leadership has drawn critical attention to how future leaders are formed by academic leadership education. It has forced teachers to increasingly contemplate what leadership ideas and pedagogical practices they bring to the classroom, and who they are in the light of the ideas and practices they adhere to. In this ‘Leading Questions’ we take an interest in how leadership educators’ identities are formed and exploited in everyday teaching. The questions and comments we present are part of an ongoing conversation on identity work triggered by the controversies we experienced when co-teaching a course titled Rethinking Leadership at a renowned international business school. Where most discussions of identity work in a business school context only highlight the distressing and unfavourable aspects of identity work, we take a different approach. We confess how we struggle with our own identities as leadership educators. We then argue this identity work comes with pedagogical potential, yet to be accounted for, especially relevant to future education of critical and responsible leaders. Finally, we confess that even if our years of conversation on our different teacher identities did not result in a distinct pedagogical model, it dramatically changed and charged our ability to intentionally make space for controversial identity work in the leadership classroom.


Introduction
Rethinking and improving management education to answer societal calls for more responsible leaders (Moratis and Melissen, 2022;Morsing, 2021) is very demanding when one struggles with an increasingly ambiguous academic identity (Billot, 2010).Recent research on the work-life of business school academics has provided insights on the insecurity, tension and difficulty they face when trying to make sense of who they are and what they want to be at work (Brown et al., 2021;Knights and Clarke, 2014;Knights et al., 2022;Learmonth and Humphreys, 2012;Tomkins and Nicholds, 2017).From a pedagogical perspective it seems the identity work (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002) of business school academics comes directly or indirectly with negative consequences for management education.The more effort we make to secure and sustain our identities, the less inclined we are to think, teach and learn management critically (Knights et al., 2022).
As leadership educators, with serious unresolved identity issues, some provoking questions beg for attention: If we make less an effort to secure our identities, will it improve our teaching?Or is the problem the effort to secure our identities?Or are we asking the wrong questions on identity work in management education altogether?
In this thought piece we take the opportunity to introduce a new question on identity work in a business school context.What pedagogical potential comes with the identity work our teaching is embedded in, and how is it relevant to the education of critical and responsible leaders?To explore this question empirically, we draw on a particular co-teaching experience full of distressing identity work.To set the scene, Jonathan was the instructor of a leadership course at a renowned international business school in Japan, where he worked with undergraduate foreign exchange and graduate exchange MBA students from around the world.Tomas, employed at a less renowned business school in Sweden, was invited to the course to introduce rhetoric theory and encourage critical thinking.What then happened was that Tomas clashed with students, undermined the subject of leadership, and disrupted the curriculum of the course carefully planned by Jonathan.This unintended and exceptionally awkward situation came to trigger years of conversation between us, trying to understand why we teach leadership and who we are as leadership educators in the light of our ideas and teaching practices.As the conversation evolved, we became less self-protective and more self-reflexive and our reasoning more nuanced and complex.
In this thought piece we return to the initial controversy, and the questions and insights that followed, to explore the pedagogical potential of identity work in leadership education.Our experiences are presented in a personalized style similar to what Van Maanen (1988) calls confessional tales.Writing in this style allows us to convey conflicting versions of our experiences, rendering a nuanced and open-ended story of how we enact and exploit our different leadership educator identities.

Identity work in higher education
Identity does not only give meaning and structure to the concept of self, it also has a social function, connecting the self to social systems (Gecas, 1982).Drawing on Alvesson and Willmott (2002), we understand identity work as a form of storytelling that functions to regulate the self and at the same time endorse the ongoing activity or work in and through which identity is developed.According to Ashforth and Schinoff (2016), identity refers to an individual's self-definition, and answers the big questions, such as "Who am I?" or "Who are we?".Identity construction, then, is the process through which we come to define who we are, and who we would like to become in a social context.In so saying, we are all products of our workplace, drawing on Collinson who suggests "insecurities, ambiguities and multiplicities of workplace selves [---] illustrate how organizations [---] in important symbolic and material ways, also produce people" (Collinson, 2003: 541).
Research on identity work in the context of business schools and management education covers a wide range of situations and issues; identity work of business school leaders (Brown et al., 2021), managerial identity and gender (Barry et al., 2006), academic writing as identity work (French, 2020), students development of identities (Clapp-Smith et al., 2019;Fernando and Kenny, 2021;Hay, 2014;Hawkins and Edwards 2015;Zaar et al., 2020), and of particular relevance for our arguments, the identity work of management and leadership educators (Learmonth and Humphreys, 2012;Tomkins and Nicholds, 2017).
Institutional changes in higher education caused by new government policies, forcing higher education to become more consumer-driven, have had an impact on the responsibilities and identities of educational professionals (Billot, 2010).Treating students as customers, standardizing education, and focusing on ranking-related indicators, might make sense to business school executives.However, for teachers and their everyday classroom practices these ambitions can act as barriers because they directly or indirectly discourage interdisciplinary approaches and critical thinking (Cornuel and Hommel, 2015).At the same time, including critical thinking in the management education curriculum adds further complexity to an already complex work situation and ambiguous identity (Knights and Clarke, 2014;Knights et al., 2022).
Given that leadership is one of the most popular subjects in business schools (Sowcik and Allen, 2013), leadership education has often been the main target of critique.Leadership educators have been urged to reconsider not only how they teach leadership but also how they make sense of leadership, and why leadership should be taught in the first place (Hay and Hodgkinson, 2006).To improve leadership education we need to "revisit not just theories and teaching methods, but also our identities as scholars and instructors" (Petriglieri and Petriglieri 2015: 625).Moreover, we need to acknowledge the significance of the place where our identities are formed (Hawkins and Edwards 2015;Sinclair, 2010).However, surprisingly to us, the pedagogical potential of actually taking identities and identity work into account in teaching and learning is totally overlooked.

A brief note on our writing process
The writing process triggered by the co-teaching experiences was mainly coordinated by Tomas.He took field-notes during the co-teaching period, interviewed 11 of the students, compiled about 220 emails sent between us, and took notes during the 10 video conference meetings we had from 2016 to the middle of 2020.In 2019, we did the first systematic analysis of the material.To some extent we followed the conventional procedure for ethnographic analysis (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007).We did close-reading of notes, coded quotes, and tried to bring them into analytic categories mainly related to teaching practices, rhetoric, controversy, and identity.
However, as our self-reflexive conversation via email and video meetings continued, we became more sensitive to our different experiences, which often came out as confessions difficult to include in a conventional research paper.We decided to give up the rigour of ethnographic analysis and instead engage wholeheartedly in co-authored confessional tales (Van Maanen, 1988).In so doing we downplay the ambition to give an objective or realistic account of what actually happened.We use confessional tales to form an intimacy with the reader by means of emotional accounts of the research endeavour itself, to the benefit of a rich complex story full of moral storytelling and identity work.In so concluding, we turn to the intriguing co-teaching experiences that caused us to address these issues in the first place.

Tomas
My interest in rhetoric emerged in my undergraduate studies in media, communication, and critical theory in the early nineties in Sweden.The years that followed I made a living as a self-employed communication consultant, trying to work in the critical spirit of my education but by the end of the day accepting the assignments I could get.I even had to teach marketing, to unemployed people in a program funded by the municipality.I read some books on marketing and pretended to know what the books were all about.This is how I faked my way into teaching.Ten years later I was still teaching, in the same manner, but now the audience was executives in fancy business hotels.
In 2001, the business school at my home university had difficulty finding a teacher in marketing communication.I turned up and was hired.The students appreciated my professional experience and playful style of teaching but my habit of drawing on rhetoric theory when analysing business problems made them frustrated.Around 2012, I was approached by colleagues at the management department, asking me to teach leadership.When reading the textbooks they used, I understood why they asked.If leadership is about identity and management of meaning, it really makes sense to bring a rhetorician like me into the leadership classroom.It was also what I told Jonathan 4 years later when we met at an international conference on management science.

Jonathan
As a budding American scholar at a major research university in New York I was fortunate to cultivate professional relationships with progressive-minded educational researchers during my doctoral study from 2009-2012.They worked with a wide range of approaches to teaching and research on leadership, including narrative inquiry and arts-based learning.The shift from traditional social science methods towards improvisational and postmodern methods was exciting to follow.It highlighted a new relationship of the researched and the researcher; and a shift from general theory to more particular, localized knowledge.This reframing of leadership helped me develop an academic identity in line with several challenging teaching assignments at home and abroad.
Between 2013-2020 I developed and taught courses on leadership, organizational design and change, social justice, and culture at a highly ranked business school in Japan.I was working with an incredibly diverse group of international exchange students in a growing program that served undergraduate and graduates alike from 44 different countries across six continents.
When meeting Tomas at the research conference on management science in 2016, he first approached me after I had presented a paper on the value of storytelling for developing personal leadership theory.We found out we both had a shared interest in narrative, discourse, and rhetoric in our teaching and research.There and then we made plans for future collaboration.Two years later, I invited Tomas to co-teach the course Rethinking Leadership.We were enthusiastic to not only discuss ideas on leadership but also to see how our ideas might play out with students in the classroom.

Jonathan
According to the curriculum, the course Rethinking Leadership was divided into seven sessions covering themes as transformational leadership, moral responsibility, frames for thinking about leadership, and knowing yourself as a future leader.The main assignment was to develop and present a reflective narrative based own theory of leadership.I approached this course like many others, with an understanding that nearly all of these undergraduate students were never asked to define leadership on their own terms.My years of experience revealed that asking the students to define leadership, a blurry concept that most students are typically only taught about, needed a more constructivist approach.In trying to unlock their perspectives on leadership, I would ask them to define leadership using their personal and professional experiences, and what they have learned from course or self-selected academic theory.
In an effort to help the students challenge their assumptions about leadership, I invited Tomas to share his theories on leadership rhetoric during the first 100-min block.During the second block I asked that he test the students' understanding by doing a collaborative activity with them.I also hoped Tomas would tap into the many perspectives of leadership stemming from the different cultural backgrounds in the class.Finally, before ending the session, we would compare our leadership perspectives and discuss them with the students.
Tomas agreed and planned to give an introduction of rhetoric in a very playful style, and then ask the students to do a rhetorical analysis of a leadership speech, and perhaps create a short leadership speech based on a situation we present to them.

Tomas
The day before my appearance in the course, I was still not sure how to arrange my session.Introducing rhetoric is one thing, engaging culturally diverse students in a collaborative workshop is something very different.Realizing that most of the cases and entertaining anecdotes I use when teaching in Swedish would not work at all, did not make me less stressed.
There was something odd in Jonathan's request to help students find ways to talk about leadership in their own words.In a field obsessed with jargon, clichés and memes, I could not see what these words would be.Students should be taught to experiment with language and critically investigate the effects, not the meaning.Leadership is first and foremost words.If anything, I wanted the students to become highly sensitive to all forms of leadership discourse, including what we as leadership teachers fill them with.
Time was running out.I decided to start with an exploration of charismatic leadership.It's a popular theme among students.I could draw on their pre-understanding of charisma and then show how charisma is a rhetorical accomplishment, not a divine inner capacity that some leaders have, and others do not.Theoretically I would draw on Aristotle's ideas on ethos.I would also address the issue of identity and demonstrate how I use the wide range of identities I have access to (Lecturer, Entrepreneur, Business Professional, Athlete, Father, Freemason, Queer, etc.) in business settings, far beyond conventional leadership jargon.
I was not sure how or where this would end, but decided to improvise the rest of the lecture, and turn to Jonathan for support if needed.

Tomas
It became a very lively lecture, to say the least.From a rather comfortable introduction, sharing my own leadership experiences, the order and conduct of the lecture unravelled when I began to argue identity is a rhetorically constructed effect.The students looked suspicious.Jonathan was sitting by the window on my left side.I had no idea what he was thinking.
One of the studentsin this paper we use the pseudonym "Gabriel"interrupted me over and over again to ask detailed questions about my conceptualisation of charisma and identity, which he had difficulty understanding.So did I actually.His questions were sharp and well formulated.I could hear growing irritation in his voice.He must be wondering what all this has to do with the concept of authentic leadership, which I had said I would talk about eventually.He was waiting for it.I took a deep breath.
My point is… there is no identity, or personality, untouched by language.We construct identity, form it, and reshape it, through the language we use, to appear as leaders in the eyes of others, and ourselves.The more time and effort we spend to find the authentic and mindful leader within us, the more confused and frustrated we become.There is no inner leader to be found!Only to be constructed.In a given time and situation, by means of leadership words and expressions.Some are currently in fashion.Some not.Choose what works for you.Welcome to the art of rhetoric!Gabriel immediately interrupted me.He was extremely upset.
You are totally wrong!There must be an identity, and a personality!Every human has it.If you don't acknowledge it, you can never be an authentic leader!
The whole class looked at me.I looked at Gabriel.It was an awkward situation.And it was about to get worse.
Well, I have no personality.I'm empty.Grey.Transparent.Nothing more than the clothes I put on.Today I dressed up in this fancy business suit, to look influential and important.I also have a Scottish kilt.Might wear that tomorrow.To become something and someone else.Who knows.
The students laughed out loud.Not Gabriel.I continued.
Fair enough.If you insist.What personality do you want me to have?Just name it.No? Okay, let's go for "confused leadership educator" [writing it on the whiteboard with big letters].This is my authentic self from now on.Hope it makes you feel better, so we can continue.
Students laughing.Gabriel was silent at first, but when he spoke everyone listened.He spoke in a low sad voice.A long and emotional story about his life, and how his practice of mindfulness literally prevented him from taking his own life.
You have no right to dismiss mindfulness, personality, and authentic leadership in such a sarcastic and utterly stupid manner.A leader who is not true to himself or herself can never be a good leader.
His story shattered me.An intense feeling of shame overcame me.I had just told a person that the ideas and knowledge he holds sacred, as they prevented him from committing suicide, are meaningless.I looked at Jonathan.I had most certainly contradicted what he had taught the students is the essence of leadership.I was waiting for him to comment on the situation.Saving me.He didn't.I panicked!I am still not sure how I managed to continue.I probably mumbled to Gabriel I was truly sorry for what I said, and quickly went back to my PowerPoint presentation, carefully avoiding all the concepts that had upset him, counting the minutes to the break.When the break came, Gabriel left the room without a word.
Before I had a chance to speak to Jonathan about what happened with Gabriel, and sincerely apologize for ruining the course curriculum, I was approached by a group of students.They wanted to know more about rhetoric and the seemingly weird things you can accomplish with this art.It was a huge relief.
When the other students came back after the break, I was still talking to the small group of students.We were laughing.The other students joined us.I sat on a table in the middle of the room, answering their questions on leadership and rhetoric.And, as I often do to illustrate complex rhetorical reasoning, I tell vivid stories about my mistakes and poor leadership skills.I have never heard my colleagues or any other teacher at a business school share the detailed, self-ironic and hilarious stories of failure I do.I make people laugh at me.They will do it anyway.But what do I do when someone cries?I glanced at the clock.The group discussion Jonathan always had after a lecture should have started long ago.The questions I had prepared were about leadership charisma, but the controversy with Gabriel, and the ongoing banter with the students during the break, had taken the lecture in a totally different direction.I had to make a quick decision.
Listen up students!You are supposed to work in groups now, to answer questions about leadership charisma.But I would like to continue the fun discussion we had during the break.I suggest you answer the questions later and send them individually to Jonathan for comments.Is that fine with you?They said yes, and we continued the banter for another hour.The session finished after Jonathan gave instructions for the next session.
I was totally exhausted.Still shaken by the incident with Gabriel.

Jonathan
After the lecture, Gabriel came straight to me and declared he would be dropping the course immediately.It was not totally unexpected given his mounting frustration in the classroom.I knew Gabriel as a very emotional and outspoken student and assumed Gabriel's dissatisfaction with this session would probably result in a critical call from an administration hell-bent on order and unremarkable routines.This was the first time I played the role of a spectator during one of my leadership courses.This was how Tomas' contribution was set up.It became a performance, not a lesson designed to help the students grow as leaders and thinkers about leadership.The idea of our co-teaching, which I carefully considered when planning this session, was completely neglected by him.
As an educator that relies on clinical instructional scaffolding, and who prides himself on leadership training and development, I felt there was a missed opportunity.Because the lecture continued until just before dismissal, the content of our common ideas on leadership were never tested by the students.Moreover, I perceived little progress in their own thinking about leadership during Tomas' session.I had to connect his presentation to the course objectives in the few remaining moments before his session ended.At the start of the following session, I was able to align the provocative discussion with the work of the class.
It was Friday evening, after a long week, and a longer afternoon.All energy was spent.When Tomas and I met for a drink after class, I could tell he felt dismayed by the experience.

Tomas
The day after, I was still embarrassed to have messed up the session and perhaps the whole course for Jonathan.He wanted to support the students finding their own voices on leadership, having them formulate emerging theories on leadership using their own words.Then I appeared on the scene to tell the students there is no authentic leadership.Jonathan played the role of responsible pedagogue with an ambition to teach leadership.I was able to offer nothing but provocations.
I ended the co-teaching experience with Jonathan by interviewing some of the students the week after.It was not planned from the beginning, but I really wanted to talk to them about my ideas on leadership and rhetoric, and at the same time try to understand how they made sense of the classroom controversy.I asked all 23 of the students, and 11 of them accepted to be interviewed.Gabriel was one of them.
To my surprise, none of them addressed the controversy.Not even Gabriel.I asked them open questions about leadership and rhetoric, and they spoke of their backgrounds, families, studies, dreams, and ambitions to become good leaders.I listened, as I should have done already in the classroom.Jonathan does this when teaching.I can see how he inspires the students, gives them a voice, helps lead the way to knowing.Seeing this, I understand why he is so appreciated by the students.

Jonathan
Watching Tomas teach rhetoric and tell provocative stories was both exciting and inspiring.Nonetheless, I was frustrated by his inability to corral the conversation into a meaningful takeaway for the students.I have long believed in asking the students to unpack their experiences and narratives on leadership, to challenge their own and others' assumptions of what leadership can be, and to explore the unknown.I did not realize until I reflected on my time with Tomas how controlled my interactions with the students had been.My classes were being run almost as if they were experiments.Tomas' approach knocked something loose.I needed more space for controversial discussions in my leadership pedagogy.
Despite the departure from the flow of the course, it was a valuable co-teaching experience for me.In retrospect I can understand, and appreciate, how being part of a close to chaotic session forced me to acknowledge my own strong need to carefully articulate and plan courses, sessions, and relationships with students.
Finally, Gabriel remained engaged in the course until its completion.He never spoke another word about the controversy.

Discussion
The course Rethinking Leadership was designed by Jonathan to teach students to take ownership of their experiences and ideas of leadership.Being critical of conventional models of leadership, he would inspire and guide students to formulate their own theories of leadership, urging students to take responsibility for the leader identities they developed during the course.As a leadership teacher, he was there to support, negotiate meaning, and secure moral development.Tomas had an entirely different approach to leadership.To him leadership is a myth, a standard solution to every imaginable organisational problem regardless of context.The leadership student, then, should be held responsible to the effect of any jargon used to justify actions in the name of leadership.Tomas believes the leadership teacher is there to provoke, demonstrate effects, and secure a critical attitude to leadership discourse.As a result of these conflicting approaches to leadership and leadership teaching, most students became confused, some entertained, Gabriel furious, Tomas devastated, and Jonathan uncertain if this co-teaching attempt was really worth the effort.
Leadership students often experience doubt about their identities as emerging leaders (Hawkins and Edwards, 2015) fearing the responsibility that comes with being a leader (Zaar et al., 2020).Drawing on our experiences, teachers are not passive observers of this potential identity crisis but very much part of it, with consequences for their own identity work.
Teachers undergo a dramatic identity crisis when old models of education crack under new social and economic pressures (MacLure, 1993).Then again, as we have experienced, equally dramatic crises occur in the messy microcosmos of a classroom when students and teachers clash on ideas, beliefs, and identities.These controversies are seldom acknowledged in a pedagogical context as they seemingly fail to connect or contribute to predetermined distinct learning goals.To us, the learning goals served as a mirror in front of which we enacted, explored and shaped our teacher identities.In front of this mirror we have learned that Jonathan guides students to new insights on leadership and their emerging leadership identity based on a trustful relationship with them.Tomas confronts students and encourages them to deconstruct and play with leadership discourse and leader identities.Jonathan's lessons are calculated, and then continually re-designed to improve efficiency, following the progressive-minded work of his favorite educational researchers.Tomas' lessons challenge students' assumptions of what leadership can be, intentionally designed to disrupt.Jonathan, trying to unlock the leadership potential of students by asking them to develop emerging practical theories of leadership through the practice of self-reflection and storytelling.Tomas, favouring a self-made postmodern take on the emptiness of leadership, caught up in controversies with students, and himself, always struggling with not-knowing.We were both focused on the same overall learning goaldeveloping critical and responsible leadersbut we were not able to learn from our differences until they burst open in the distressing identity work contemporary management education is so full of (Knights and Clarke, 2014;Knights et al., 2022;Learmonth and Humphreys, 2012;Tomkins and Nicholds, 2017).
Returning to the classroom, we leadership teachers might have very different understandings of what it means to be critical, still we all agree students should "think and speak for themselves".But, when our leadership ideas and pedagogical practices are challenged in the classroom, it hurts.We feel obliged to defend our ideas and practices, typically in terms of accuracy, usefulness, efficiency, emancipatory potential, and morality.We seldom acknowledge the identity work these ideas and practices are embedded in, not even when identities crack in classroom controversies.As we argue in this thought piece, this is a missed opportunity.
Without the classroom controversy and the extensive identity work that followed, we would not have dedicated time and space to rethink our teaching.It was in and through conversations on who we are as leadership teachers we critically assessed our teaching practices and renegotiated relationships and ideas with students.
Drawing on MacLure, "to lay claim to an identity [---] is to engage in a form of argument rather than description" (MacLure, 1993: 320).Put differently, by arguing for a particular leadership idea or pedagogy, we work up an identity which in turn endorses the arguments we make.Conversations and confessions on who am I in the light of my ideas, triggered by controversies, provide reason and space for both teachers and students to keep talking differently on matters of importance to teaching and learning.Hence, the robustness of the leadership ideas management educators bring to the classroom might be less important than the controversies among educators, students, and themselves they generate.
Encouraging students to co-create leadership knowledge through controversies situate them and the educators in a liminal space (Edwards et al., 2021) in which they are able to resist the romanticism, hype and hubris that often characterises the idea of leadership in management education (Collinson and Tourish, 2015).In so doing, students and educators are also better disposed to critically question the omnipresent idea of authentic leadership that promises huge advantage to leaders if you find out who you really are (Einola and Alvesson, 2021).

Another confession
This thought piece is the outcome of a long and ongoing conversation between two business school academics on our differences as leadership educators.Although we share the same passion to teach students to become critical and responsible leaders, the identities we enact in the classroom for this purpose are indeed very different.
This conversation was not intended to be this long and our confessions so many.In fact, the confessions were not intended at all.We planned to co-teach a course on leadership, but it didn't go as planned.The whole co-teaching experience became so embedded in controversies we had to talk about it for years to better understand it and ourselves.We ended up with a thick empirical illustration of how leadership education is full of controversies in and through which educators and students engage in self-reflexive and controversial identity work.
What are the causal relationships in this story?Our (over)interpretation of the pedagogical potential of identity work is full of serendipities where "the effect may act on its own causes" (Eco, 1992: 33), to which we add another confession.The co-teaching experience, and the years of conversation, has not resulted in any innovative well-elaborated pedagogical doctrine, model, or curriculum.Even so, we have noticed our co-teaching experience dramatically changed and charged our interest in, and ability to, intentionally make space for controversial identity work in the leadership classroom.
In a call for a fundamental transformation of management education, Dyllick (2015) asks, rhetorically, where does business faculty get their pedagogical skills, where do they learn to teach students, to inspire and motivate them, and to serve as role models in their personal development?To Dyllik, such locations for pedagogical development are absent in contemporary business schools.We agree there is a need for radical pedagogical development, but disagree it is a matter of role models.We have seen far too many cases of teacher-driven leadership education, inviting students to bask in the presumed fixed expertise of authority figures.This is not the type of role model students need to become critical and responsible leaders.So, what role models do they need then?
Perhaps we are again asking the wrong question?If the pedagogical potential of identity work in leadership education materialises in controversy, is there a need for a role model, assuming such a model appears with a more or less fixed identity?Reformulating the question asked in the introduction, what if we spend more time to unsecure our identity?
A business school is a space of action inhabited by self-reflexive social actors and full of competing identities and practices (Carroll and Levy, 2010).When leadership teachers and students bring their identity work into the learning process, it will generate controversies, where new leadership ideas and pedagogical practices will emerge, and be challenged.This, if anything, will benefit the education of critical and responsible leaders.