Exploring Leadership, Life Moments, and a Transforming Career Across Boundaries

Here I describe the intersection of my life, career, and primary focus on linking together how one crosses boundaries of knowledge and understanding to make sense of how we theorize leadership, how we research it, and how it is practiced by the authors who write about it and the targets of their writing. I also write about how my lived experiences, some of which coincided with moments that impacted my generation, informed each important boundary I traversed in my field of leadership studies and practices. After an overview of the arc of the evolution of the leadership field focusing on the first 100 years of the modern era of leadership research and practice, I weave in stories of the personal and professional experiences that shaped my understanding and interpretations of what constitutes leadership and how it is developed. I focus primarily on positive forms of leadership, except when comparing bad and good leaders—the charismatic form of leadership deserves its own discussion category, given the awesome power these leaders hold for liberating or destroying followers, organizations, and institutions. In the end, I have been privileged to shake my own brain and many other brains on what constitute the best positive forms of leadership and its development.