Practical Wisdom for Leaders with Scott J. Allen, Ph.D.

Collective Leadership with Dr. Richard Bolden

• Scott J. Allen • Season 1 • Episode 285

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Since 2013 Dr. Richard Bolden has been Professor of Leadership and Management and Director of Bristol Leadership and Change Centre at Bristol Business School, University of the West of England (UWE). Prior to this he worked at the Centre for Leadership Studies at the University of Exeter Business School for over a decade and also as an independent consultant, research psychologist and in software development in the UK and France. 

A Few Quotes From This Episode

  • “Leadership isn’t always about who holds the role—it’s about what’s being mobilized.”
  • “Sometimes we solve problems too quickly, before the right people have even had a voice.”
  • “Leadership is a lens—it helps us see what’s often hidden.”

Resources Mentioned in This Episode 

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

About  Scott J. Allen

My Approach to Hosting

  • The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic.



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Scott Allen:

Okay, everybody, welcome to Practical Wisdom for Leaders. Thank you so much for checking in, wherever you are in the world. Today I have a new friend and we shared space at the International Studying Leadership Conference. Last fall it was, and we were in Birmingham in the UK, and the conference in the coming year is going to be in St Andrews in Scotland. So super excited for that. That is on my radar. Richard is also heavily involved in the ILA and that conference is coming up this year in Prague, so we will be together then.

Scott Allen:

Richard, I'll buy you a pint as a thank you for being on the show today. I appreciate it very, very much so, and since 2013, richard has been a professor of leadership and management and director of Bristol Leadership and Change Center at Bristol Business School University of West England, and he is just an expert in a number of nooks and crannies of this conversation, publishes in the best journals in the world. His full bio is in the show notes, but I was in a session at the International Studying Leadership Conference and once again kind of bumped into this topic that I had not spent a lot of time exploring and it's this topic of collective leadership and so I had asked Richard, to come on the show and just provide you, the listener, with a little bit of understanding of how we think about this concept of collective leadership. So, richard, thank you so much for being with me today. I'm looking forward to this conversation, and maybe we start with just a little bit of an overview of how we're thinking about this concept of collective leadership.

Dr. Richard Bolden:

Great. Well, thank you, scott, and a pleasure to be with you today as well and to discuss this topic. So, yeah, I really enjoyed the conversation we had at the ISLC and that was part of the co-lead network that I and a range of other scholars who many of whom have been on your podcast are part of. So collective leadership as far as I see it's a bit of a sort of catch-all phrase for lots of different approaches, so you might be familiar with ideas around shared leadership, distributed leadership, collaborative leadership, etc. And they're all really approaches that really shift the focus away from just focusing on individual leaders we might call it a kind of leader-centric focus to thinking about leadership as a broader social process to which many people contribute, and a wider range of other factors have a part in kind of what gets achieved. What gets accomplished.

Scott Allen:

Okay, so that's a great beginning and just foundational little bit of a definition. So what are some things I mean as we intrigue listeners with this topic, let's kind of take it down a little bit deeper of what are some core concepts that folks should be aware of. When we're talking about this notion of collective leadership, we might come across it several different names, it could be shared or distributed, we might have some different ways of kind of naming this, but ultimately, collective leadership means that it is not necessarily a leader-centric, just one individual, but there are many actors, many players. So what are some core concepts or other foundational things that people should know about this?

Dr. Richard Bolden:

So I guess you know one of the points would be to say that leadership is not just done by people who are in formal positions of authority, and it also isn't something that just happens in organizations. It happens within and beyond and across organizations. One of the challenges I think that people often talk about you've been significant, the Center for Creative Leadership talk about this. One of the key challenges facing even people in formal positions of authorities how do you lead without authority? How do you mobilize groups of people?

Dr. Richard Bolden:

And collective leadership, I think is really about often that question around sort of exploring, in a way, kind of different ways in which power might be taken up, so rather than as an individual property that particular people have by virtue of their personality or their position, and really thinking around how we might develop a more collective, inclusive, collaborative approaches to getting stuff done. So I guess one of the things is it kind of shifts our focus of our attention beyond just individual role holders, and so often we do that. And also, whilst we know and I'm sure you've had other speakers on this talking about the idea of followership as well as a bit of an under-focused and under-explored aspect of leadership, collective leadership kind of to some extent problematizes aspects of that too, of going well. Very formal positional leaders are also needing to follow, and there are also times when followers people who we might see more typically in followership roles are able or required or need to sort of step forward and take the lead. So I think it's kind of how leadership is accomplished as a collective process.

Scott Allen:

Ron Riggio. I think it might have been like episode five of this podcast and he had a statement that always has just stuck with me. He said leaders don't do leadership. Leadership is co-created by leaders and followers working together. This product, whatever the result, is that there's a co-creative nature to this and I think also in that, at least how I interpret that statement, is some of that dynamic nature of to dance. It's not necessarily clear and always the person in position of authority is making progress. This is a co-creation that's occurring. Does that kind of in some ways align with how you're?

Dr. Richard Bolden:

thinking. I think absolutely so. That kind of captures it in many ways. Of course, this is the way things have always been done and always talked about. But really I think if you look at the, particularly the academic leadership and scholarship around leadership, it's really since the turn of the millennium, since the early 2000s, that we've seen more intentional approaches to thinking about leadership as a collective social process. Of course, you can go back earlier than that so the work of Mary Parker Follett and others much earlier but it's really since then there's been more explicit attempts to kind of theorize and conceptualize that.

Dr. Richard Bolden:

One of the challenges I guess that's come with that is a bit of a proliferation of terms and concepts. I mean it happens in leadership studies in general. You know we have an awful lot of adjectives of just about every kind of flavor or type of leadership you can imagine, and this applies also to this field as well. So there's a very good special issue of the journal Human Relations, published in 2020, with Sonia Ospina, gail Fairhurst, brad Jackson and others, who helps kind of unpick, in a way, some of the various ways in which collective leadership is conceptualized. And I guess, in relation to the leader follower conversation, the thing you've described. They give this two by two grid really around seeing collective leadership at residing at different levels. So whether it's more of the team level or more of it's a systemic property and that's two elements of the two by two.

Dr. Richard Bolden:

And then the other side is, wherever we see it as a type of leadership, much like transformational leadership, servant servant leadership and all of the others, or really a lens, a way of looking at leadership, and I guess you know where they do quite a nice mapping in that article there I can share the details with you for that to share with the audience.

Dr. Richard Bolden:

But good mapping of different approaches to it. And I guess my approach is more from the lens perspective. I see distributed leadership. If we come and look at whatever context we're trying to look at leadership, we come at it as a lens. It's a way of looking at the world. We begin to notice the contributions of maybe less visible actors, but also non-human aspects, you know so, aspects of the physical environment, the wider socio-culture environment, the way in which they impact on what is accomplished and what's achievable, what's even kind of thinkable and doable in those contexts. So I'm more on that kind of lens side than the type side where lots of people say, you know, distributed leadership or systems leadership is a particular style of leadership which can be differentiated from others.

Scott Allen:

Well, you'd mentioned something a little bit ago and so again, I just want to make sure that I'm kind of tracking with you. But you'd use the word mobilizing and so would one way, richard, kind of exploring what you just said. If I have a lens that collective leadership is an option and is a really, really good option, if I'm interested in mobilizing, then I am not necessarily focused on me as leader, I'm focused on outward and trying to really explore who can we mobilize, who can we activate, who can we tap, and the more individuals that we've mobilized, that we've tapped that energy that we've unleashed again in that co-creation, that we'll probably get further, faster, or it's just another way to do the work. Respond to that if you would. Am I in the ballpark or not?

Dr. Richard Bolden:

Yeah, absolutely so. The one thing I think I'd sort of add to that is really saying, in a way, the mobilization is the outcome. So a lot of the time when we're focusing on leaders and followers and so on, we're looking at kind of individuals and of course that affects the pay that you're given and the recognition and acknowledgement for what you've achieved. But if you turn your attention to the outcomes, again, this is part of the work. The Center for Creative Leadership has done a lot of work on these sorts of topics and they talk around sort of shifting our attention from, I mean, what they said Warren Bennett called the tripod of leadership, so leaders, followers and the shared task. And if we shift our attention from saying, okay, that might explain how leadership occurs in certain situations. But there are many cases where we mobilize large groups of people where it's less easy, less tangible, to kind of identify those.

Dr. Richard Bolden:

We look at some of the social movements Black Lives Matters, I guess, is a sort of more recent one, or the Arab Spring Occupy Movement, extinction Rebellion where it's less easy to identify specific individuals in specific roles or even sometimes a shared, agreed sense of what we're trying to accomplish. You know what the task is. So they say you know. What we're better to do then is look at the outcomes of leadership. So their suggestion is where you find groups of people that share a sense of common direction, they're going in the same sort of way, a degree of alignment, so a kind of they're not all firing off in different directions and commitment to a common set of kind of goals or values or purpose, and that's kind of where leadership has been going on whatever it is, kind of where leadership has been going on whatever it is. So, again, I think leadership as a lens helps us look at the mobilization, what's happening, and maybe makes us less hung up on who's doing what, who claims, you know, the credit, the rewards for how we got there.

Scott Allen:

And yes, I mean the DAC model from CCL is really so that's super useful for me and super helpful for me to kind of think about it that way. What are some other baseline concepts you would want listeners to at least have on their radar? I mean, I love and you can get into Brad Jackson's work around place right, and so I love the fact that you've kind of brought some of that into the conversation. Are there other pieces that you want listeners to be aware of when it comes to this topic of collective leadership?

Dr. Richard Bolden:

Yeah. So I think, well, if I maybe reflect on part of my journey sort of through that literature really over the last 20 years, 25 years I guess. Now we're 2025, now aren't we? So some of the earlier work that I was engaging with was around ideas about distributed leadership. So the work of people like Peter G gron and also spillane and harris and others. Much of that came from the field of education and schools in particular, and kind of going what gets achieved and who needs to have a say in what gets achieved, in how schools are run, goes beyond just your head teacher or even you know other senior teachers. So that that was, I think, for me, some of the earlier conceptualization.

Dr. Richard Bolden:

Now, as I said, often the risk is that concepts get developed and they can kind of get co-opted for other purposes along the way, and I think there's been elements of that within the field of distributed leadership and in some ways that becomes described in some contexts as a style, as a way of leading, like a type perspective, and sometimes it doesn't go as far as it perhaps could or should in really kind of questioning, underpinning assumptions around power and authority, in particular in hierarchical organizations. So that was kind of part of it. And then I think, other concepts people may be familiar with and have engaged stuff around shared leadership, sort of work with Congo and Pierce and others around this idea of they talk about vertical and horizontal forms of leadership. So vertical is kind of the hierarchy, but the horizontal we don't always pay so much attention to and that's back to that leading without authority often. How do you influence and encourage people to do, when you don't have formal authority over or control of resources or anything else, that kind of matters for them? So those would be kind of a couple of key bodies of work that we would draw on.

Dr. Richard Bolden:

There's other work around collaborative leadership, but more recently my work has kind of moved towards exploring something called system leadership, which again has been picked up and operationalized in a variety of ways. For me I'd see that as part of that wider kind of body of work around seeing leadership as a collective phenomenon. And for me systems leadership is of interest because it kind of begins to break us outside of the constraints of single organizations. So again, much of our theory, much of our work, much of our education remains focused on people leading within a single organization. But if you think about tackling the largest challenges that we face in society. Those span across multiple organizations and multiple sets of stakeholders, often with very different sets of agendas, assumptions, ways of doing things, views of what works.

Dr. Richard Bolden:

So For me, the idea to think about how we might work within systems so quite a lot of the work I do is in the health care system and health and social care. So if you think of them as systems, they are incredibly complex. They're not just about a single organization or a single perspective. Again, problematically, sometimes that stuff gets picked up in practice and consultancy and policy in a way that says what we need now in a systems environment, lots of systems leaders and they become the new big superheroic leader who can step in and not only do all these other things but now lead the whole healthcare system change, which is not really the perspective that I would want to take. So I would tend to come at it more from a complexity.

Dr. Richard Bolden:

So this is the other space that takes you to around work about complexity and to think about. So if we are part of complex systems, you know there is nobody at the top or at the bottom in this. You know if you're part of a system, you are both able to sort of nudge and influence that system from where you are within it, but you're also completely shaped. We can never see the whole of the system and the parts are outside where we can never see the whole of the system and the parts are outside.

Dr. Richard Bolden:

So one other sort of thing to add, and then I'll pause, but it's really around. Also then I think associated with that are ideas around the importance of inclusiveness and inclusion, diversity of voice and perspective, which, again, has been very actively picked up in certain organisations, certain sectors and so on, but it's not always featured as clearly within some of the leadership theory and concepts as we might expect. So ultimately, I think part of the agenda of that is saying how do we create more inclusive organizations, more inclusive societies and more compassionate ones as well? That's the big question. Answers on a postcard yeah exactly.

Scott Allen:

So maybe here on maybe here on the Practical Wisdom for Leaders podcast you can give us the answer, I'd be a very rich man. It's a really, really interesting conversation. I mean even, richard, what I love about how you're communicating right now and I feel overwhelmed too. I mean, as soon as we start talking about complexity, as soon as we start talking about systems, as soon as we start speaking about a collective phenomenon, what you're grappling with here, it's 50,000 feet, it's big, it's complex. I find it incredibly intriguing. I mean, you must as well.

Dr. Richard Bolden:

I do, but of course it's also incredibly difficult. I mean there are so many, very many significant societal and kind of planetary challenges and issues going on that I think really, as leadership scholars and practitioners and so on, I think we need to have an interest in those questions and a kind of question of say what, in small way, might we do that? But I guess, in the face, one of the challenges and why I guess people resort back to the more simplistic sort of theories and binaries around how we work is because, as you said, it can be overwhelming, it can be just too much. So again, the question, I think, as educators alongside scholars, is to say so how do you roll that back to saying so what does that mean about the ways we go about trying to support and develop leaders and just good, active citizens and the idea of kind of leadership at all levels? So some of that. So, for example, I have a number of colleagues of mine at the University of Western England.

Dr. Richard Bolden:

So Charlotte Von Buelow and Peter Simpson have been doing fantastic work around ideas called negative capability, and so negative capability ideas have been around for a long time. Actually came originally from a letter by the poet John Keats has been around for a long time actually came originally from a letter by the poet john keats who was reflecting on what were the kind of the characteristics that made kind of great great thinkers, great people of history, and I think he was reflecting particularly around william shakespeare at that point and he said you know, one of the one of the great qualities they have is this ability of being comfortable without in positions of unknowing, without this irritable reaching for kind of reason or solution in the face. So often I guess our organizations expect of our leaders to come up with the idea, make the decision, have a plan, all of these sorts of things. The argument now of negative capability is actually sometimes there's a need for that. Of course there are points where that's required, but much of the time our leaders might intervene and kind of force a solution before it's the right time or before we've had the right levels of engagement, develop a capacity for people to be able to sit in positions of unknowing, maybe, or to support their organizations and those around them to be comfortable with that as well. Because we know I guess we've all had leaders or been in positions where we've seen people who are expected to be leaders who seemed indecisive or undecided and that's not massively inspiring sometimes. But if we have an appreciation of that, how do we hold that space, but unknowing, and then let stuff emerge. So that's the other thing about complexity. See, then, what emerges through that, and a key aspect of the work that they're doing and that they bring into our, some of our programs and teaching as well, is around the practice of attention. So yeah, in the face of all of that complexity, the things we describe, all of the different things that are going on you could go. I just don't know where to begin. So the main capacity we can help people maybe develop or bring is a different quality of attention to what they're noticing. And I guess you know that brings me back to the lens perspective on collective leadership. We say it's a lens, it helps us notice and see examples of things. We say it's a lens, it helps us notice and see examples of things.

Dr. Richard Bolden:

If I describe sort of my, one of the examples I sometimes use when I'm trying to explain the role of the less visible actors in our organization, I describe a wonderful lady came and cleaned the offices where I worked in a previous role in a previous university was an italian lady called carmela and she'd go around each morning around all our separate offices and we're sat there in this building in our separate rooms, you know, not speaking or interacting, and she was the one person who went around and spoke to everybody every morning and she'd have a chat and she'd ask you what you were up to the weekend, what your kids were doing, and so on, and then she'd go to the next room and then she'd kind of make the connections between people and say, oh yeah, so and so's just been on holiday or they've just got a birthday, and I go, I didn't know, I just came in to do my teaching and my marking, and now I go back home again, and so it was really that glue, that kind of held people together in terms of that sort of that social connection and connectedness, and that's a contribution that so many people play in our organizations who are largely invisible. Now, of course, what did the organization do about that? So the organization, in its wisdom, was going Carmela doesn't seem to be cleaning offices as quite as quickly as she might be. How can we make her more efficient? And so a consequence was that they then said well, let's A make her come in at times where nobody else is in for her to talk to and B randomly allocate people to different buildings it wasn't always the same person coming in.

Dr. Richard Bolden:

So all of a sudden, as part of a kind of efficiency kind of move within the organization, we removed a key part of the social glue that held people together and I think we lost something very significant there. That is very hard to know how you get that back again, how, how you bring that back again. So I think from a lens, from an attention perspective, we may begin to notice the people, the things I mean. Another example of a colleague of mine Harriet Short has done lots of work around the importance of food and drink in the workplace and she's done stuff around. You know, cake in the office. Again, we may not notice or think it might feel like an irrelevancy that people bring in a cake at birthdays or whatever, but actually it's a key organizing. People organize and have different kinds of conversations with one another when it's over a bit of cake or a bit of food or a drink or whatever. Trying to.

Scott Allen:

I don't think she's been promoting the merit to bringing alcohol into the workplace, but having a cup of tea or a different kind of conversations is really absolutely key in an, an organization I worked in, just the Keurig machine brought all kinds of people to a central location to get a cup of coffee that probably would have had no other reason to have a conversation. So I get it. I see that for sure.

Dr. Richard Bolden:

Yeah, again with efficiency moves. So in my current building we have these and a lovely new building with these hot water you know, the boiling water on tap kind of machines, which is brilliant, but it means then that you're not standing around waiting for the kettle to boil or whatever, which is that are absolutely key to a sense of belonging, a sense of place, a sense of community that I think are kind of at the heart of meaning in organizations and beyond.

Scott Allen:

Well, as we begin to wind down our time, anything else that you want to highlight for listeners on this topic, or it could even be a resource that you would want to turn listeners onto? I will put a link to the special issue. For sure That'll be in the show notes. Is there anything else that you would want to turn listeners onto?

Dr. Richard Bolden:

So I guess there's a you know there's lots of things and a shortage of things. I mean other things that I kind of have an interest in which are linked to these. So we're currently editing a book around the idea of ghost leadership, which has been quite interesting in bringing together. We were really struck by the number of different contributions we got. We're kind of overwhelmed by them. But again, it's a way of trying to think slightly differently.

Dr. Richard Bolden:

So ghost leadership is based really on the idea of those, you know, the hidden aspects of how stuff gets done, and that might involve human agents, but it also might involve kind of new non-human aspects, so the increasing significance of artificial intelligence and other forces on the ways in which things get done or don't get done in our organization. So that was interesting. We had a bit of fun with my co-editors on that, with an ILA blog around Halloween we talked about lessons from ghosts and vampires and zombies and so on. So I can certainly share that with an ILA blog around Halloween where he talked about lessons from ghosts and vampires and zombies and so on. So I can certainly share that with you. The other one is back to that sort of thinking differently about leadership in relation to environmental sustainability challenges.

Dr. Richard Bolden:

So currently also doing an edited collection around leadership beyond the SDGs sustainable development goals, drawing together a range of different perspectives and what we find is, as ever, there's all these different communities doing great work that aren't always connected yes so there's lots of people who do stuff on leadership, lots of people who do stuff on the sdgs, not so many people doing stuff on the interconnections between them, and I think that's a really interesting space and one of the things I'm beginning to see through some of that and some of the other work is around the kind of post-human perspective on leadership.

Dr. Richard Bolden:

So, say you know, if collective leadership was beginning to get us away from individual leaders and our obsession with being leader centric, post-human, is kind of going, let's not have the human being necessarily at the center of all our concerns. So what would it be if we thought about the role of non-human actors so aspects of the environment, the natural world and so on as agents in the leadership process? I'm on a steep learning curve myself there around it, currently supervising a fantastic PhD study with one of my students who's kind of looking at some of those aspects in indigenous communities in Peru. But those are, you know, I think there's lots of really interesting stuff to learn and explore in that field.

Scott Allen:

Well, as you were speaking, I just had an insight and this will not tie everything up in a nice bow, but it might and again push back, if you disagree, please. I'm even thinking of my own community, and in my community, let's say, we have six really significant organizations that are doing important work, but different types of work. So one could be the mayor's office, let's just say that that's one. Then there's a leadership center that does incredible work. Let's say that there's four or five other organizations.

Scott Allen:

And what's unfortunate is that because those five entities aren't themselves moving lockstep, because if we looked at them as a system, one might be the heart, one might be the brain, one might be the muscle and the bones, because each of them have a little bit of a different function, but they aren't functioning in some ways as one. And if they were the power and the energy that could be unleashed in the community. But unfortunately, what oftentimes happens is that they're just individually working. So to your point just a few moments ago these people are doing good work and these people are doing good work. Sometimes it's the same, Sometimes it's not connected. And so I had made a comment to a friend in the community. I said what could be accomplished if they were marching in the same direction and toward the same end and giving a little bit of themselves in some ways, because they can't be everything to everyone, but that to me direction, alignment, commitment. If they were directed and aligned and committed, our community could leap forward in some ways.

Dr. Richard Bolden:

Does that make sense? Absolutely? And that brings us back to the other thing you'vehuman physical aspects. A module, a program that Brad and also Eric Guffey, his close collaborator, used to run is around the idea of the geography of leadership. I think Brad's actually working on more ideas around that.

Dr. Richard Bolden:

So the idea of kind of the physical aspects in place, kind of shaping and constraining what we can do and certainly we've looked at some of that in the city of Bristol, where I'm based and work with people like Robin Hambleton, who worked with our city mayor to develop a kind of citywide approach where we say all of these are absolutely instrumental domains of leadership space and how do we find ways to bring them together?

Dr. Richard Bolden:

And well, the then mayor kind of was a very active kind of ambassador and champion for that. Back to that space, I think the sort of the Meg Wheatley idea of kind of leader is a kind of host of bringing, of holding, of creating a space for different voices to come together. As ever, in most times, people always want something different from what they've already got, though. So you know, subsequently our city ended up voting to remove the mayor. We've gone back to some other structure which is a bit different, but there are still elements of that kind of citywide civic approach to promoting leadership which I think is absolutely kind of key and again, I would see it as an integral aspect of collective leadership which gets us beyond the individual organizational focus. Again, so much of our theory, our research, our teaching remains very much bounded within individual organizations.

Scott Allen:

Well, richard, I'm so thankful for your time today. I'm thankful for the good work that you do as a scholar. You're thinking at multiple levels when it comes to this conversation of leadership and so, listeners, I hope you're intrigued by how he's thinking about this work. And I also want to say thank you, because I know that you're heavily involved in helping to plan the ILA conference in Prague. So thank you so much for that helping to plan the ILA conference in Prague. So thank you so much for that.

Scott Allen:

Listeners, you can go into the show notes and you can find links about how to learn more about that conference. And, of course, you are always involved in the International Studying Leadership Conference, which will be in St Andrews this fall, and I'll put a link to that as well in the show notes. So I always conclude the conversation by asking guests what you've been listening to streaming, what you've been consuming, what's caught your attention in recent times. It does not have to be academic, it doesn't have to have anything to do with what we just discussed. What might interest listeners? That's caught your attention?

Dr. Richard Bolden:

Well, thanks, scott, it's been a great conversation. I mean, I was thinking about that sort of question. So I listened to a fair amount of podcasts when largely when I'm out walking the dog, and I think mainly some of the ones on the BBC Sounds app because of where I'm based in the UK, and there's some really excellent series. Things like Tim Hartford's series called Cautionary Tales is really nice little kind of insights into, kind of inquiring into things that people would be familiar with, but they're really quite interesting. Kind of takes on thinking differently about how stuff happens. Some really good other sort of mini series. So the Great Post Office Trial was a series that was run recently about kind of the crisis in the post office in the UK which, again, people in the UK will be familiar of. I'm less familiar outside, but certainly I think this kind of one's unpick, again, the complexity and the roles of lots of different people, so they're really good illustrations of some of those issues. So I guess podcasts, as we were talking at the beginning, listen to lots of different kinds of music as well, some old, some new, and that kind of keeps me going.

Dr. Richard Bolden:

In terms of reading, I just finished a book that had been on my list for a very long time to read.

Dr. Richard Bolden:

I finally just finished reading, which was Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, and it's very kind of powerful take, really kind of a from a perspective with an African community, of the impact of colonialism and colonization, and I'd kind of been waiting to read, looking to read that, largely because of some work that Jonathan Gosling, who you're familiar with and have written and worked with a lot as well, who'd sort of used that as a platform for thinking about.

Dr. Richard Bolden:

You know, what does it tell us about leadership and developing leaders and supporting them in the face of some aspects of societal collapse, you know, the aspects of what we've held on to or what we think of as standards that are fixed in place, that take away or disappear that we weren't really expecting and that's really powerful. I'm still kind of processing that, but I think that's part of my ongoing education from my youngest daughter, who's been studying English literature and is making me broaden my horizons to read lots of books that I've been meaning to read for many years, and encouragement, I guess, for your readers whether they listen, whether they read those or whether they just sort of seek to pick up and read those books that they've been meaning to read for a long time. That would be an invitation.

Scott Allen:

That's great. That's great. Well, sir, I am excited to see you. I'll probably see you next in Prague, so I'll be excited to see you then. And again, thank you so much for your good work. Thanks so much for stopping by today, thanks a lot.

Dr. Richard Bolden:

It's wonderful. Thanks for the time. Thanks for the invitation.

Scott Allen:

I just have great respect for Richard, for his wisdom, his knowledge and thank him for helping me better understand this landscape, this space, a nook and cranny of the conversation about leadership that I really had not explored Again. We're almost 290, some episodes into this endeavor, 190-some episodes into this endeavor, and I am still learning each and every week and for that, Richard, I'm so very thankful. Can't wait to see you in St Andrews later this fall, in Prague later this fall. And to all of you listening, thanks so much. Appreciate you, Take care, Be well.