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a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c tThis paper argues that although authentic leadership may be rooted in the notion of a 'true self', it is through the embodiment of that 'true self' that leaders are perceived as authentic or not. In making this claim, we consider ways in which a somatic sense of self contributes to the felt sense of authenticity, and how through engaging with somatic cues, leadership can be performed in a way which is experienced as authentic, both to the leader and to those he or she seeks to lead. In developing our ideas further, we draw from the acting theory of Stanislavski (1936aStanislavski ( , 1936bStanislavski ( , 1961 to explore how authentic dramatic performances are created, focusing on the role of emotional memory, the magic 'if' and physical action in performances. We propose three key components of a resulting theory of how embodied authentic leadership is created: self exposure, relating, and making leaderly choices.

This paper explores the territory of leading as an embodied activity through the lens of the aesthetic category of 'the beautiful'. Its starting point is that although much of the literature about effective leadership practice focuses on leadership behaviours, little is written about the way in which those behaviours are actually enacted. The musician, Bobby McFerrin serves as a case study for identifying three key aspects of leading beautifully: mastery, congruence between form and content, and purpose. These are further considered through reference to the concept of beauty as theorised by the philosophers Plato and Plotinus. The paper then considers how 'leading beautifully' might differ from other conceptualisations of leadership and discusses the particular insight it brings to understanding the nature of leading as a relational phenomenon.

The terms pertinent to it are 'feeling', 'judgement', 'sense', 'proportion', 'balance', 'appropriateness'. It is a matter of art rather than science, and is aesthetic rather than logical. (Barnard, 1938: 235) From Max Depree's Leadership is an Art (1989) to Michael Jones' Artful Leadership (2006) to Oba T'Shaka's two volumes of The Art of Leadership (1990-1991), the rhetoric that leadership is an art is alive and well. However, with a few exceptions such as Keith Grint's The Arts of Leadership (2001), the moniker 'leadership as art' is used rather indiscriminately, indicative of everything from 'skillful practice' to 'trendy title for a book'. In this special issue we offer six articles that each work with the idea of leadership as art, not as a loose rhetorical turn, but as a starting point for some rigorous and interesting thinking. Our impetus for generating this issue was curiosity about the consequence of taking the notion of 'leadership as art' seriously. How might doing so inform what we recognize as leadership? What consequences would result for the ways in which we understand the role of followers or context in leadership's enactment? What would it imply about the ways in which leaders might be developed? Why might conceptualizing 'leadership as art' be important? The six articles presented here create a surprisingly consistent argument in answer to this final question. In short, we live in a complex world, which cannot be fully understood solely by reference to scientific forms of logic and sense-making. The arts, and arts-based practices, provide different ways of both describing and relating to that complexity, thereby offering novel ways of responding to it. This possibility has been noted by a number of organizational theorists in recent years, for instance Karl Weick writes: Consider the tools of traditional logic and rationality. Those tools presume that the world is stable, knowable, and predictable. To set aside those tools is not to give up on finding a workable way to keep moving. It is only to give up one means of direction finding that is ill-suited to the unstable, the unknowable, and the unpredictable. To drop the tools of rationality is to gain access to lightness in the form of intuitions, feelings, stories, improvisation, experience, imagination, active listening, awareness in the moment, novel words, and empathy. All of