“…In an interdisciplinary environment involving researchers, course designers, trainers, and sector practitioners, we feel that patterns of leadership like those presented earlier provide a common ground for further dialogue. Unlike, semi-structured interviews, or questionnaires, the gathering of ethnographic data including interviews, but also observational methods, the collection of documents, diary studies and other methodological tools, can provide rich descriptions of practice which may challenge the status of leadership, and in doing so reveal a more complex world of work that practitioners in this part of the public sector must manage but for which few have been formally trained to cope with (Goddard-Patel & Whitehead, 2000;Loots & Ross, 2004). The sharing of stories of practice as patterns, we suggest, provides one method for researchers, trainers and practitioners to critically examine the nature of leadership in practice and reflect on the skills and work that practitioners engage in, rather than idealized or prescriptive visions of what that work is or should be.…”