Where Does Leadership Happen?

Attending to the relating through which people, possibilities, and direction take shape

When we look for leadership, where do we look?

Our gaze tends to settle on the person who speaks, decides, influences, or takes charge. We look for individual traits, capabilities, and behaviours. When leadership is shared, we may look instead at how these qualities are distributed among several people or expressed through their interactions.

Why are we so drawn to the individuals in the picture?

Perhaps there is a romance at work here. The romance of leadership captures our readiness to place individuals and their attributes at the centre of organisational stories. It offers a compelling account: a leader acts, and an organisation moves. Yet the appeal of this account can draw us away from the relating through which people, meaning, and direction emerge.

What enters the frame when we cast our gaze more reflexively?

At the closest range, we encounter moments of relating: a contribution offered, a response made, a difference expressed, an opening created. As these moments connect, they form patterns of participation and coordination. They develop within wider organisational and societal worlds, carrying shared histories, cultural meanings, established roles, unspoken expectations, formal rules, structures, and imagined futures.

Each moment draws upon this wider relational field and, through the responses it generates, participates in reconstructing it. And what might begin to take shape within this movement?

Possibilities.

The relational web creates a plausible field: a field shaped by what has come before, what matters in the present, and what those involved can imagine becoming. Possibility is neither limitless nor random. Some actions become meaningful and available; others remain unthinkable, unsayable, or beyond reach. Every response takes shape within this field and participates in forming what may follow.

Here lies the proposition at the heart of my work: relating is an ongoing process of becoming through which people, relationships, meanings, and realities are continuously constructed and reconstructed.

We emerge within this process. Our identities, positions, and possibilities for action are formed and re-formed as we engage with other people and with the organisational world around us. Through relating, we participate in creating the conditions of our own participation.

And leadership?

Leadership emerges within this movement, as relating gathers possibilities around a direction and creates the grounds for co-action. Leadership takes shape in the interplay itself: in how concerns are received, differences are carried, organisational arrangements shape participation, and people continue together.

Why should this concern us?

Because where we locate leadership shapes how we practise it. Locating leadership in a person directs attention towards individual capability. Attending to its emergence in relating opens a wider field of responsibility: for how we respond, how we organise participation, how clearly we define roles and processes, and which possibilities our ways of working enable or constrain.

This is how I have come to understand leadership: as an ongoing process signifying the pursuit of direction in the production of a space for co-action.

Our initial question asked where we should look for leadership. As our gaze widens, the inquiry itself begins to move:

What possibilities for leadership are we producing through the ways we relate?

How Possibilities Gather Into Co-Action

As a possibility gathers life within a relational field, what allows it to travel?

Relating unfolds through responsive interplay. A gesture calls forth a response; that response gives meaning to what came before and creates an opening for what may follow. A question, concern, idea, or movement can become an invitation: an opening through which people might connect in co-action.

Whether anything develops from it depends on how others respond and what the wider field allows them to take up.

Some invitations pass unnoticed. Others connect with something that already matters: an earlier conversation, a shared concern, a tension in the work, or a future people have begun to imagine. A response gives the invitation meaning and carries it into exploration.

Here, the possibility begins to move.

Through exploration, people question, differentiate, contest, adapt, and connect what has been offered. They bring different histories, responsibilities, and interpretations into the conversation. The possibility may gather richness, change direction, or lose its hold altogether. Exploration is where those involved begin to work out what co-action could mean within the realities of their work.

What allows exploration to continue?

Relationships matter, and so do the forms through which relating is organised. Roles shape who can contribute and who carries responsibility. Governance establishes where decisions can be made. Structures connect some conversations while keeping others apart. Processes create continuity, timing, and boundaries. Their clarity can provide enough stability for people to engage with difference without losing the possibility of moving together.

As exploration unfolds, some possibilities begin to acquire weight within the plausible field. They connect with what matters, mobilise available relationships and resources, and become meaningful enough to carry forward. Through affirmation, people place energy into such a possibility. A decision, an agreement, a renewed commitment, or a response that says this matters; let us continue activates its potential for co-action.

Invitation, exploration, and affirmation are movements within responsive interplay. Their movement is recursive: affirmation may open another invitation, while exploration may return people to a concern they thought they had resolved. A response may expand the plausible field, while another may narrow it.

Through this movement, possibilities acquire direction. People and their organisational realities are reconstructed as they participate: responsibilities shift, meanings develop, relationships change, and new forms of action become possible.

Leadership emerges as possibilities are activated within the plausible field and carried into co-action. It unfolds through the ongoing production, maintenance, and reconstruction of the space in which direction can be pursued together.

Bringing the Inquiry Into Organisational Life

In my research, I stay close to leadership as it unfolds in everyday organisational life: in meetings, conversations, disagreements, pauses, and turning points. Following these moments over time allows me to explore how people sustain their engagement with one another, reconstruct the space for co-action, and continue seeking direction amid uncertainty and difference.

What stays with me is the generative quality of response. A concern is taken seriously. A question creates an opening. A difference invites further exploration. A clear role or process allows people to remain engaged. A response gives new life to a possibility.

Bringing this inquiry into practice means working across the different levels of the relational field:

Macro: The organisational field

Ask: What possibilities do our culture, governance, structures, and established ways of working make plausible?

Put into practice: clarify authority, responsibilities, and decision-making boundaries so that participation has form.

Meso: Collective work

Ask: Which concerns are gathering significance within our teams, and where is exploration being enabled or constrained?

Put into practice: create spaces and processes in which different perspectives can meet, responsibilities can be negotiated, and possibilities can develop

Micro: The responsive moment

Ask: What opening is being created here, and how might my response carry it forward?

Put into practice: notice invitations, remain with exploration, and affirm possibilities that have gathered enough meaning and commitment for co-action.

These questions invite attention to the conditions through which leadership emerges.

They ask us to remain close to how possibilities travel, how direction gathers, and how a space for co-action is produced in the movement of everyday work.

We have stayed close to how possibilities gather life, travel through a relational field, and become co-action. Where we locate leadership shapes how we practise it.

And so, the dialogue continues:

What possibilities for leadership are we producing through the ways we relate?

I hope these reflections have brought leadership as a relational process into dialogue with your own work. What has begun to move for you: a question, a connection, a possibility? I would love to hear where it takes you and to continue the dialogue together.

Research in View

The infographic below brings together the central movement of this inquiry: from the individual gaze to the plausible relational field, and from possibilities gathering life to the emergence of direction and co-action. You are welcome to download it for personal reference and return to its questions in dialogue with your own work.

Research in Practice

Bringing this inquiry into organisational life calls for attention across the field, the collective and the moment. These three places of practice remain interwoven: organisational conditions shape what becomes plausible; collective spaces allow concerns and possibilities to enter engagement; and responsive moments participate in what gathers life. The questions below offer a way of staying close to each as leadership emerges in everyday work.

Continue the dialogue

Download Research in View and Research in Practice: Where Does Leadership Happen? as a two-page visual resource. For personal reference. Please retain the attribution and copyright notice when sharing.

In Dialogue - Where Does Leadership Happen - Research in View and Practice.pdf

Download PDF • 309KB

As you bring these questions, connections and possibilities into your own work, please feel welcome to get in touch. I would love to hear what they set in motion and to continue the dialogue.

Author’s Note

Where This Work Comes From

This post grows from my doctoral research into the relational process of leadership and from my subsequent article on turning points and the becoming of leadership:

Sklaveniti, C. (2015) Syn-kinesis: An empirical inquiry in the relational process of leadership. Doctoral thesis. Glasgow: University of Strathclyde, Strathclyde Business School, Department of Strategy and Organisation.

Sklaveniti, C. (2020) ‘Moments that connect: Turning points and the becoming of leadership’, Human Relations, 73(4), pp. 544–571. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726719895812

Through In Dialogue, I return to these ideas and continue working with what they might open for research and everyday organisational practice.

Further Reading

Alvesson, M. and Sveningsson, S. (2003) "Managers doing leadership: The extra-ordinarization of the mundane", Human Relations, 56(12), pp. 1435–1459.

Gergen, K.J. (2009) Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hosking, D.M. (2011) ‘Telling tales of relations: Appreciating relational constructionism’, Organization Studies, 32(1), pp. 47–65.

Hosking, D.M., Dachler, H.P. and Gergen, K.J. (1995) Management and Organization: Relational Alternatives to Individualisation. Aldershot: Avebury.

Meindl, J.R., Ehrlich, S.B. and Dukerich, J.M. (1985) "The romance of leadership", Administrative Science Quarterly, 30(1), pp. 78–102.

Raelin, J.A. (2011) "From leadership-as-practice to leaderful practice", Leadership, 7(2), pp. 195–211.

Raelin, J.A. (2016) "Imagine there are no leaders: Reframing leadership as collaborative agency", Leadership, 12(2), pp. 131–158.

Shotter, J. (1993) Conversational Realities: Constructing Life through Language. London: SAGE.

Shotter, J. (2005) "Inside the moment of managing: Wittgenstein and the everyday dynamics of our expressive-responsive activities", Organization Studies, 26(1), pp. 113–135.

Copyright and Citation

© 2026 Chrysavgi Sklaveniti. All rights reserved.

The concepts developed in this post originate in the research cited above. When drawing upon these concepts, please cite:

Sklaveniti, C. (2020) ‘Moments that connect: Turning points and the becoming of leadership’, Human Relations, 73(4), pp. 544–571. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726719895812

The writing and original visual interpretations created for In Dialogue may be quoted briefly when reproduced accurately and without alteration. Please credit Chrysavgi Sklaveniti and link to the original post.

Please do not reproduce, alter, adapt, or redistribute the article or its original visuals, in whole or in substantial part, without prior written permission from the author.