Exploring Leadership: For College Students Who Want to Make a Difference (2nd edition) (review)

"It is our assertion that leadership is the way we invade the future" (p. 325) is one of the show-stoppers of Exploring Leadership: For College Students Who Want to Make a Difference (2nd edition). This simple and straight-forward statement sums up the challenge of fostering leadership capacity among college students. It could also serve as a poignant reminder to the reader of what counts in this important area of study and practice.

Exploring Leadership is a renewed, expanded, and improved resource for leadership educators and students alike. While the first edition served as a helpful resource for wide number of students and professionals who read it, the second edition is more comprehensive, integrates more material, and has the potential for much greater impact in students' lives. The authors set out to provide a resource that could easily be used for either course-based or out-of-class learning; they achieved this by drafting a text that is accessible, interesting, strewn with student examples, clear in application of concepts to practice, and is itself a readily usable compendium and guide to other helpful resources.

Exploring Leadership is organized in five parts that flow logically from one to the other, though all could be used as stand alone resources on specific focus areas. These parts include: "Part I—Leadership for a Changing World," "Part II—Exploring your Potential for Leadership," "Part III—Context for the Practice of Leadership," "Part IV—Making a Difference with Leadership," and "Part V—Leadership Development and Renewal." The core of the book centers around the definition of leadership as "a relational and ethical process of people together attempting to accomplish positive change" (p. ix). After introducing a number of other leadership models and theories, the relational leadership model is described as one that "builds commitment toward positive purposes that are inclusive of people and diverse points of view, empowers those involved, is ethical, and recognizes that all four of these elements are accomplished by being process-oriented" (p. 74). The combination of an intuitively sensible definition and a model that, when implemented, will bring purposefulness to leadership and organizations, are two of the book's most appealing characteristics. Staff and students alike will appreciate translation of the relational model's five elements into the framework of knowing, being, and doing (p. 78-79), which provides greater detail about how to enact the model in practice.

The authors present the relational leadership model and then go to the heart of the matter in student leadership learning—know thyself. There are a number of other books that are now emerging for academic and broader audiences that advocate the importance of self-knowledge as essential in leadership. These include books as far back as The Active Life (Palmer, 1990) and more recently Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future (Senge et al, 2004). These books are complemented by research (Sternberg, 2006) and books that help staff understand how to help students with this important journey (Parks, 2000). Exploring Leadership does a wonderful job of providing a roadmap for the journey of self-discovery for college students. Ultimately, self-discovery is proposed as essential before understanding of others and of groups is even possible, especially if students seek to be credible, trustable, and authentic in their leadership.

There really are no comparable or competing books to Exploring Leadership Books such as The Leader's Companion (Wren, 1995), which provides a breadth of articles that could be read as confirmation or augmentation to Exploring Leadership, have been used for a number of years and are well known by leadership educators. However, this collection does not pose a theory or a progressive series of ideas that can help students understand leadership more fully. Kouzes & Posner's The Leadership Challenge (3rd ed., 2006) is more like Exploring Leadership . . . in terms of proposing a model...