In their different ways, all three reviews in this issue bear on the issue of organisational effectiveness. Action learning can add organisational value by helping people to recognise and avoid toxic leadership, developing the understanding of when silences are productive and when they are not, and inculcating the collaborative skills that can promote innovation through circular economy ideas.
Given that action, learning plays a prominent role in many leadership development programmes, Eugene Sadler-Smith’s review of Toxic Leadership: Research and Cases by Steven Walker and Daryl Watkins, will give readers of this journal much pause for thought. If they are not already aware of the dangers, this book will alert both facilitators and their clients to the pitfalls associated with the trade of leadership development. A key purpose of the authors is to help participants to understand how leadership toxicity emerges, how to spot it in their organizations and to think about what they can do to stop it from ‘destroying organizational value’. Sadler-Smith suggests that this short but valuable book provides useful negative role models to contrast with the often uncritical ideas offered in many leadership programmes.
Silences in organisational life may, or may not, indicate the presence of toxic leadership. In his review of Mark Cole and John Higgins’ The Great Unheard at Work: Understanding Voice and Silence in Organisations, Chris Dalton notes in particular two genres of silences in management learning: an individual phenomena of ‘silence-as-presence’ and a collective ‘silence-as-absence’ in group and corporate settings. Silences can be indicators both of healthy personal reflection and of the unhealthy absences of ‘speaking up’ which can so often destroy organisational value. Silences are of particular interest in action learning where noticing and listening to both the saying and the not-saying are critical skills for both facilitators and set members.
Genevieve Cother reviews the Research Handbook of Innovation for a Circular Economy edited by Siri Jakobsen & colleagues. The Circular Economy idea is a profound one, marking a shift in mindsets from the traditional, linear ‘take-make-waste’ model to the circular one emphasising not only reusing, reducing, and recycling but more radically now decoupling economic performance from simple notions of growth. Such a shift puts great emphasis on innovation and action learning is well suited to promoting the collaborative problem-solving on which this book places a central importance. The book provides a roadmap of the intricacies of the Circular Economy and the associated challenges of their implementation in organisational settings.