The Wounded Leader - Book Review

School Administrator, Feb, 2003 by Roberta A. Gerold

Superintendent, Farmingdale School District, Farmingdale, N.Y.

"Who comforts the leader?" It's a question I've been thinking about seriously as part of our leadership responses to the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001. It's also a question that a leadership cohort in my school district has been considering through discussions of student achievement, teaching for learning, budget development and human crises.

The Wounded Leader: How Real Leadership Emerges in Times of Crisis by Richard Ackerman, a professor at University of Massachusetts-Lowell, and Pat Maslin-Ostrowski, a professor at Florida Atlantic University, helped to inform our conversation. It gave us a context in which to understand the many ways our system and our communities "wound" us and how we can comfort one another so that we are strengthened by our healing.

Through important stories told by leaders who were hurt by political agendas, by poor student performance on standardized exams and by staff members' behaviors, we find connections to our own experiences. The stories are clarified by research, assisting our search for meaning. Probably most valuably, this work describes clearly the thinking that went on in the story-tellers' tales of what led to their woundings, how and why they survived, what they learned from the experiences and what it all really means for us.

The Wounded Leader is an easily accessible work, but it is also a long read. One can't help but be disturbed by these stories.

(The Wounded Leader: How Real Leadership Emerges in Times of Crisis by Richard H. Ackerman and Pat Maslin-Ostrowski, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2001, 160 pp. with index, $24.95 hardcover)