ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on particular individuals as leaders, along with a devotion of resources to their development is, at the same time, a distortion of leadership practice. It argues that when those appointed as leaders seek to control the direction of events, such as during projects of change, they are also likely to suffer a loss of control, which in turn produces an ongoing cycle that seeks to find ways for leaders to re-assert control, as part of the myth that individual leaders can be in control. It then provides the source of the leader's conundrum which lays the trap for the paradox of distortion. The chapter presents the metaphor of a river and river-bank, drawn from the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, in the examination of the working of leadership during projects of change. Competences have also been used in relation to the idea of transformational leadership and one of the well-known frameworks is the Multi-Factor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ).
