ABSTRACT
This chapter asks a series of international non-governmental development aid workers two key questions about leadership:
What does it take to be an effective leader where it is hot, dusty and dangerous?
What can other leaders learn from leaders working with such extremes of human emotion and experience?
Their stories take us to Somalia, Afghanistan and Honduras, the USA, the Central African Republic and Senegal. Themes include retaining resilience and avoiding burn out. There are beneath the surface, psychoanalytic insights concerning ego-free leadership, attachment to the team, guilt, abandonment and metaphorical martyrdom. Additional themes include collaboration, overt and inadvertent reward, leading in crisis, corruption and failing systems. There are examples of leading staff experiencing trauma and shock, of factional splitting and ethical dilemmas. There are commercial points about constructing a winning negotiation. The author Rachel Ellison adds her own leadership experiences from her human rights and broadcasting work with women in Afghanistan to the real stories told by some of her former coaching clients. There is pragmatic, challenging and psychoanalytic, below the surface reflective learning for leaders and coaches.