Byte-sized leadership: RRU prof tackles challenges and triumphs of guidance

Learn more about the Master of Arts in Leadership Studies. 

A Royal Roads University professor with a long career in leading organizations as well as talking about and teaching leadership has a lifetime of experience and wisdom to share on the topic. 

And that's what Kathy Bishop is doing on her podcast, The Wonder of Leadership, which she launched earlier this year.

One of the big questions facing leaders is, “How, with all these different perspectives, ideas and peoples, do we pull together rather than pull apart?” Bishop says, and her podcast explores possible answers.

An associate professor and program head in RRU’s School of Leadership Studies, Bishop says she sees leadership as not only essential to building and running successful organizations but, critically, to making change.   

“At the heart of it is people wanting to make the world a better place and being able to do that together,” she says. “How do we mobilize as human beings? We all have that inherent in us.”  

Bishop comes to these beliefs through years of study and work in the fields of social work, business, educational psychology and leadership studies.   

She began her professional life as a social worker, working at a treatment centre in England and on the streets of Vancouver. After relocating from Metro Vancouver to Vancouver Island in the early 1990s, she started a life skills program for youth and became the society’s executive director, then moved into being the executive director of a chamber of commerce. She also earned a PhD in interdisciplinary studies (educational psychology and leadership studies, plus applied theatre), and  joined the RRU faculty . 

She conceived of the podcast in the shadow of the COVID pandemic as a way to connect and share her thoughts on a topic to which she has devoted her life. 

“For me, it’s been a real joy to reflect on my own leadership from the past and going forward, but also to critically think about what that looks like,” Bishop says. “I thought the podcast was an avenue to be more personal with people and, also, to share my own voice on leadership.” 

The result is podcasts that are digestible and consumable; typically in the six-minute range. = Each one explores a specific leadership topic, with titles like as How to meet the demands of being a leader and have a life!, and Re-enchanting our leadership and Leading within multigenerational workplaces. 

Her hope for listeners  is that they get “reinspired and reenchanted” with leadership, with its myriad challenges and responsibilities, and absorb some practical tips. And she notes that while it  is a complex time to be a leader, modern approaches to the discipline are spreading the work around.   

“We no longer need the one great hero leader anymore,” Bishop says. “There’s a movement now around leading with others — distributed leadership. We’re all in this together.”  

Accessing the collective wisdom of an organization is key and requires “somebody who shifts from a me perspective to a we perspective.”  

For possible answers, check out her podcast.