Dr. Suze Wilson,  is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Management at Massey University. She is passionate about all things leadership along with an abiding interest in how we can make organisations both effective for external stakeholders and enjoyable places to work for employees.

Her doctoral research examined why and how it has become normalized in recent decades to equate ‘leadership’ with grandiose expectations of ‘transformation’, ‘vision’, and ‘charisma’. She argues these ideas, when examined closely, actually create undesirable pressures on leaders, grant them excessive powers, and rely on the problematic assumption that ‘followers’ are inherently inadequate. She is interested in theorising and practising leadership in ways that are more inclusive and humble.

More recently, she’s written a short op-ed exploring how conspiratorialism and the so-called infodemic are undermining the good pandemic leadership we had benefitted from in New Zealand and thinking about the wider undermining of legitimate authority and the potential for a shared reality that these dangerous and toxic influences pose and what that might mean for leadership.