This paper reimagines leadership by proposing the concept of narrative reflexivity as a practice to interrogate the stories we tell ourselves and each other towards an ethics of relationality. It offers an understanding of dialectic, emergent narrative phenomena in organizational life, arguing that both stories and storytellers can act as leaders and exhibit leaderful behavior. Such practice activates awareness of hegemonic stories alongside marginalized stories, introducing doubt, curiosity, pause and co-creative tension into the process of engaging with collective leadership narratives. We draw upon case studies to ground the operationalization of narrative reflexivity at each of the three levels of narrative activity: individual, group, and collective. Within the leadership-as-practice movement, which reconceptualizes leadership as an emergent and processual collective activity, narrative reflexivity opens up the possibility of evaluating our stories, understanding others’ stories, and coproducing new stories for collective acting.
