Leadership is often discussed as though it were a fixed trait, either something inherent or something acquired. Professor James Bailey has spent his career questioning that binary. "Leadership is a little bit like a giraffe," he says. "The environment didn't stretch its neck. But the environment sustains it." That metaphor, drawn from his early work on nature versus nurture, captures the throughline of his thinking: potential exists, but context determines whether it thrives.
Bailey is the Professor of Leadership at George Washington University. His classrooms blur academic theory with lived human behavior, scaling concepts from boardrooms to societal trends. "My job is not to tell people what leadership is," he says. "It's to help them recognize the environments in which they can actually survive."
His shift from academic journals to practitioner publications marked a turning point in both reach and intent. "A great idea in a scholarly database is a whisper," he explains. "A great idea in practitioner media is a conversation." That shift caught the attention of the readers, moving insights from closed academic loops into public discourse. "At a certain point, influence becomes a responsibility," he says. "If people are reading, you have to make it worth their time."
Central to Bailey's work is the insistence that leadership and management are not opposing skill sets. "The best managers are leaders, and the best leaders are managers," he notes. "It is not one job or the other. It's an ongoing negotiation of stepping up and stepping back." His writing on the topic later became the focus of the Harvard Business Review. To Bailey, the idea is less conceptual than practical: leadership is not defined by authority but by calibration, knowing when to direct, when to support, and when to cede the stage entirely.
Bailey has examined how environments can shape behavior within industries, institutions, and public sentiment and vice versa. One body of work explored leadership structures in legal organizations. "Some sectors reward forceful leadership," he says. "It's about alignment, not command."
He has also studied how external forces shift internal dynamics, whether it's navigating cultural divides, generational workplace expectations, or consumer identity as it intersects with organizational behavior. While his subjects evolve, his lens stays constant: What conditions make leadership possible, and what conditions make it improbable?
"When people ask me about the next frontier of leadership," he says, "I don't talk about systems first. I talk about access." For Bailey, that question has become personal and urgent. Living with Parkinson's disease, he has observed a gap in many mainstream conversations about workplace equity. "Inclusion conversations are happening. But disability is often an afterthought instead of a starting point," he says. "There are numerous capable people who are simply invisible in the discussion."
According to Bailey, talent does not fail evenly. It fails selectively, often because environments misread or underserve it. "Potential without conditions is just a theory," he says. "Environments make ability visible." It's why he pushes emerging leaders to audit not only their skill sets, but their ecosystems. "If you're stagnant, ask whether you are being starved or supported," he says. "The wrong environment neutralizes ability. The right one accelerates it."
Despite an extensive publication portfolio, Bailey describes his work in simple terms: "I study conditions, the ones that let people rise, and the ones that hold them in place." His ambition is straightforward: widen who gets to participate in the conversation and reshape how leadership accounts for human variation, not despite it, but because of it.
"We spend years asking what makes a great leader," he says. "Maybe the better question is: what makes a place worth leading in?"
