Glisk. Moments of grace in leadership and life - Dr Stephen Duns

There are moments in leadership and in life that arrive carrying a choice.

Not the dramatic decisions that fill biographies, but the almost imperceptible turning points where we tighten or soften, push or pause, dominate or disappear. In these moments, something subtle yet consequential shifts. A relationship opens or narrows. A system contracts or grows. A person hardens or develops.

Glisk: Moments of Grace in Leadership and Life explores these moments.

Drawn from old Scots, glisk refers to a brief glimpse of light, a flash of opening. Here it names those instances when a different way of responding becomes visible, when power and love briefly return to relationship and grace has the conditions it needs to appear.

Grace, in this book, is not moral achievement or spiritual polish. It cannot be manufactured through technique. It emerges when presence, courage and relational awareness coincide, often briefly and often at personal cost.

Across twenty-five narrative chapters organized into four thematic collections, the book explores what happens when authority tightens under pressure, care turns into over-accommodation, candour loses tenderness, competence outlives its usefulness or conflict threatens connection. Some chapters show grace arriving. Others show it being missed. Often the difference is barely perceptible until its consequences unfold.

At the heart of the book lies a central tension: power and love are both necessary yet frequently fall out of relationship. Power without love hardens into control. Love without power dissolves into rescuing and self-erasure. When they reconnect, even briefly, leadership shifts from performance to presence.

While grounded in leadership experience, Glisk moves beyond organizational roles. It speaks to parents holding boundaries, partners navigating conflict, managers giving feedback, friends setting limits and individuals meeting their own inner critics. Leadership is reframed not as position but as a way of being with responsibility and relational weight across a whole life.

The book will appeal to readers of Brené Brown, Parker Palmer and Margaret Wheatley, and to leaders who have outgrown formulaic development models yet still long for depth, integrity and humanity in how they exercise influence. It also speaks to readers interested in adult development and relational leadership without becoming academic or abstract.

In a leadership landscape saturated with tools and tactics, Glisk offers something different: a disciplined and compassionate exploration of the inner and relational conditions under which grace can visit, even briefly.