Exploring Co Leadership TALK Through INTERACTIONAL SOCIOLinguistics

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Leadership

DOI: 10.1177/1742715008092389 2008; 4; 339 Leadership

Bernadette Vine, Janet Holmes, Meredith Marra, Dale Pfeifer and Brad Jackson Exploring Co-leadership Talk Through Interactional Sociolinguistics

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Leadership

Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore)Vol 4(3): 339–360 DOI: 10.1177/1742715008092389 http://lea.sagepub.com

Exploring Co-leadership Talk ThroughInteractional SociolinguisticsBernadette Vine, Janet Holmes, Meredith Marra, Dale Pfeifer andBrad Jackson, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand andThe University of Auckland, New Zealand

Abstract This article seeks to bring to the fore the processes by which leaders co-create leadership through collective talk within the workplace. Co-leadership hasrecently been recognized as an important aspect of leadership practice, especiallyat the top of organizations, yet it remains under-theorized and empirically under-explored. Guided by the desire to integrate concepts that have emerged from leader-ship psychology with discursive leadership approaches, this exploratory empiricalstudy applies a specific form of discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics,to three different organizational contexts. Because interactional sociolinguisticsfocuses on the ways in which relationships are seen to be negotiated and maintainedthrough talk, it is well placed to analyse leadership, a relational process involvingleaders and followers that is predicated on asymmetrical power relations. Theanalysis demonstrates how successful co-leaders cooperate, dynamically shiftingroles and integrating their leadership performance to encompass task-related andmaintenance-related functions of leadership.

Keywords co-leadership; discourse analysis; interactional sociolinguistics

IntroductionThis article examines the concept of co-leadership, the process by which two leadersin vertically contiguous positions share the responsibilities of leadership. While theexistence of co-leadership has always been implicitly recognized, it has receivedremarkably little attention in the way of theoretical conceptualization, let aloneempirical analysis. In the popular imagination, the names of principal leaders likeWinston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela comereadily to mind whenever any one is quizzed about leadership, but who were their‘Number 2s’, their ‘Second Lieutenants’, their ‘Right-hand Men or Women’ or, touse current parlance, their ‘Co-leaders’? They remain largely unknown, unless theyemerge to take over the ‘Number 1’ spot, but their roles are usually duly acknowl-edged in the autobiographies and biographies of notable leaders. We all implicitlyunderstand that these individuals were probably vital in the acknowledged success

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of the principal leaders, but we never seem to be obliged to recall, let alone investi-gate them. The same selective memory recall appears to afflict many leadershipscholars. Building on recent work on co-leadership, it is to this long overdue taskthat we turn in this article.

We begin by introducing the concept of co-leadership, what it captures andcontributes and how it might be better understood. To this end, we highlight a recentclarion call from Fairhurst (2007) to find ways to build bridges between the two‘traditions’ that run parallel within leadership studies – the dominant and long-standing tradition of leadership psychology and discursive leadership, an emergenttradition that is rapidly gaining momentum. Guided by this call, we draw upon inter-actional sociolinguistics, a discursive approach utilized by the Wellington Languagein the Workplace Project (LWP) team to better understand a variety of workplace talkpractices within numerous organizational contexts. Having turned its attention toleadership practices, LWP has endeavoured in an exploratory manner to enrich itsdiscursive analyses with the integration of well-established concepts derived fromleadership psychology.

This article presents the findings from empirical work that has been conducted inthree SME organizations based in New Zealand. Analysing recorded instances ofleadership performances from a sociolinguistic perspective, we exemplify the waysin which co-leadership is enacted in these distinctive organizational contexts. Ourprimary focus is to examine the speech practices of leaders in their interactions withtheir followers to show how two leadership functions – task and maintenanceactivities – are actually co-performed. Moreover, while we detect certain similaritiesin the ways that co-leadership is achieved linguistically, there are some importantdifferences in practice, which are engendered by the individual leaders and thespecific organizational contexts within which they act.

We conclude the article by highlighting further discursive inquiry into co-leadership practices. We also reflect on the experience of attempting to integratediscursive leadership approaches with concepts derived from leadership psychology,pointing to the potential opportunities for further research as well as the problemsthat such a potentially uneasy and awkward rapprochement poses.

Co-leadership

The argument for co-leadership

First coined by Heenan and Bennis (1999), ‘co-leadership’ is defined as two leadersin vertically contiguous positions who share the responsibilities of leadership. Theydescribe co-leaders as ‘truly exceptional deputies – extremely talented men andwomen, often more capable than their more highly acclaimed superiors’ (Heenan &Bennis, 1999: 6). Among the most well-known leadership partnerships that explic-itly divide leadership roles between two or more leaders at the top of the organiz-ation are the CEO–CFO; president–vice-president; chancellor–vice-chancellor;prime minister–deputy prime minister; minister–senior civil servant; and managingdirector–artistic director partnerships. Heenan and Bennis observe that ‘we continueto be mesmerized by celebrity and preoccupied with being No. 1’. However, thistendency overvalues the contribution of the general or CEO or president and

Leadership 4(3) Articles

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simultaneously depreciates the contributions of subordinates. ‘The genius of our ageis truly collaborative’, they write, ‘the shrewd leaders of the future are those whorecognize the significance of creating alliances with others whose fates are correlatedwith their own’ (Heenan & Bennis, 1999: viii). When it comes to leadership an oldcliché may well ring true: ‘two heads are better than one’.

Although co-leadership has yet to undergo rigorous analysis, several scholarssuggest that it improves leadership effectiveness (Alvaez & Svejenova, 2005; Heenan& Bennis, 1999; O’Toole et al., 2002; Sally, 2002). Upper Echelons Theory, asconceived by Hambrick and Manson (1984), provides us with some insight into whythis might be. This theory suggests that leadership is an important ingredient oforganizational performance; however, the complexity of organizations makes itimprobable that one leader alone will be able to exert great influence over allmembers of the organization. A formal co-leadership structure (i.e. co-CEO, co-chair,co-director) structure can help to make this more likely but these remain the notableexception, like the triumvirate that collectively runs Google, rather than the rule.

In addition, Hambrick (1989) argues that strategic leadership occurs in an environ-ment embedded in ambiguity, complexity, and information overload. An importantresponsibility of top-level organizational leaders is enabling the organization to adaptto this complex environment (Boal & Hooijberg, 2000). The skills required tosuccessfully negotiate this increasingly complex environment are extensive and maybe too broad to be possessed by one leader (Alvarez & Svejenova, 2005; Story, 2005).Collaboration at the senior leadership level improves the success of the strategicorganizational partnership (Huxham & Vangen, 2000), allowing top corporatemanagers adequate attention for different aspects of the leadership task includingday-to-day operational activities and long-term strategy (Bass, 1990). It also givesthe organization an opportunity to continue, even when one of the top leaders leavesthe organization.

Normative and methodological issues

In the past couple of years we have witnessed growing interest in developingfollower-centred perspectives on leadership (e.g. Shamir et al., 2007). Jackson andParry (2008) suggest that we can think of the various theories which advocate thatfollowers do and should act as leaders along a continuum. At the more conservativeend of the continuum is the notion of ‘co-leadership’, which recognizes that leader-ship is rarely the preserve of one individual, but is frequently exercised by a pair ofindividuals or group of individuals, such as a top management team. Further alongthe continuum is ‘shared leadership’, the notion that the responsibility for guiding agroup can rotate among its members, depending on the demands of the situation andthe particular skills and resources required at that moment (Raelin, 2003). Evenfurther along the continuum is the notion of ‘distributed leadership’, in which theteam leads its work collectively and independently of formal leaders, by creatingnorms of behaviour, contribution and performance and by supporting each other andmaintaining the morale of the group (Day et al, 2004; Gronn, 2002; Nielsen, 2004).

Distributed leadership theories tend to be more normative than descriptive. Theytalk about how things should be rather than how they necessarily are. But theyhave done an important service, as Fletcher and Käufer note, ‘shared approaches to

Leadership Exploring Co-leadership Talk Through Interactional Sociolinguistics Vine et al.

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leadership question this individual level perspective, arguing that it focuses excess-ively on top leaders and says little about informal leadership or larger situationalfactors’ (2003: 22). On the other hand, as Kellerman and Webster have cautioned,‘the prevailing scholarly winds have now shifted so much in favour of collaboration– in contrast to hierarchical decision-making and organizational structures – that thechallenge for researchers has become one of guarding against excess’ (2001: 493).Care must be taken not to overestimate the degree that leadership is or should beshared between members of a team. What we have regularly observed in many of theempirical contexts we have studied, is that leaders often do collaborate with theirfollowers, but not with all organizational members. Instead, as recognized by LeaderMember Exchange (LMX) theory they frequently collaborate or co-lead with theirclosest allies, who invariably also hold formal leadership positions within theorganization (Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995). Co-leadership acknowledges and encom-passes the relevance of both hierarchical authority and collaboration. This is import-ant because, as Kellerman and Webster suggest, collaborative leadership betweenteam members is not always necessary – and does not necessarily work – in allcircumstances.

On the methodological front, leadership research has tended to maintain a narrowfocus on its unit of analysis, concentrating on dyads or individual pairs of leadersand followers (Kark & Shamir, 2002; Yammarino et al., 2005; Yukl, 1999). Conse-quently, leadership scholars have come to understand leadership as a series of dyadicinteractions occurring within a group, over time (Yammarino et al., 1998). How aleader influences group-level processes is not well explained (Yukl, 1999). Addition-ally, and of paramount concern in this article, is the question of how multiple leadersmight influence groups of followers in an empirical context.

In the past, leadership research has tended to rely predominantly on informationgathered from interviews and surveys, rather than on direct observation and record-ing of communicative interaction in workplaces. As Alvarez and Svejenova note,leadership research has predominantly focused ‘on the personal characteristics andpsychology of executives rather than on their actual behaviour and their activities inperforming the tasks prescribed by their roles’ (2005: 3). Other scholars have alsoargued that more attention needs to be given to precisely how leadership manifestsitself in specific contexts, in order to provide a deeper understanding of how leaders’behaviour impacts the leadership process (Berson & Avolio, 2004; Den Hartog et al.,1999; Dorfman, 1996).

The research described in this article attempts to address these methodologicalconcerns by examining the actual speech of leaders in their daily interactions withothers in their workplaces. Following on from Cuno, who states that ‘leaders leadthrough their words’ (2005: 205), we believe that studying the words of leadersenables us to examine how leaders ‘do being a leader’ (Holmes et al., 1999).Moreover, as Larsson and Lundholm (2007) have argued, leadership can be under-stood only as something that is embedded in everyday and mundane managerialwork-activities, rather than outside of these. Building on Uhl-Bien’s relational theoryof leadership (Uhl-Bien, 2006), they show in their ethnographic study of managerialwork conducted within a Swedish bank how leadership is accomplished throughtalk-in-interaction, highlighting some of the micro-level rhetorical work throughwhich leadership is accomplished.


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We take as our starting point the initial conceptualizing work that has been doneon co-leadership primarily by leadership psychologists, and enrich and extend thiswork by conducting discourse analysis to explore the discursive processes by whichco-leadership is enacted and accomplished at the micro level of everyday managerialwork.

Bridging psychological and discursive approaches to leadershipIn her timely and highly constructive text, Gail Fairhurst (2007) has identified anddistinguished between ‘two traditions’ that have become established within leader-ship research. The dominant and long-standing tradition, ‘Leadership psychology’,places the primary emphasis upon the individual and works almost exclusively withinthe cognitive realm of human endeavour. The more recent yet rapidly growingtradition, ‘Discursive leadership’, is by contrast heavily oriented towards discourseand communication.

According to Fairhurst (2007) discourse can broadly take on two forms:‘discourse’ (or little ‘d’ discourse) which refers to talk and text in social practiceswithin specific local contexts. The language that is being used by the actors and theinteraction processes, therefore, becomes the central concern for the analyst (Potter& Wetherell, 1987). With its focus upon exploring forms of co-leadership talk, thepresent study will be concerned with this type of discourse, also the domain of aninteractional sociolinguistic approach. The other broad type, ‘Discourse’ (or big ‘D’Discourse) relates to general and enduring systems for the formation and articulationof ideas in a historically situated time. This type of approach is probably bestexemplified by the genealogical work of Michel Foucault (1982, 1988).

Associated with these two broad types of discourse, Fairhurst (2007) identifies awide range of techniques for analysing discourse or ‘discursive approaches’ thatinclude sociolinguistics, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, speech actschematics, interaction analysis and semiotics. In this study we will be using a tech-nique called interactional sociolinguistics which will be discussed in the next sectionof the article. From within the extensive scope of approaches which fit under theumbrella term of discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics fits squarely in thecentre of the range, with elements of both the top down and bottom up approachesfound at the extremes. It is ethnographically oriented, taking account of the analyst’sunderstanding of the socio-cultural context of the interaction under investigation, andit makes use of micro-level analytic techniques to explore how participants negoti-ate meaning in face-to-face interaction. As such, it makes use of the kind of back-ground and self-reported information gathered through interviews and observations,and uses this to support analysis of talk in action.

In common with Fairhurst (2007), we argue that neither leadership psychologynor discursive leadership offers the better ‘lens’ through which to view and makesense of leadership. Each tradition has something to offer the other, althoughexamples of work that bridge these two traditions are still few and far between. Ineffect, we still have two distinctive ‘camps’ of leadership scholars – each campfavouring one approach to the exclusion of the other with, somewhat ironically, verylittle discourse taking place between the two except that which is couched ascritique. The leadership psychology camp has largely ignored discursive leadership,


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characterizing it as an eccentric fringe. The discursive camp, on the other hand, hasused leadership psychology as both a ‘punch-bag’ to vent frustration with existingconceptions of leadership and as a ‘springboard’ into their specific discursiveapproach. While we understand how this state of affairs may have come about, weagree with Fairhurst’s conclusion that ‘Discursive leadership and leadership psychol-ogy are thus usefully conceived as complementary Discourses or alternative ways oftackling and knowing about leadership’ (2007: 11). The following study attempts tofind a complementary connection in its concern with co-leadership which hasemerged primarily from the field of leadership psychology and has been explored inonly a very limited way in a discursive manner.

Research methodology

The Wellington Language in the Workplace Project

The Wellington Language in the Workplace Project (LWP) team has consciously triedto bridge the gap between these two traditions by bringing together leadershippsychology scholars with (applied) linguistics scholars, in order not only to sharetheir knowledge, but to create a genuinely open and constructive discourse, and tocreate a blended, more holistic, understanding of leadership dynamics within a rangeof organizational contexts.

The interactions that we analyse in this study are drawn from the database whichincludes a wide variety of New Zealand workplaces, ranging from governmentdepartments and commercial companies, to small businesses and factories. LWP wasestablished in 1996 with the aim of identifying characteristics of effective workplacecommunication. Over the intervening decade, we have collected more than 1500interactions, ranging from two minute telephone calls to long meetings, and encom-passing more than 500 participants in 22 different workplaces.

The method of data collection can be broadly described as ethnographic. Typi-cally, after a period of participant observation to establish how the workplaceoperates, a group of volunteers use mini-disk recorders to capture a range of theireveryday work interactions over a period of two to three weeks. Some keep therecorders on their desks, while others carry the equipment as they move around theirworkplace. In addition, where possible, a series of regular workplace meetings isvideo-recorded.

Over the recording period we find that people increasingly ignore the microphonesand the video cameras (which are relatively small and fixed in place). They simplycome to be regarded as a part of the standard furniture. Thus, this methodology givesparticipants maximum control over the data collection process, whilst also allowingworkplace interactions to be recorded as unobtrusively as possible (see Holmes &Stubbe, 2003 and Marra, 2008 for more detail on the data collection process).Unusually in research on leadership, therefore, we use authentic recorded data as themain basis for our analyses.

Drawing on these data, the LWP has applied various sociolinguistic techniques tothe analysis of a range of aspects of workplace talk such as humour (Holmes &Marra, 2006), politeness (Holmes & Stubbe, 2003; Schnurr et al., 2007) andprofessional identity construction (Holmes, 2006; Vine, 2004). The current focus of


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LWP is leadership as a particular aspect of workplace talk (Holmes, 2007), a focuswhich begs an interdisciplinary approach. Drawing on leadership scholarship,discourse analysis is employed to examine how people actually do leadership ratherthan how they talk about doing it.

Interactional sociolinguistics

The theoretical framework, interactional sociolinguistics, is well established in socio-linguistics (a discipline which focuses on the analysis of language use in its socialcontext) and follows the traditions of two highly influential scholars, linguisticanthropologist John Gumperz (1982a, 1982b, 1996) and sociologist Erving Goffman(1963, 1974). Interactional sociolinguistics analyses discourse in its wider socio-cultural context, and draws on the analysts’ knowledge of the community and itsnorms in interpreting what is going on in an interaction (see Holmes, 2008; Schiffrin,1994; and Swann & Leap, 2000 for overviews of interactional sociolinguistics). Assuccinctly summarized by Schiffrin:

Goffman’s focus on social interaction complements Gumperz’s focus on situatedinference: Goffman describes the form and meaning of the social andinterpersonal contexts that provide presuppositions for the decoding of meaning.The understanding of those contexts can allow us to more fully identify thecontextual presuppositions that figure in hearers’ inferences of speaker’smeaning. (1994: 105)

What this means is that the approach benefits from both contextual information andfine-grained analytic tools to understand how meaning is negotiated between partici-pants in interaction. Using this approach, we analyse authentic everyday workplacetalk for evidence of the social relationships between speakers, examining both whatthey say and how they say it. The analysis involves paying particular attention to theclues people use to interpret conversational interaction within its ethnographiccontext. In practice, this includes such features as turn-taking and content, as well aspronoun use, discourse markers (e.g. oh, okay, well), pauses, hesitations and para-linguistic behaviour, amongst a much wider range of relevant features.

The ways in which relationships are negotiated and maintained through talk isclearly a key component of interactional sociolinguistics and it is, therefore, anappropriate framework within which to analyse leadership, a relational processinvolving leaders and those they work with, that is predicated on asymmetrical powerrelations. Someone may be in a position of power, but how does the way they talkreflect and reinforce their position as a leader or co-leader? The content of a leader’sturns are important, but we also consider the way a leader takes charge of aspects ofthe interaction such as turn-taking: a leader is likely to be in charge of selectingspeakers, for example, through the use of questions, as well as having control oftopics.

In the analysis that follows we consider some of these factors, along with the waythe leaders use humour and how they express approval and compliment their teamsin order to accomplish different facets of leadership. We draw on recordings madein three different commercial organizations based in New Zealand. The three organiz-ations were extracted from the much larger LWP corpus. In each case, the leaders in


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these organizations were selected because they were recommended to us by internaland external colleagues as exemplars of effective leaders (i.e. we take an apprecia-tive inquiry approach in selecting our data set [see Hammond, 1996]). The firstorganization, NZ Services,1 is the national office of a large multinational corpora-tion. The leaders (a section and project leader) head a team of managers who arecharged with establishing a new service centre. The second organization, NZ Produc-tions, has a staff of around 50 (including a sales office and a production site) and theleaders include the general manager as well as the business support manager andmanaging director of the larger group. The third organization, Kiwi Productions, isin the same industry as NZ Productions and has an in-house staff of around 25 includ-ing the CEO and department manager who are the focus here. Their point of differ-ence is that their ethos and goals are culturally oriented; they consider themselves tobe a Maori organization, representing and addressing an indigenous market. In eachorganization individual leaders recorded a range of their everyday one-to-one inter-actions. Video recordings were also made of a series of 6–12 weekly/monthlymeetings (the primary data source used in the examples below).

Task and maintenance leadership behaviours

Leadership psychologist researchers generally accept the recurrent salience of twomajor dimensions that underlie leadership behaviour: a dimension summarizingbehaviours directed at getting the group to get things done (i.e. ‘task behaviours’)and a dimension summarizing behaviours directed at looking after the people in thegroup (i.e. ‘maintenance’ behaviours) (Yukl, 2002). Drawing on the Ohio StateStudies, Schreisheim and Bird (1979) labelled these two underlying dimensions‘initiating structure’ and ‘consideration’. The former captured the extent to which aleader attempts to define his or her role and the roles of subordinates through suchbehaviours as planning, setting high standards, assigning tasks, expecting subordi-nates to stick to the rules and measuring performance. The latter dimension measuredthe extent to which the leader shows mutual trust between him- or herself and groupmembers, through such behaviours as expressing concern for their feelings, beingapproachable, and helping them with personal difficulties. Through the means oftheir managerial grid, Blake and Mouton (1987) ingrained this distinction in prac-titioners’ minds the world over with the need to balance a ‘concern for production’with a ‘concern for people’. In sociolinguistics the distinction is often labelledtask-oriented vs. relational behaviours.

In what follows we take each organization in turn and provide a range ofexamples from their meetings which illustrate co-leadership talk aimed at promot-ing task accomplishment and maintaining relationships within the group. Themeeting transcripts are rich with examples, although for the purpose of this articlewe present a few examples from each workplace to demonstrate the relevance andsalience of ordinary everyday talk in the exercise of effective leadership. From theanalysis we conducted of the transcripts, we identified a number of other types ofleadership behaviours that were performed by the co-leaders of each organizationsuch as visionary and inspirational behaviours. However, we have chosen to dwellon the task and maintenance behaviours in this article because they were the mostfrequently practised and because we wanted to use the limited space available to


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provide a sufficiently varied range of exemplars that could be duly compared andcontrasted.

Analysis

Co-leadership context number one: NZ Services

At the first organization, NZ Services, we explore the co-leadership of Clara, a seniormanager and section head, and Smithy, her deputy and special project manager, whowork closely and harmoniously together. The meetings that we examine involveClara, Smithy and a team that reports predominantly to Smithy as project manager.We recorded a series of meetings of Smithy’s team involving a project to re-engineera customer service centre. There are 14 people in the team including Clara andSmithy.

The promotion of task accomplishment is a role shared by Clara and Smithy,although Smithy takes primary responsibility for this. His questions during meetingsconsistently focus on practical issues with the aim of making sure the project is ontrack, that someone is taking responsibility for tasks and that everyone understandswhat needs to be done. Example 1 is taken from a meeting when the project to estab-lish an effective customer service centre is well underway. Each member of the teamis updating the group on progress within their areas. After each summary, Smithyasks practical questions.

Example 12

Context: update meeting of project team.

Smithy: so who’s going to follow that up? . . .Clara what about your projects last week? . . .have you got any issues that have come upsince you started working on it?

Smithy’s questions are direct and to the point. They are the type of questions someonein authority can ask and control the talk in the meeting by selecting both speakersand topics. Example 2 also comes from this meeting and shows that at other timesClara will ask the same type of questions.

Example 2Context: update meeting of project team.

Clara: and IS are doing the set up for the training room are they? . . .what are the issues about hitting this week’s dead- um milestone? . . .where are the gaps likely to be? . . .got any other issues?

At the next update meeting, Smithy checks at the beginning of the meeting that thejobs people had said they would do in the previous meeting have been done, includ-ing checking that Clara has completed her tasks. Again this reflects his role as aleader, with the authority to check that people have completed tasks.


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Smithy: action items from last week’s meeting umClara Banks was to arrange [system] access with Keely Coolingand you’ve done that?[brief discussion about this item]

Smithy: okay training meeting with Fraser um re the customer satisfaction courseTessa: yep + (we did that)Smithy: Tessa to follow up [name] for notification of the training system for

[system]Tessa: yep we’ve done that ++

Smithy’s practical task orientation is quite explicit as he checks that each task hasbeen completed. It is important for the progression of the project that each task iscompleted on time so that the next stage of the project can be initiated, and Smithyis careful to check that everything is on schedule.

Maintenance behaviours are also predominantly enacted by Smithy, althoughagain there is sharing of this role at NZ Services. Smithy consistently engages insmall talk and jokes with other members of the team before and after meetings; hebehaves and is treated as ‘one of the team’. They know about his personal life andhe knows about theirs. Clara is more removed, as typified in the team’s reference toher at times as ‘the Queen’ (see Holmes & Marra, 2006).

One way Clara contributes to the maintaining of relationships, however, andshares this maintenance role with Smithy, is through the expression of approval. InExample 4, Clara expresses approval at the team’s performance. Typically, approvalof this type is only appropriate from a leader.

Example 4Context: meeting of project team at beginning of project.

Clara: a couple of things about the projectwe really expecting a high performance work teamand I’m I’m really confident that we’ve got thatwith the make up of the people we’ve got here.

As well as expressing her expectations that they will achieve a good result with theproject, and so motivating, inspiring the team and promoting task accomplishment,she expresses her confidence in their individual abilities (I’m really confident . . .withthe make up of the people we’ve got here). This compliment builds good teamfeeling, enabling her to create team while still keeping her place and distance as thequeenly leader.

In a final example from this pair of leaders we see explicit evidence of the effec-tive co-leadership of Clara and Smithy in practice. Here we see orientation again toboth task and people-oriented goals, and also co-operation between the leaders in theway that the maintenance work is achieved (see Holmes & Marra, 2004; Holmes &Stubbe, 2003 for further examples and discussion). This example follows on fromExample 3.


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1. Smithy: um Vita was to meet with IS to determine er2. an implementation plan for the recording device3. Vita: yes done it +4. Smithy: [parenthetical tone] Vita’s done a um work plan just for that5. + um implementation6. Clara: great that’ll make the plan easier

In lines 1–2, Smithy reports on what the team agreed Vita should do by this meeting(a practical task oriented act), and in line 3, Vita confirms that she has indeedaccomplished the specified task. Since Clara makes no immediate response, Smithyproceeds to ‘prime’ Clara in line 4 to provide positive feedback to Vita (Vita’s donea work plan just for that+ um implementation). Clara responds appropriately in line6 with a positive and appreciative comment. Smithy’s diplomatic facilitative move ismade extremely discreetly, and Clara picks up his cue without missing a beat. Claradoes the overt maintenance work but this is set up by Smithy. This is skilled co-leadership at work – subtle, backgrounded, relational work, attending to workplacerelationships in the interests of the project’s progress.

At NZ Services, Smithy takes main responsibility for both task-allocation andmaintenance behaviours. Clara is more removed both practically and emotionally,but still takes on facets of both of these roles and the two leaders work togethereffectively to manage the team.

Co-leadership context number two: NZ Productions

At NZ Productions, there are three co-leaders: Seamus, the managing director,Jaeson, the general manager and Rob, the business development manager. All threeattend meetings of the senior management team, which provides the focus of ouranalysis. Eight other managers also attend these meetings, most of whom report toJaeson.

Part of the way task accomplishment can be promoted relates to planning and thesetting of high standards (as evidenced in Example 4 from Clara at NZ Services).Seamus and Rob are both actively involved in this aspect of leadership at NZProductions. At the time of recording, the company was about to go through somedrastic changes as they expanded. Rob, as business development manager, wasemployed to help plan and push the changes through because of his business develop-ment expertise. His job responsibilities revolve around this as he helps plan andstrategize the new direction for the company. In one management meeting hespends 30 minutes talking about the changes, motivating the management team andhighlighting the positive impact that these changes will have.

Seamus, as managing director, also takes on this role. He is highly energetic andmotivated to succeed and has high expectations of his staff in relation to the proposedchanges. The excerpt in Example 6 comes from a ten minute section of talk from amanagement team meeting where Seamus explains his expectations of the team inrelation to the changes taking place in the company.


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Example 6Context: meeting of senior management team.

1 Seamus: you guys are managing all areas which are gonna be affected . . .2 you’ve got to own your own areas and the change within them . . .3 promoting and embracing the change within our teams . . .4 the ones that want to do well5 the ones that want to embrace the change6 they’ll be jumping out of their skins to be part of it . . .7 nothing’s gonna hold us back here8 and if er if it does we’re gonna remove it9 we can’t get somewhere great

10 without having everyone on board11 everyone doing their best12 and without removing obstacles

Seamus uses strong persuasive language. He talks about promoting (line 3) andembracing change (lines 3 & 5) and the aim of getting somewhere great (line 9). Anyobstacles will be removed (lines 8 & 12). His expectations for his management teamand for the whole organization are clear.

On the practical side of task accomplishment, Jaeson is the senior manager whomost regularly steps into the implementation role in NZ Productions, although attimes Seamus also gets absorbed by practical issues relevant to getting things done(see Holmes & Chiles, in press). As general manager Jaeson is responsible formaking sure things happen. His questions during meetings anticipate problems andidentify potential issues to be resolved. In Example 7, the senior management teamhave been discussing a technical problem. Jaeson makes his philosophy andpractical orientation quite explicit.

Example 7Context: meeting of senior management team.

Jaeson: but what you’re saying Ivo umjust confirms what Rob’s team came up with you knowand that is shunt these problemsget them sorted as soon as possibleget them out of the systemdon’t go all the way down the systemand then discover that you gotta change it you know . . .um so and (I mean) we’ve talked about it for ageswe know that we’ve gotta do this

In this example, Jaeson is clearly signalling the importance of anticipating ways inwhich things might not run as smoothly as planned. Jaeson interprets Ivo’s comments(what you’re saying Ivo) and links them constructively to the analysis provided byRob’s team, providing an indirect compliment to Ivo in the process, as well asreinforcing the analysis undertaken by Rob’s team. Jaeson’s clear, direct summary isexpressed in bald imperative clauses (shunt these problems, get them sorted as soonas possible, get them out of the system) grammatical structures which emphasize his


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meaning. His views are equally clearly stated in simple direct language we know thatwe’ve gotta do this.

In terms of addressing people-oriented goals and maintenance behaviour, Jaesonis also clearly the frontrunner at NZ Productions. He is frequently the instigator ofhumour, a discourse strategy which takes account of the relational needs of the teamby enhancing solidarity and smoothing out tensions. In Example 8, Jaeson useshumour to ease tension in a situation where there is a general sense of frustrationabout an issue. They cannot get the builders, who are currently on site to constructan extension to the offices, to pour some concrete into a hole that needs filling.Jaeson’s facetious question suggests that the leaders will have to do the workthemselves.

Example 8Context: meeting of senior management.

Seamus: [exhales] builders are supposed to be back this weekJaeson: if he turns up can er we get him to pour concrete in that hole over thereSeamus: no he’s told me he’s not a concrete guy + he’s a builder +++Jaeson: what are you like with concreteRob: I’m okay on the end of a shovel

Rob contributes to the humour here, responding to Jaeson’s question. Seamus doesnot contribute and does not often instigate humour. Like Clara, however, he does ashare of the maintenance work by expressing approval. For instance he praises Harry,a department manager, for identifying problems and sorting them out, something heis urging everyone to do as they initiate the changes within the company.

As with NZ Services, the leadership at NZ Productions is shared, this timebetween three top level leaders. Planning and the setting of high standards are aspectsof the task accomplishment role which are shared between Seamus and Rob. Thepractical side of this leadership function is predominantly undertaken by the thirdleader Jaeson, with Seamus stepping up at times according to the context. Mainten-ance-related aspects are also mainly fulfilled by Jaeson; Seamus again taking a smallrole here when appropriate.

Co-leadership context number three: Kiwi Productions

The third workplace is a small commercial Maori organization, Kiwi Productions,operating according to Maori values, beliefs, and tikanga (‘ways of doing things’),and committed to furthering Maori goals. The managing director of Kiwi Produc-tions is Yvonne, who also founded the company with her husband. For the first fewyears, Yvonne was the only full-time employee but the company has grown andemployed approximately 25 people at the time we recorded the data examined here.Yvonne’s most senior manager is Quentin. We examine the way Yvonne and Quentinundertake co-leadership, examining data from general staff meetings involving allstaff in the organization as well as meetings of Quentin’s team.

Quentin is involved in day-to-day implementation and goal achievement, takingprimary responsibility for task accomplishment, although like Clara and Seamus,Yvonne is involved in planning and the setting of high standards. Yvonne has full


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confidence in Quentin’s abilities when it comes to getting things done and, as a result,only attends the meetings of his team when he is absent or if there is a particularissue on which she wants feedback from his individual team members. Quentin’sfocus on the practical side of things is illustrated in Example 9.

Example 9Context: meeting of Quentin’s team.

Quentin: that was something that I was thinking of for instance you knowyou wanted to like say we wanted money to do get a surveyon children about [product] you knowyou could send that ahead of timeand it could be something that they do so that when we get thereit’s actually has been done and completedit just saves time you know and and it doesn’t less interruptionor you know if we wanted to talk to maybe a a group of childrenthen you could still do that umbut it’s just a way of thinking ahead

Example 9 shows Quentin suggesting a practical way of getting feedback on some ofthe items that the company produces for children: conducting a survey with thesechildren. This is evidence of his practical orientation to the tasks they must undertake,and his focus on ways to help them achieve their goals effectively and efficiently.

Maintenance behaviours at Kiwi Productions are also more evident in Quentin’sdiscourse than Yvonne’s. He engages in small talk and jokes (classic relational behav-iour), especially before and after the team meetings, but this type of behaviour is alsoapparent when Quentin attends the general staff meetings. In Example 10, Quentinis reporting back on what has been happening in his unit to a meeting of all the staff.In a humorous way, he relates a phone conversation he had with a person from outsidethe company.

Example 10Context: meeting of all staff.

Quentin: when I spoke to er their manager on the phonewe were we’re talking away and then she saidum oh I (might) tell you a secret Quentinand so I thought oh (oh) this is good+ um I won’t tell anyone else

ALL: [laugh]Quentin: and she said um + we prefer to work with

[Kiwi Productions products]we can’t work with [other company’s products]so we we decided well that’s not actually their secret

ALL: [laugh]Quentin: that [Kiwi Productions products] are better than

better for them to work with(so) they tried working with the other [products]


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and they just can’t work with themso I think you know that’s a creditto the work that er Rangi and [the team] have done

Everyone laughs in response to Quentin’s humorous recounting of this story, and thehumour contributes to the group cohesion. Quentin uses the narrative as a lead-in toan explicit expression of approval of the team responsible for producing the productsin question, although the story itself reflects positively on the whole company. Thisfurther demonstrates maintenance behaviour from Quentin.

As with the other top level leaders, Clara and Seamus, Yvonne too exhibits main-tenance behaviour by expressing approval of the actions taken by her employees, seeExample 11.

Example 11Context: meeting of all staff.

Yvonne: we had a [subject] workshop in Maori that was taken bySheree and Pat that was amazing . . .all credit to them they were just fantastic I thought

This example comes from a meeting attended by all staff at Kiwi Productions.Yvonne is updating everyone on what has been happening since the last meeting andmakes a public statement about her positive evaluation of the work done by Shereeand others as she goes through her summary.

Another aspect of leadership related to maintenance behaviour which is relevantfor our Maori workplace arises from the cultural context. One component ofQuentin’s distinctive role is that of ‘cultural leader’. In their own words, Yvonneprovides the vision and the direction, while Quentin ensures it is achieved in a cultur-ally appropriate way. Quentin has strong Maori language skills and Yvonnecommented to us how Quentin’s control of the Maori language means he can speakfor the organization in Maori contexts, and that he can give occasions a ‘sense ofmoment’ (see Holmes, 2006).

It is also worth noting that in addition to a relative language proficiency issue withYvonne and Quentin, there is also a gender issue here. As noted, this is a Maoriorganization, operating according to Maori values and tikanga (‘ways of doingthings’). In most Maori tribal areas, overt leadership on many occasions is exercisedby men (Metge, 1995). Moreover, Quentin’s proficiency in te reo Maori is greaterthan Yvonne’s. On these two counts, then, it is appropriate for Quentin to take thelead in matters relating to Maori kawa or protocol. And this is exactly what he does.He is recognized as the cultural leader by all those who work at Kiwi Productions.He opens his team meetings with a karakia (a formal greeting in the form of a prayerused to open Maori events) and he ensures that Maori protocol is respected andfollowed as appropriate in all the organization’s activities. One interpretation is that,like a traditional Maori chief or rangatira, Quentin ‘weaves people together’ (theliteral meaning of rangatira) at Kiwi Productions, paying attention to their spiritual,relational and material needs. This also goes beyond the company, enabling them tooperate effectively within the wider context of the products and services they provideto the community.


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Effective co-leadership is exhibited in all three case studies, but for each organiz-ation the way that this is enacted varies. The higher level manager at Kiwi Produc-tions, Yvonne, is more removed from the practical side of task-allocation than themost senior manager at each of the other two organizations. The setting of highstandards is an aspect of task-allocation that all three of these senior managers takeon, although Seamus at NZ Productions has another manager who shares equalresponsibility for this. Clara, Seamus and Yvonne all play similar small roles whenit comes to maintenance behaviour. Yvonne’s second, Quentin, like the second-in-commands at NZ Services and NZ Productions, takes main responsibility for main-tenance aspects of leadership as well as for the practical side of task-allocation. AtKiwi Productions, the backdrop of the minority cultural norms which permeate theworkplace culture, adds an interesting dimension to the maintenance responsibilitiesthrough the cultural leadership role taken by Quentin.

Discussion and conclusionGail Fairhurst has noted that ‘discursive approaches allow leadership to surface inmyriad forms’ (2007: 5). By taking a discursive approach in this study we have beenable to identify how leadership is accomplished through communication not by onesole leader but by one or two other co-leaders. In this study we have focused on twoelements of leadership behaviour that have long ago been identified by leadershippsychologists as being central to leadership: task-oriented and maintenance-relatedbehaviour. The analysis has shown that in these organizational contexts, leadersorient themselves to different facets of leadership according to the specific contextin which they are operating as well as in a process of dynamic interplay with theirco-leaders. The exact ways in which this is instantiated differ from one organizationto another, as well as in different contexts within organizations. The dynamism ofthese enactments is readily apparent from the examples of talk we have presentedwhich reveal how at different points in the course of one mundane interaction, co-leaders share the performance of various facets of leadership. Initiatives andresponses flow back and forth rather than always proceeding downwards as in moretraditional models of leadership.

This exploratory study has been presented to encourage leadership researchers toconsider three research opportunities. First, following Gail Fairhurst, we invitescholars to begin experimenting with and investigating how a genuine and meaning-ful conversation might be created between the fields of leadership psychology anddiscursive leadership. More specifically, how might that conversation be translatedinto the empirical realm? Tourish has eloquently characterized this challenge as oneof getting leadership scholars ‘to engage in a more interpretive dance with each other’(2007: 1735). This study is presented in the spirit of showing what the first awkwardbut well-intentioned steps of that dance might look like.

Second, we encourage researchers to focus their attention upon the actualprocesses by which leadership is created through everyday talk between leaders andfollowers. Fairhurst (2007) has presented us with a helpful guide to seven differenttypes of discursive methods that can enable us to access and analyse these processes.In this study we have demonstrated the empirical application of just one of theseapproaches – interactional sociolinguistics. Svennevig (2008) has noted, ‘what is


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more so needed in the future are studies of managers in their day-to-day communi-cation with their colleagues and their employees’. He points out that the work thathas been done in this area has focused on expert–lay communication (such as thatbetween doctors and patients and social workers and clients) but not between leadersand followers. He also notes that the field of communication has traditionally focusedmainly on written texts such as business letters and annual reports but recently therehas been an encouraging upsurge in interest in analysing conversations and manage-ment. We hope that our study will encourage and guide others to conduct moreempirical work that analyses a variety of leadership conversations within a diverserange of organizational settings.

Our second research objective was to encourage researchers to actively considerthe possibility that leadership as something that can, and is frequently co-led by twoor more leaders within a particular group or organization. Customarily, our focus hasbeen on the sole leader at the top of the organization or at the apex of a group. It,therefore, follows that we need to move away from a preoccupation with the dyadicrelationship between leader and follower as the key unit of analysis in leadershipresearch and develop ways to examine leadership in a much more collective anddynamic manner which encompasses the discursive practices between a few leadersand their followers.

With respect to leadership practice, we hope that this article successfully high-lights three aspects of leadership development which do not usually receive theattention that we consider they warrant. First, it emphasizes the importance ofeveryday talk in the most mundane settings as an important means of creating leader-ship. Too often, when communication training is included within leadership develop-ment programmes, its main focus is on teaching and coaching leaders to make morepowerful and compelling presentations to key stakeholder groups, both within andoutside of their organizations. While it is important that these moments should beproperly capitalized upon, these tend to be relatively infrequent and are oftenconsidered as ‘special occasions’ and, therefore, are not seen as being entirelygenuine sources of communication. The problem with the preoccupation withspeeches and presentations is that leaders often miss valuable opportunities in whichto communicate leadership through everyday one-on-one and small group communi-cation, which followers generally consider to be more genuinely open and dialogiccommunication vehicles.

Communication training, therefore, needs to highlight the importance of regular,commonplace communication such as weekly meetings or impromptu corridorconversations, and encourage leaders to utilize these to their full effect. As Tourishhas observed, many of the models of leadership that are generally taught withinbusiness schools, most especially the ‘transformational leadership’model, convey thefalse impression that ‘leadership consists of a few easily learned skills, which obviatethe need for paying close attention to the discursive mechanism by which leaders andfollowers interact and take action with each other’ (2008: 5).

The idea of promoting conversations between leadership psychology and discur-sive approaches to leadership has important implications for leadership scholars notonly in terms of how they conduct research but also in terms of how they conducttheir teaching. Traditionally, leadership psychology has dominated the teaching ofleadership as reflected in the primary leadership texts, both at the undergraduate


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and postgraduate levels. It is imperative that we begin to find creative and mean-ingful ways to introduce discursive approaches to leadership into our teachingpractices. One of the authors, who has traditionally emphasized leadership psychol-ogy, has responded to this challenge by co-teaching alongside a discursive leader-ship researcher in an attempt to model the two approaches to understandingleadership and to show how they might complement but also conflict with eachother. The Fairhurst (2007) text provides a helpful teaching resource in this regard.As Chen has observed, ‘much is gained by embracing holism. In practice, under-standing issues from multiple perspectives is increasingly seen as a requirementfor leaders and leadership at all levels, my own experience being a case in point’(2008: 7).

The other taken-for-granted and under-trained area that we hope this article willhighlight for practitioners is the notion of co-leadership. We hope that leaders withinone organization or group will be encouraged to reflect upon and actively developtheir collective abilities at co-creating leadership through shared talk. This is some-thing that they may already be doing to varying degrees of effectiveness eitherconsciously or unconsciously. However, by simply showing them how this isaccomplished in three reasonably effective yet, by and large, unremarkable organiz-ations, it brings to the surface how simple, but frequently elusive, effective co-leadership talk can be. This points to the need for co-leadership teams to engage inleadership development collectively rather than on an individual basis as iscustomary. Importantly, we are not arguing that co-leadership communication is notsomething that can or should be rehearsed as this kind of approach can be readilyperceived as being inauthentic and disingenuous by followers, but it is an improvis-ational skill that can be improved through consistent practice and consciousexperimentation.

The analysis of real workplace interaction, the kind in which we all engage inthe everyday enactment of our work, rather than relying solely on interview orsurvey data, allows us to get closer to examining leadership in action. The discur-sive processes by which leadership is constructed and enacted are illuminated byexamining leaders at work interacting with each other and with their followers.Given the vital role of communication in the leadership process, the use ofdiscourse analysis, and in particular interactional sociolinguistics, enriches ourunderstanding of this process and highlights the way the leaders in the threeorganizations do effective leadership. Leadership is an on-going process, whichmust be constantly enacted, maintained and negotiated through language andcommunication. This article has demonstrated how Interactional Sociolinguisticanalysis can provide useful insights into how this process is accomplished and thushopefully bring leadership scholars and practitioners closer together within a cogni-tive realm that they can both readily relate to, in order to co-create better informedand more effective leadership.

Notes

1. All names of companies and individuals are pseudonyms designed to protect the identityof our participants. Small details irrelevant to the analysis have also been edited out orchanged where they might provide clues to an organization’s identity.


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2. Transcription conventions:

[..] editorial comment or deleted names. . . indicates that some of the transcription has been left out(..) unclear parts of the transcript+ pause of upto one secondo- cut off word

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Bernadette Vine is a Research Fellow on the Language in the Workplace Project andCorpus Manager for the Archive of New Zealand English, both based at the Schoolof Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, NewZealand. Bernadette’s research interests include workplace communication andleadership, and she is the author of Getting Things Done at Work: The Discourse ofPower in Workplace Interaction published by John Benjamins in 2004. [email:[email protected]]

Janet Holmes is Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Language in the Work-place Project at Victoria University of Wellington. She teaches sociolinguistics andhas published in many aspects of workplace communication, language and gender,


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and New Zealand English. Her most recent books are the Blackwell Handbook ofLanguage and Gender, co-edited with Miriam Meyerhoff, Power and Politeness inthe Workplace co-authored with Maria Stubbe, Language Matters, written withLaurie Bauer and Paul Warren, and Gendered Talk at Work published by Blackwellin 2006. The Language in the Workplace Project’s current research examines Maoriand Pakeha leaders’ discourse at work.

Meredith Marra is a Lecturer in Sociolinguistics within the School of Linguisticsand Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. Meredith’sprimary research interest is the discourse of workplace meetings (including her PhDresearch which investigated the language of decision making in business meetings),but she has also published in the areas of humour and gender in workplace inter-actions. As a Research Fellow for Victoria’s Language in the Workplace Project,Meredith’s current research explores cross-cultural dimensions of talk at work.

Dale Pfeifer is a Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Leadership, VictoriaUniversity of Wellington, New Zealand. Her research interests include indigenousleadership, cross-cultural leadership, inter-group leadership, public leadership andco-leadership. Dale has taught a postgraduate course in Leadership Studies.

Brad Jackson is the Fletcher Building Education Trust Professor of Leadership atThe University of Auckland Business School. He was formerly Director of the Centrefor the Study of Leadership and Head of School of the Management School atVictoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. Jackson has spoken to academicand business audiences throughout the world and has published four books –Management Gurus and Management Fashions, The Hero Manager, OrganisationalBehaviour in New Zealand and A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and ReasonablyCheap Book About Studying Leadership.


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Exploring Co Leadership TALK Through INTERACTIONAL SOCIOLinguistics

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