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 Leadership
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Exploring Co-leadership Talk Through Interactional Sociolinguistics

Bernadette Vine, Janet Holmes, Meredith Marra, Dale Pfeifer and Brad Jackson
Leadership 2008; 4; 339
DOI: 10.1177/1742715008092389

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Leadership

Exploring Co-leadership Talk Through

Interactional Sociolinguistics
Bernadette Vine, Janet Holmes, Meredith Marra, Dale Pfeifer and
Brad Jackson, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand and
The 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 has
recently been recognized as an important aspect of leadership practice, especially
at 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 empirical
study applies a specific form of discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics,
to three different organizational contexts. Because interactional sociolinguistics
focuses on the ways in which relationships are seen to be negotiated and maintained
through talk, it is well placed to analyse leadership, a relational process involving
leaders and followers that is predicated on asymmetrical power relations. The
analysis demonstrates how successful co-leaders cooperate, dynamically shifting
roles and integrating their leadership performance to encompass task-related and
maintenance-related functions of leadership.
Keywords co-leadership; discourse analysis; interactional sociolinguistics

Introduction
This article examines the concept of co-leadership, the process by which two leaders
in vertically contiguous positions share the responsibilities of leadership. While the
existence of co-leadership has always been implicitly recognized, it has received
remarkably little attention in the way of theoretical conceptualization, let alone
empirical analysis. In the popular imagination, the names of principal leaders like
Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela come
readily 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, to
use current parlance, their ‘Co-leaders’? They remain largely unknown, unless they
emerge 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 implicitly
understand that these individuals were probably vital in the acknowledged success

Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore)
Vol 4(3): 339–360 DOI: 10.1177/1742715008092389 http://lea.sagepub.com
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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 leadership
scholars. Building on recent work on co-leadership, it is to this long overdue task
that we turn in this article.
We begin by introducing the concept of co-leadership, what it captures and
contributes and how it might be better understood. To this end, we highlight a recent
clarion 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 emergent
tradition that is rapidly gaining momentum. Guided by this call, we draw upon inter-
actional sociolinguistics, a discursive approach utilized by the Wellington Language
in the Workplace Project (LWP) team to better understand a variety of workplace talk
practices within numerous organizational contexts. Having turned its attention to
leadership practices, LWP has endeavoured in an exploratory manner to enrich its
discursive analyses with the integration of well-established concepts derived from
leadership psychology.
This article presents the findings from empirical work that has been conducted in
three SME organizations based in New Zealand. Analysing recorded instances of
leadership performances from a sociolinguistic perspective, we exemplify the ways
in which co-leadership is enacted in these distinctive organizational contexts. Our
primary focus is to examine the speech practices of leaders in their interactions with
their followers to show how two leadership functions – task and maintenance
activities – are actually co-performed. Moreover, while we detect certain similarities
in the ways that co-leadership is achieved linguistically, there are some important
differences in practice, which are engendered by the individual leaders and the
specific 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 integrate
discursive leadership approaches with concepts derived from leadership psychology,
pointing to the potential opportunities for further research as well as the problems
that 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 leaders
in vertically contiguous positions who share the responsibilities of leadership. They
describe co-leaders as ‘truly exceptional deputies – extremely talented men and
women, 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 managing
director–artistic director partnerships. Heenan and Bennis observe that ‘we continue
to be mesmerized by celebrity and preoccupied with being No. 1’. However, this
tendency overvalues the contribution of the general or CEO or president and

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simultaneously depreciates the contributions of subordinates. ‘The genius of our age

is truly collaborative’, they write, ‘the shrewd leaders of the future are those who
recognize the significance of creating alliances with others whose fates are correlated
with their own’ (Heenan & Bennis, 1999: viii). When it comes to leadership an old
cliché may well ring true: ‘two heads are better than one’.
Although co-leadership has yet to undergo rigorous analysis, several scholars
suggest that it improves leadership effectiveness (Alvaez & Svejenova, 2005; Heenan
& Bennis, 1999; O’Toole et al., 2002; Sally, 2002). Upper Echelons Theory, as
conceived by Hambrick and Manson (1984), provides us with some insight into why
this might be. This theory suggests that leadership is an important ingredient of
organizational performance; however, the complexity of organizations makes it
improbable that one leader alone will be able to exert great influence over all
members 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 notable
exception, 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 important
responsibility of top-level organizational leaders is enabling the organization to adapt
to this complex environment (Boal & Hooijberg, 2000). The skills required to
successfully negotiate this increasingly complex environment are extensive and may
be too broad to be possessed by one leader (Alvarez & Svejenova, 2005; Story, 2005).
Collaboration at the senior leadership level improves the success of the strategic
organizational partnership (Huxham & Vangen, 2000), allowing top corporate
managers adequate attention for different aspects of the leadership task including
day-to-day operational activities and long-term strategy (Bass, 1990). It also gives
the organization an opportunity to continue, even when one of the top leaders leaves
the organization.

Normative and methodological issues

In the past couple of years we have witnessed growing interest in developing
follower-centred perspectives on leadership (e.g. Shamir et al., 2007). Jackson and
Parry (2008) suggest that we can think of the various theories which advocate that
followers do and should act as leaders along a continuum. At the more conservative
end 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 of
individuals or group of individuals, such as a top management team. Further along
the continuum is ‘shared leadership’, the notion that the responsibility for guiding a
group can rotate among its members, depending on the demands of the situation and
the particular skills and resources required at that moment (Raelin, 2003). Even
further along the continuum is the notion of ‘distributed leadership’, in which the
team leads its work collectively and independently of formal leaders, by creating
norms of behaviour, contribution and performance and by supporting each other and
maintaining the morale of the group (Day et al, 2004; Gronn, 2002; Nielsen, 2004).
Distributed leadership theories tend to be more normative than descriptive. They
talk about how things should be rather than how they necessarily are. But they
have done an important service, as Fletcher and Käufer note, ‘shared approaches to

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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 situational
factors’ (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 the
challenge 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 be
shared between members of a team. What we have regularly observed in many of the
empirical contexts we have studied, is that leaders often do collaborate with their
followers, but not with all organizational members. Instead, as recognized by Leader
Member Exchange (LMX) theory they frequently collaborate or co-lead with their
closest allies, who invariably also hold formal leadership positions within the
organization (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 between
team members is not always necessary – and does not necessarily work – in all
circumstances.
On the methodological front, leadership research has tended to maintain a narrow
focus on its unit of analysis, concentrating on dyads or individual pairs of leaders
and followers (Kark & Shamir, 2002; Yammarino et al., 2005; Yukl, 1999). Conse-
quently, leadership scholars have come to understand leadership as a series of dyadic
interactions occurring within a group, over time (Yammarino et al., 1998). How a
leader 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 leaders
might influence groups of followers in an empirical context.
In the past, leadership research has tended to rely predominantly on information
gathered 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 and
psychology of executives rather than on their actual behaviour and their activities in
performing the tasks prescribed by their roles’ (2005: 3). Other scholars have also
argued that more attention needs to be given to precisely how leadership manifests
itself 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 methodological
concerns by examining the actual speech of leaders in their daily interactions with
others in their workplaces. Following on from Cuno, who states that ‘leaders lead
through their words’ (2005: 205), we believe that studying the words of leaders
enables 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 managerial
work-activities, rather than outside of these. Building on Uhl-Bien’s relational theory
of leadership (Uhl-Bien, 2006), they show in their ethnographic study of managerial
work conducted within a Swedish bank how leadership is accomplished through
talk-in-interaction, highlighting some of the micro-level rhetorical work through
which leadership is accomplished.

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

Bridging psychological and discursive approaches to leadership

In her timely and highly constructive text, Gail Fairhurst (2007) has identified and
distinguished 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 within
the cognitive realm of human endeavour. The more recent yet rapidly growing
tradition, ‘Discursive leadership’, is by contrast heavily oriented towards discourse
and 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 practices
within specific local contexts. The language that is being used by the actors and the
interaction processes, therefore, becomes the central concern for the analyst (Potter
& Wetherell, 1987). With its focus upon exploring forms of co-leadership talk, the
present study will be concerned with this type of discourse, also the domain of an
interactional sociolinguistic approach. The other broad type, ‘Discourse’ (or big ‘D’
Discourse) relates to general and enduring systems for the formation and articulation
of ideas in a historically situated time. This type of approach is probably best
exemplified by the genealogical work of Michel Foucault (1982, 1988).
Associated with these two broad types of discourse, Fairhurst (2007) identifies a
wide range of techniques for analysing discourse or ‘discursive approaches’ that
include sociolinguistics, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, speech act
schematics, interaction analysis and semiotics. In this study we will be using a tech-
nique called interactional sociolinguistics which will be discussed in the next section
of the article. From within the extensive scope of approaches which fit under the
umbrella term of discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics fits squarely in the
centre of the range, with elements of both the top down and bottom up approaches
found at the extremes. It is ethnographically oriented, taking account of the analyst’s
understanding of the socio-cultural context of the interaction under investigation, and
it 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 psychology
nor discursive leadership offers the better ‘lens’ through which to view and make
sense of leadership. Each tradition has something to offer the other, although
examples of work that bridge these two traditions are still few and far between. In
effect, we still have two distinctive ‘camps’ of leadership scholars – each camp
favouring one approach to the exclusion of the other with, somewhat ironically, very
little discourse taking place between the two except that which is couched as
critique. 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, has
used leadership psychology as both a ‘punch-bag’ to vent frustration with existing
conceptions of leadership and as a ‘springboard’ into their specific discursive
approach. While we understand how this state of affairs may have come about, we
agree with Fairhurst’s conclusion that ‘Discursive leadership and leadership psychol-
ogy are thus usefully conceived as complementary Discourses or alternative ways of
tackling and knowing about leadership’ (2007: 11). The following study attempts to
find a complementary connection in its concern with co-leadership which has
emerged primarily from the field of leadership psychology and has been explored in
only 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 tried
to bridge the gap between these two traditions by bringing together leadership
psychology scholars with (applied) linguistics scholars, in order not only to share
their knowledge, but to create a genuinely open and constructive discourse, and to
create a blended, more holistic, understanding of leadership dynamics within a range
of organizational contexts.
The interactions that we analyse in this study are drawn from the database which
includes a wide variety of New Zealand workplaces, ranging from government
departments and commercial companies, to small businesses and factories. LWP was
established in 1996 with the aim of identifying characteristics of effective workplace
communication. Over the intervening decade, we have collected more than 1500
interactions, 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 workplace
operates, a group of volunteers use mini-disk recorders to capture a range of their
everyday work interactions over a period of two to three weeks. Some keep the
recorders on their desks, while others carry the equipment as they move around their
workplace. In addition, where possible, a series of regular workplace meetings is
video-recorded.
Over the recording period we find that people increasingly ignore the microphones
and the video cameras (which are relatively small and fixed in place). They simply
come to be regarded as a part of the standard furniture. Thus, this methodology gives
participants maximum control over the data collection process, whilst also allowing
workplace 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 the
main basis for our analyses.
Drawing on these data, the LWP has applied various sociolinguistic techniques to
the analysis of a range of aspects of workplace talk such as humour (Holmes &
Marra, 2006), politeness (Holmes & Stubbe, 2003; Schnurr et al., 2007) and
professional 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 focus

which begs an interdisciplinary approach. Drawing on leadership scholarship,
discourse analysis is employed to examine how people actually do leadership rather
than 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 social
context) and follows the traditions of two highly influential scholars, linguistic
anthropologist 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 its
norms in interpreting what is going on in an interaction (see Holmes, 2008; Schiffrin,
1994; and Swann & Leap, 2000 for overviews of interactional sociolinguistics). As
succinctly summarized by Schiffrin:
Goffman’s focus on social interaction complements Gumperz’s focus on situated
inference: Goffman describes the form and meaning of the social and
interpersonal contexts that provide presuppositions for the decoding of meaning.
The understanding of those contexts can allow us to more fully identify the
contextual presuppositions that figure in hearers’ inferences of speaker’s
meaning. (1994: 105)
What this means is that the approach benefits from both contextual information and
fine-grained analytic tools to understand how meaning is negotiated between partici-
pants in interaction. Using this approach, we analyse authentic everyday workplace
talk for evidence of the social relationships between speakers, examining both what
they say and how they say it. The analysis involves paying particular attention to the
clues people use to interpret conversational interaction within its ethnographic
context. In practice, this includes such features as turn-taking and content, as well as
pronoun 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 is
clearly a key component of interactional sociolinguistics and it is, therefore, an
appropriate framework within which to analyse leadership, a relational process
involving leaders and those they work with, that is predicated on asymmetrical power
relations. Someone may be in a position of power, but how does the way they talk
reflect and reinforce their position as a leader or co-leader? The content of a leader’s
turns are important, but we also consider the way a leader takes charge of aspects of
the interaction such as turn-taking: a leader is likely to be in charge of selecting
speakers, for example, through the use of questions, as well as having control of
topics.
In the analysis that follows we consider some of these factors, along with the way
the leaders use humour and how they express approval and compliment their teams
in order to accomplish different facets of leadership. We draw on recordings made
in 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 internal

and 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 first
organization, 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 are
charged 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 the
leaders include the general manager as well as the business support manager and
managing director of the larger group. The third organization, Kiwi Productions, is
in 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 to
be a Māori organization, representing and addressing an indigenous market. In each
organization 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/monthly
meetings (the primary data source used in the examples below).

Task and maintenance leadership behaviours

Leadership psychologist researchers generally accept the recurrent salience of two
major dimensions that underlie leadership behaviour: a dimension summarizing
behaviours 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 the
group (i.e. ‘maintenance’ behaviours) (Yukl, 2002). Drawing on the Ohio State
Studies, Schreisheim and Bird (1979) labelled these two underlying dimensions
‘initiating structure’ and ‘consideration’. The former captured the extent to which a
leader attempts to define his or her role and the roles of subordinates through such
behaviours as planning, setting high standards, assigning tasks, expecting subordi-
nates to stick to the rules and measuring performance. The latter dimension measured
the extent to which the leader shows mutual trust between him- or herself and group
members, through such behaviours as expressing concern for their feelings, being
approachable, and helping them with personal difficulties. Through the means of
their 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 labelled
task-oriented vs. relational behaviours.
In what follows we take each organization in turn and provide a range of
examples from their meetings which illustrate co-leadership talk aimed at promot-
ing task accomplishment and maintaining relationships within the group. The
meeting transcripts are rich with examples, although for the purpose of this article
we present a few examples from each workplace to demonstrate the relevance and
salience of ordinary everyday talk in the exercise of effective leadership. From the
analysis we conducted of the transcripts, we identified a number of other types of
leadership behaviours that were performed by the co-leaders of each organization
such as visionary and inspirational behaviours. However, we have chosen to dwell
on the task and maintenance behaviours in this article because they were the most
frequently 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 and
contrasted.

Analysis
Co-leadership context number one: NZ Services
At the first organization, NZ Services, we explore the co-leadership of Clara, a senior
manager and section head, and Smithy, her deputy and special project manager, who
work closely and harmoniously together. The meetings that we examine involve
Clara, 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-engineer
a customer service centre. There are 14 people in the team including Clara and
Smithy.
The promotion of task accomplishment is a role shared by Clara and Smithy,
although Smithy takes primary responsibility for this. His questions during meetings
consistently focus on practical issues with the aim of making sure the project is on
track, that someone is taking responsibility for tasks and that everyone understands
what 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 team
is updating the group on progress within their areas. After each summary, Smithy
asks 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 up
since you started working on it?
Smithy’s questions are direct and to the point. They are the type of questions someone
in authority can ask and control the talk in the meeting by selecting both speakers
and topics. Example 2 also comes from this meeting and shows that at other times
Clara will ask the same type of questions.

Example 2
Context: 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 the
jobs 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 a
leader, with the authority to check that people have completed tasks.

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Example 3
Context: update meeting of project team.
Smithy: action items from last week’s meeting um
Clara Banks was to arrange [system] access with Keely Cooling
and you’ve done that?
[brief discussion about this item]
Smithy: okay training meeting with Fraser um re the customer satisfaction course
Tessa: 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 has
been completed. It is important for the progression of the project that each task is
completed on time so that the next stage of the project can be initiated, and Smithy
is careful to check that everything is on schedule.
Maintenance behaviours are also predominantly enacted by Smithy, although
again there is sharing of this role at NZ Services. Smithy consistently engages in
small talk and jokes with other members of the team before and after meetings; he
behaves and is treated as ‘one of the team’. They know about his personal life and
he knows about theirs. Clara is more removed, as typified in the team’s reference to
her at times as ‘the Queen’ (see Holmes & Marra, 2006).
One way Clara contributes to the maintaining of relationships, however, and
shares this maintenance role with Smithy, is through the expression of approval. In
Example 4, Clara expresses approval at the team’s performance. Typically, approval
of this type is only appropriate from a leader.

Example 4
Context: meeting of project team at beginning of project.
Clara: a couple of things about the project
we really expecting a high performance work team
and I’m I’m really confident that we’ve got that
with the make up of the people we’ve got here.
As well as expressing her expectations that they will achieve a good result with the
project, and so motivating, inspiring the team and promoting task accomplishment,
she expresses her confidence in their individual abilities (I’m really confident . . .with
the make up of the people we’ve got here). This compliment builds good team
feeling, enabling her to create team while still keeping her place and distance as the
queenly 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 to
both task and people-oriented goals, and also co-operation between the leaders in the
way that the maintenance work is achieved (see Holmes & Marra, 2004; Holmes &
Stubbe, 2003 for further examples and discussion). This example follows on from
Example 3.

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Example 5
Context: update meeting of project team.
1. Smithy: um Vita was to meet with IS to determine er
2. an implementation plan for the recording device
3. Vita: yes done it +
4. Smithy: [parenthetical tone] Vita’s done a um work plan just for that
5. + um implementation
6. 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 indeed
accomplished the specified task. Since Clara makes no immediate response, Smithy
proceeds to ‘prime’ Clara in line 4 to provide positive feedback to Vita (Vita’s done
a work plan just for that+ um implementation). Clara responds appropriately in line
6 with a positive and appreciative comment. Smithy’s diplomatic facilitative move is
made extremely discreetly, and Clara picks up his cue without missing a beat. Clara
does the overt maintenance work but this is set up by Smithy. This is skilled co-
leadership at work – subtle, backgrounded, relational work, attending to workplace
relationships in the interests of the project’s progress.
At NZ Services, Smithy takes main responsibility for both task-allocation and
maintenance behaviours. Clara is more removed both practically and emotionally,
but still takes on facets of both of these roles and the two leaders work together
effectively 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 three
attend meetings of the senior management team, which provides the focus of our
analysis. Eight other managers also attend these meetings, most of whom report to
Jaeson.
Part of the way task accomplishment can be promoted relates to planning and the
setting 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 NZ
Productions. At the time of recording, the company was about to go through some
drastic changes as they expanded. Rob, as business development manager, was
employed 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 and
strategize the new direction for the company. In one management meeting he
spends 30 minutes talking about the changes, motivating the management team and
highlighting the positive impact that these changes will have.
Seamus, as managing director, also takes on this role. He is highly energetic and
motivated to succeed and has high expectations of his staff in relation to the proposed
changes. The excerpt in Example 6 comes from a ten minute section of talk from a
management team meeting where Seamus explains his expectations of the team in
relation to the changes taking place in the company.

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Example 6
Context: 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 well
5 the ones that want to embrace the change
6 they’ll be jumping out of their skins to be part of it . . .
7 nothing’s gonna hold us back here
8 and if er if it does we’re gonna remove it
9 we can’t get somewhere great
10 without having everyone on board
11 everyone doing their best
12 and without removing obstacles
Seamus uses strong persuasive language. He talks about promoting (line 3) and
embracing change (lines 3 & 5) and the aim of getting somewhere great (line 9). Any
obstacles will be removed (lines 8 & 12). His expectations for his management team
and for the whole organization are clear.
On the practical side of task accomplishment, Jaeson is the senior manager who
most regularly steps into the implementation role in NZ Productions, although at
times Seamus also gets absorbed by practical issues relevant to getting things done
(see Holmes & Chiles, in press). As general manager Jaeson is responsible for
making sure things happen. His questions during meetings anticipate problems and
identify potential issues to be resolved. In Example 7, the senior management team
have been discussing a technical problem. Jaeson makes his philosophy and
practical orientation quite explicit.

Example 7
Context: meeting of senior management team.
Jaeson: but what you’re saying Ivo um
just confirms what Rob’s team came up with you know
and that is shunt these problems
get them sorted as soon as possible
get them out of the system
don’t go all the way down the system
and then discover that you gotta change it you know . . .
um so and (I mean) we’ve talked about it for ages
we know that we’ve gotta do this
In this example, Jaeson is clearly signalling the importance of anticipating ways in
which 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 by
Rob’s team, providing an indirect compliment to Ivo in the process, as well as
reinforcing the analysis undertaken by Rob’s team. Jaeson’s clear, direct summary is
expressed in bald imperative clauses (shunt these problems, get them sorted as soon
as 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 that
we’ve gotta do this.
In terms of addressing people-oriented goals and maintenance behaviour, Jaeson
is also clearly the frontrunner at NZ Productions. He is frequently the instigator of
humour, a discourse strategy which takes account of the relational needs of the team
by enhancing solidarity and smoothing out tensions. In Example 8, Jaeson uses
humour to ease tension in a situation where there is a general sense of frustration
about an issue. They cannot get the builders, who are currently on site to construct
an 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 work
themselves.

Example 8
Context: meeting of senior management.
Seamus: [exhales] builders are supposed to be back this week
Jaeson: if he turns up can er we get him to pour concrete in that hole over there
Seamus: no he’s told me he’s not a concrete guy + he’s a builder +++
Jaeson: what are you like with concrete
Rob: I’m okay on the end of a shovel
Rob contributes to the humour here, responding to Jaeson’s question. Seamus does
not contribute and does not often instigate humour. Like Clara, however, he does a
share of the maintenance work by expressing approval. For instance he praises Harry,
a department manager, for identifying problems and sorting them out, something he
is urging everyone to do as they initiate the changes within the company.
As with NZ Services, the leadership at NZ Productions is shared, this time
between three top level leaders. Planning and the setting of high standards are aspects
of the task accomplishment role which are shared between Seamus and Rob. The
practical side of this leadership function is predominantly undertaken by the third
leader 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 small
role here when appropriate.

Co-leadership context number three: Kiwi Productions

The third workplace is a small commercial Māori organization, Kiwi Productions,
operating according to Māori values, beliefs, and tikanga (‘ways of doing things’),
and committed to furthering Māori goals. The managing director of Kiwi Produc-
tions is Yvonne, who also founded the company with her husband. For the first few
years, Yvonne was the only full-time employee but the company has grown and
employed 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 Quentin
undertake co-leadership, examining data from general staff meetings involving all
staff in the organization as well as meetings of Quentin’s team.
Quentin is involved in day-to-day implementation and goal achievement, taking
primary 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 particular
issue on which she wants feedback from his individual team members. Quentin’s
focus on the practical side of things is illustrated in Example 9.

Example 9
Context: meeting of Quentin’s team.
Quentin: that was something that I was thinking of for instance you know
you wanted to like say we wanted money to do get a survey
on children about [product] you know
you could send that ahead of time
and it could be something that they do so that when we get there
it’s actually has been done and completed
it just saves time you know and and it doesn’t less interruption
or you know if we wanted to talk to maybe a a group of children
then you could still do that um
but it’s just a way of thinking ahead
Example 9 shows Quentin suggesting a practical way of getting feedback on some of
the items that the company produces for children: conducting a survey with these
children. 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’s
discourse 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 also
apparent when Quentin attends the general staff meetings. In Example 10, Quentin
is 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 outside
the company.

Example 10
Context: meeting of all staff.
Quentin: when I spoke to er their manager on the phone
we were we’re talking away and then she said
um oh I (might) tell you a secret Quentin
and 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 them

so I think you know that’s a credit
to the work that er Rangi and [the team] have done
Everyone laughs in response to Quentin’s humorous recounting of this story, and the
humour contributes to the group cohesion. Quentin uses the narrative as a lead-in to
an explicit expression of approval of the team responsible for producing the products
in question, although the story itself reflects positively on the whole company. This
further 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, see
Example 11.

Example 11
Context: meeting of all staff.
Yvonne: we had a [subject] workshop in Māori that was taken by
Sheree 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 and
makes a public statement about her positive evaluation of the work done by Sheree
and others as she goes through her summary.
Another aspect of leadership related to maintenance behaviour which is relevant
for our Māori workplace arises from the cultural context. One component of
Quentin’s distinctive role is that of ‘cultural leader’. In their own words, Yvonne
provides the vision and the direction, while Quentin ensures it is achieved in a cultur-
ally appropriate way. Quentin has strong Māori language skills and Yvonne
commented to us how Quentin’s control of the Māori language means he can speak
for the organization in Māori contexts, and that he can give occasions a ‘sense of
moment’ (see Holmes, 2006).
It is also worth noting that in addition to a relative language proficiency issue with
Yvonne and Quentin, there is also a gender issue here. As noted, this is a Māori
organization, operating according to Māori values and tikanga (‘ways of doing
things’). In most Māori tribal areas, overt leadership on many occasions is exercised
by men (Metge, 1995). Moreover, Quentin’s proficiency in te reo Māori is greater
than Yvonne’s. On these two counts, then, it is appropriate for Quentin to take the
lead in matters relating to Māori 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 prayer
used to open Māori events) and he ensures that Māori protocol is respected and
followed as appropriate in all the organization’s activities. One interpretation is that,
like a traditional Māori chief or rangatira, Quentin ‘weaves people together’ (the
literal meaning of rangatira) at Kiwi Productions, paying attention to their spiritual,
relational and material needs. This also goes beyond the company, enabling them to
operate effectively within the wider context of the products and services they provide
to 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 the
most senior manager at each of the other two organizations. The setting of high
standards is an aspect of task-allocation that all three of these senior managers take
on, although Seamus at NZ Productions has another manager who shares equal
responsibility for this. Clara, Seamus and Yvonne all play similar small roles when
it 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. At
Kiwi Productions, the backdrop of the minority cultural norms which permeate the
workplace culture, adds an interesting dimension to the maintenance responsibilities
through the cultural leadership role taken by Quentin.

Discussion and conclusion

Gail Fairhurst has noted that ‘discursive approaches allow leadership to surface in
myriad forms’ (2007: 5). By taking a discursive approach in this study we have been
able to identify how leadership is accomplished through communication not by one
sole leader but by one or two other co-leaders. In this study we have focused on two
elements of leadership behaviour that have long ago been identified by leadership
psychologists as being central to leadership: task-oriented and maintenance-related
behaviour. The analysis has shown that in these organizational contexts, leaders
orient themselves to different facets of leadership according to the specific context
in which they are operating as well as in a process of dynamic interplay with their
co-leaders. The exact ways in which this is instantiated differ from one organization
to another, as well as in different contexts within organizations. The dynamism of
these enactments is readily apparent from the examples of talk we have presented
which reveal how at different points in the course of one mundane interaction, co-
leaders share the performance of various facets of leadership. Initiatives and
responses flow back and forth rather than always proceeding downwards as in more
traditional models of leadership.
This exploratory study has been presented to encourage leadership researchers to
consider three research opportunities. First, following Gail Fairhurst, we invite
scholars to begin experimenting with and investigating how a genuine and meaning-
ful conversation might be created between the fields of leadership psychology and
discursive leadership. More specifically, how might that conversation be translated
into the empirical realm? Tourish has eloquently characterized this challenge as one
of 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 awkward
but well-intentioned steps of that dance might look like.
Second, we encourage researchers to focus their attention upon the actual
processes by which leadership is created through everyday talk between leaders and
followers. Fairhurst (2007) has presented us with a helpful guide to seven different
types 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 these
approaches – 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 that
has been done in this area has focused on expert–lay communication (such as that
between doctors and patients and social workers and clients) but not between leaders
and followers. He also notes that the field of communication has traditionally focused
mainly on written texts such as business letters and annual reports but recently there
has been an encouraging upsurge in interest in analysing conversations and manage-
ment. We hope that our study will encourage and guide others to conduct more
empirical work that analyses a variety of leadership conversations within a diverse
range of organizational settings.
Our second research objective was to encourage researchers to actively consider
the possibility that leadership as something that can, and is frequently co-led by two
or more leaders within a particular group or organization. Customarily, our focus has
been 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 dyadic
relationship between leader and follower as the key unit of analysis in leadership
research and develop ways to examine leadership in a much more collective and
dynamic manner which encompasses the discursive practices between a few leaders
and 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 the
attention that we consider they warrant. First, it emphasizes the importance of
everyday 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 more
powerful and compelling presentations to key stakeholder groups, both within and
outside of their organizations. While it is important that these moments should be
properly capitalized upon, these tend to be relatively infrequent and are often
considered as ‘special occasions’ and, therefore, are not seen as being entirely
genuine sources of communication. The problem with the preoccupation with
speeches and presentations is that leaders often miss valuable opportunities in which
to communicate leadership through everyday one-on-one and small group communi-
cation, which followers generally consider to be more genuinely open and dialogic
communication vehicles.
Communication training, therefore, needs to highlight the importance of regular,
commonplace communication such as weekly meetings or impromptu corridor
conversations, and encourage leaders to utilize these to their full effect. As Tourish
has observed, many of the models of leadership that are generally taught within
business schools, most especially the ‘transformational leadership’ model, convey the
false impression that ‘leadership consists of a few easily learned skills, which obviate
the need for paying close attention to the discursive mechanism by which leaders and
followers 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 not
only in terms of how they conduct research but also in terms of how they conduct
their teaching. Traditionally, leadership psychology has dominated the teaching of
leadership 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 teaching
practices. 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 understanding
leadership and to show how they might complement but also conflict with each
other. 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 requirement
for 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 will
highlight for practitioners is the notion of co-leadership. We hope that leaders within
one organization or group will be encouraged to reflect upon and actively develop
their collective abilities at co-creating leadership through shared talk. This is some-
thing that they may already be doing to varying degrees of effectiveness either
consciously or unconsciously. However, by simply showing them how this is
accomplished 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 in
leadership development collectively rather than on an individual basis as is
customary. Importantly, we are not arguing that co-leadership communication is not
something that can or should be rehearsed as this kind of approach can be readily
perceived as being inauthentic and disingenuous by followers, but it is an improvis-
ational skill that can be improved through consistent practice and conscious
experimentation.
The analysis of real workplace interaction, the kind in which we all engage in
the everyday enactment of our work, rather than relying solely on interview or
survey data, allows us to get closer to examining leadership in action. The discur-
sive processes by which leadership is constructed and enacted are illuminated by
examining leaders at work interacting with each other and with their followers.
Given the vital role of communication in the leadership process, the use of
discourse analysis, and in particular interactional sociolinguistics, enriches our
understanding of this process and highlights the way the leaders in the three
organizations do effective leadership. Leadership is an on-going process, which
must be constantly enacted, maintained and negotiated through language and
communication. This article has demonstrated how Interactional Sociolinguistic
analysis can provide useful insights into how this process is accomplished and thus
hopefully 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 informed
and more effective leadership.

Notes
1. All names of companies and individuals are pseudonyms designed to protect the identity
of our participants. Small details irrelevant to the analysis have also been edited out or
changed 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 second
o- cut off word

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Bernadette Vine is a Research Fellow on the Language in the Workplace Project and
Corpus Manager for the Archive of New Zealand English, both based at the School
of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, New
Zealand. Bernadette’s research interests include workplace communication and
leadership, and she is the author of Getting Things Done at Work: The Discourse of
Power 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 and
has 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 of
Language and Gender, co-edited with Miriam Meyerhoff, Power and Politeness in
the Workplace co-authored with Maria Stubbe, Language Matters, written with
Laurie Bauer and Paul Warren, and Gendered Talk at Work published by Blackwell
in 2006. The Language in the Workplace Project’s current research examines Māori
and Pakeha leaders’ discourse at work.
Meredith Marra is a Lecturer in Sociolinguistics within the School of Linguistics
and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. Meredith’s
primary research interest is the discourse of workplace meetings (including her PhD
research 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, Victoria
University of Wellington, New Zealand. Her research interests include indigenous
leadership, cross-cultural leadership, inter-group leadership, public leadership and
co-leadership. Dale has taught a postgraduate course in Leadership Studies.
Brad Jackson is the Fletcher Building Education Trust Professor of Leadership at
The University of Auckland Business School. He was formerly Director of the Centre
for the Study of Leadership and Head of School of the Management School at
Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. Jackson has spoken to academic
and business audiences throughout the world and has published four books –
Management Gurus and Management Fashions, The Hero Manager, Organisational
Behaviour in New Zealand and A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably
Cheap Book About Studying Leadership.

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