The Discourse of Leadership

Abstract

Leadership has been studied from many disciplinary perspectives, but sociolinguists have not yet made a contribution to understanding how leaders use language in accomplishing their roles as leaders. Analysing three examples of naturally occurring workplace talk, we demonstrate how three leaders from different workplaces employ diverse strategies in order to get things done at work. The different discourse strategies employed by the leaders include humour, hedging, and the recounting of an anecdote, strategies which serve primarily as face-saving, mitigating devices in the contexts analysed. A further more overt and direct approach, employed in a different cultural context, is the use of explicit coaching techniques, including repetition and explanation. The analysis supports our claim that ‘doing leadership’ is a discursive achievement, and that a person’s communication skills are a crucial component in the construction of leadership.