Managing the Meaning of Leadership: Leadership as 'Communicating Intent' in Wildland Firefighting

Abstract

Leadership studies and communication studies increasingly overlap in the emergence of the post-industrial leadership paradigm. This study calls attention to how different underlying models of communication in leadership theorizing and program implementation in organizations may cause otherwise progressive theories to be falsely rejected before realizing their emancipatory potential. We analyze a leadership initiative in wildland firefighting, inspired by the German military philosophy of Auftragstaktik , which recommends communicating `leader's intent'. We show how talk about communication in the organization and talk about the theory may diverge. Adapting the language of metadiscourse theory, we explore alternate communication models to expand the practical metadiscourse of communication to better align it with the theoretical metadiscourse of leadership it purports to actualize.