Today you will play a part in several small stories at the office. Each one will be made up of a setting, characters, dialogue, context, and a scenario in play.

What you may not have noticed is that in each of these interactions, meaning is being negotiated by one or more people who are simultaneously building their leadership identity. Is one of them you?

Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant have written in the New York Times about the challenges of “speaking while female”, which holds women and companies back – such as being manterrupted, having male co-workers take the words from your mouth and run with them, being penalized in competency ratings for talking as much as male executive peers, or witnessing your contributions not being allotted equal weight in strategic discussions. Clearly, more is at stake than share of talk time.

According to the discursive leadership approach, “leadership is a language game in which meaning is managed.” When women’s voices are undermined, their ability to create meaning, and therefore leadership identity, is likely too.

Small Stories and Identity Creation

Discursive leadership says that leadership identity is achieved through influencing the meaning within everyday interactions in an organization, where the players predominantly framing conversations are reinforcing their positioning as leaders.

Research from Jonathon Clifton at the Universite´ de Valenciennes in France suggests that we too often overlook the importance of everyday “small stories” in developing leadership. We often look at leadership identity through narratives where leaders stands back and reflect on their lives.

In contrast short stories are short, happening all the time in everyday settings, told within the purpose of interaction, and aren’t necessarily about the speaker – and it’s those moments in which leadership identity, viewed as more “fragmented, fluid, and dynamic” – is constructed. Echoing Herminia Ibarra’sperspective on leadership identity, identity isn’t something we have or are – it’s something we do.

If we look at leadership more as a practice and process, and less as a quality, then the upcoming briefing meeting, the strategic discussion, and the next conflict resolution are moments in which we can “perform leader identities.” At any moment, we can “do identity” in interactions.

Being a Meaning Maker

Clifton’s research focuses on observing how we “do leadership” through our daily discourse by managing meaning in the “here-and-now” moments of interaction.

Citing previous research, Clifton notes that at any point a narrator (speaker) manages meaning and position herself or himself as leader by:

1. positioning characters (co-workers) & the collective (eg. organization) relative to each other in a story
2. positioning self as leader by being the one to convey that story right now
3. positioning self relative to the organization and certain master narratives (eg an organizational priority)

Any time we talk about anything, we position it in one particular way and not another, which privileges one version of organizational reality while pushing aside others. By influencing the meaning through which discussions are framed, a speaker positions himself or herself as leader through the interaction.

The “fine-grained” discursive techniques of leadership are not necessarily conscious because meaning is always being influenced in conversation. Once observed, certain techniques can be sharpened with awareness and practice. Here’s examples of language plays the researcher pointed out in recorded meetings:

• leading the verbal briefing of a situation at hand
• speaking on behalf of players when summarizing a situation and the various perspectives
• being the speaker framing the situation as news in the here & now, while perhaps conveying an insider viewpoint
• initiating assessment of a situation, challenging a previous assessment, or upgrading it to a stronger assessment
• judging or affirming another’s assessment to assert greater expertise
• bringing in stories or information to justify a certain way of looking at things
• returning the conversation to an angle of topic after intervening conversation
• speaking on behalf of the organization, animating its perspective and giving it voice through “we”
• authoring a (selective) organizational landscape through which dynamics are then interpreted and decisions framed

Resources and Power Imbalance in Managing Meaning

According to the research, the dance of leadership discourse is not strictly defined by hierarchy, but open to resistance, negotiation, or acquiescence and is often distributed and negotiated among different participants in any given discussion. As observed in previous research, “management of meaning does not take place in a social vacuum and rights to assess are constantly being claimed, challenged, and policed as participants jockey for influence…” But not everybody holds equal resources or power in the game.

What each person perceives as their “allowable contribution” to any discussion (eg opening, guiding, assessing, & closing it) is affected by where they sit, and if we bring Sandberg & Grant’s article into consideration – potentially by their experiences of speaking in a specific context in their organization as a man or a woman.

Though not addressing gender differences, the research acknowledges the impact of power imbalance. Clifton notes, “In this language game, rights to assess and, therefore, to define the organizational landscape are negotiated in talk and the person, or persons, who have most influence in this process emerge as the leaders. Thus, from this perspective, leadership is not a zero-sum game, rather it is in constant flow as talk progresses… it can be distributed and it is open to challenge.”

“However,” he notes, “those most likely to emerge as leaders are those who have access to more powerful discursive resources with which to influence the process of the negotiation of meaning.”

Applying that to formal roles, Clifton states “Whilst leadership may not be commensurate with hierarchy, access to discursive resources that are category-bound to more ‘powerful’ identities, such as chairperson, may skew the ability to do leadership in favour of people incumbent of certain organizational identities.”

Disrupting the Discourse Dynamic

In the majority of companies, the incumbents of most executive level identities are men. At both an executive and senior pipeline level, women are not in a position of equal access to the big conversations and often face challenges when they do get a seat at the decision table.

Sandberg and Grant have shared that senior women experience different outcomes to men when they speak. The bigger consequence at hand when women’s voices are institutionally disadvantaged is arguably the consistent re-positioning of predominantly male leadership and privileging of male-led organizational narratives.

Yet the research examples illustrated women “doing leadership” in discussion, including with male bosses. If leadership is a flow practiced with each conversation and discourse is a dance happening at every interaction, then every day presents new opportunities for you to “do leader.”

The more women do, and the more informal organizational culture changes to support and reward them equally to men in doing so, the less “leader” will be a long identity bridge women have to cross.

Instead, leadership can become a series of moments we step and speak into.