Forming the Leadership Code

The first attempt to interpret the vast array of materials (16 hours of video-tapes including large amounts of discourse and actions together with research diaries and documents) took place by conducting a thematic analysis and listing themes that were talked about. Given my background as a leadership consultant and that the particular trainings were familiar to me, it was a challenge to retain an open and sensitive attitude to what is there – to pay attention to things I had noted before and especially to those I had not noticed. The more I watched the tapes, the more themes emerged: I see this, and now that, and those things I haven’t noticed before, what are they, and there are these things... These first attempts only increased confusion, but it was a very useful exercise, because it clearly showed that the more aspects I as a researcher am able to perceive in the materials, the more there will be need for structure at some stage.

Based on the initial research interest and the research question, I chose the key terms ‘leadership’, ‘change’ and ‘practising skills’ to guide the analysis. That resulted in a list with some 25 themes. I saw that there were certain repeating patterns of action that SEBU lead-ers constantly acted out, things like answering the phone and telling people what to do and solving smaller or bigger problems. In general it seemed that they are partly reacting to the environment, partly trying to create their own agenda.

How is leadership acted out at SEBU? It soon became evident that the training participants have certain repeating patterns and recurring actions, routines. Cohen (2007), following Dewey, sees routines as a kind of “unchosen” everyday actions that often remain unnoticed:

“The actions we engage in despite our choices and resolutions seem to be mysteries or minor anomalies in a choice-centered worldview.

Yet we enter a meeting room and head for the seat we occupied last time, not because it was optimal then and remains so now, but because now it is familiar. We may even feel some resentment if our seat has been ‘taken’ by someone else. (…) Unchosen action patterns therefore predominate in our lives, but they remain mere curiosities in a discourse on organization in which cognitively grounded decision is supreme” (Cohen 2007: 777).

Routines are “recurring action patterns” (Cohen 2007) and “repeated patterns of behaviour that are bound by rules and customs and that do not change too much from one iteration to another” (Feldman 2000: 611).

But how to recognize whether these recurring patterns are leader-ship routines or some other routines? The Fieldpath Method would advocate listening to the materials without preconceptions with the aim of creating a bottom-up definition: what do people talk about? I have written down in the video-manuscript: “There are lots leadership dimensions here, what if I’d collect leadership phenomena?”

Theoretically these clusters could still be constructed in many ways, but instead of generating something extraordinary or striking, The Fieldpath Method produced clusters of phenomena that were ordinary things, everyday actions (answering questions, knowing, making decisions…). Realizing this I was at first stunned, horrified and disappointed: Is this really the result of my year-long exploration, such trivialities?

From the perspective of process ontology change is the ruling order of things and stability is an exception, whereas Cohen says that routines as stabilized patterns of actions dominate our lives. What to make out of these seemingly contradictionary notions? From the proc-ess ontological perspective the question is not “how does change take place?” but rather “how and by which means do we create stability?”

The routines that I found offer one answer to that question. If the research interest is on how leadership skills are developed in practice,

then it is obvious that the present practices are challenged. In order to understand change, we need to give account of the original stabilized state. Identifying SEBU leadership routines equates to “identification of the organizational actors framework” (Thachankary 1992) which is a central part of the process of interpretation.

Proceeding this way I ended up with an immanent and emergent leadership definition, which methodologically is in line with proc-ess ontology. None of the parties relevant to this study (researchers, consultants, participants, SEBU) has defined leadership in advance or dominated the definition. In the following, SEBU leadership becomes constructed out of that part of the discourse where participants them-selves refer to their role as leaders and explain their practical actions and thoughts in that role. They are not explicitly saying “I think leader-ship is…” but the materials that count are those where participants implicitly or explicitly talk from that position and describe their daily routines. In this fashion language and actions maintain and construct a certain kind of stabilized notion of SEBU leadership.

Potter and Wetherell (1987) explain that ethnomethodological studies make sense of everyday social life in different institutions and that one of the research strategies for dealing with materials is “telling the code” by giving an account of what is going on from the insider’s point of view. “It is a commonplace finding in traditional research that prisons, hospitals and similar total institutions have a set of informal rules which are different from, and often oppose, the official ones” (1987: 19). A similar kind of principle can be seen as a part of hermeneutic inquiry too, when Thachankary (1992: 226) talks about “revealing repetition”.

Could a set of guiding principles of SEBU leadership be summariz-ed under a set of informal rules or as an implicit code of conduct?

Routines are recurring action patterns (Cohen 2007), consisting of talk and actions. Reality in this view is a narrative social construction, shaped and altered by the way people talk about it (White and Epston 1990; Freedman and Combs 1995). As Couture and Strong (2004) state, maintaining or changing these categories “can be seen as processes and products of people’s talk”.

Through the clusters I formed the view that, indeed, there is an inherent local understanding of leadership, a culture that is maintained by recurring action, repeated patterns of speech and language usage.

These make up a leadership routine at SEBU. Here is an overview of SEBU leadership routines, i.e. what the leaders do in practice:

Table 3. The SEBU Leadership Code

Routine Idea of routine Impact on followers Orientation Answering

questions

If people ask the leader, s/he is to provide an an-swer

Quick solutions, does not support employees’ they are believed to have

more information Knowing

Problem solving

In case of interpretation, hesitation or problem, leader is to decide tar-gets, deliver results, get things done – there is always an agenda

Lean and mean, quick and dirty, walk the talk,

“just do it”. Little time for listening or reflection.

Intervening

Confronting people

If things are not “as they should be”, leader is to confront people as these discussions tend to become confron-tational

Intervening

Reading even deeper into the subject of routines I found theoretical accounts according to which routines do change (Feldman 2000), and change happens when disconcerting effects temporarily unsettle the stability of practices (Lamprou and Tsoukas 2009). But what should I do with these routines and how do they help in explaining emergence of leadership?

5.3 Two leadership orientations: knowing and intervening