Communication as Relational Practice of Leading

Abstract

The fact that communication — conscious and unconscious, verbal and non-verbal, formal and informal, local and global and so on — plays a central role in the daily practice of leading is hardly a surprise. Cunliffe has expressed it this way at a seminar in Copenhagen in June 2012: ‘We’re always embedded in the social’, and it is through our communication with one another that we understand and continuously construct reality (Gergen 2009). Leaders spend a great deal of their time at work communicating — in meetings, on the phone, via the Internet and through social media. A brief web search for communication courses for leaders will show that there are many such activities.

Social constructionism centres communicative processes as the vehicle in which self and world are ongoing constructions.

(Uhl-Bien 2006: 659)