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.