Staying with the trouble: What do the frontline need to do to be recognised as leadership actors?

Abstract

This Leading Questions piece puzzles over why frontline leadership appears little understood, recognised and drawn on in both leadership studies and organisation practice. It draws on a series of empirical ‘breadcrumbs’ to craft a pathway to understanding the frontline in leadership. It argues that such leadership is porous with resistance through a theorisation built from the construct of trouble, active ‘troubling’ of management imperatives and troubles talk. It concludes by asking a series of broader questions about organisational resisting and leading through the unique lens of the frontline who bring both into a different conversation.

I was talking with a group of leaders from a large organisation one day and used the phrase ‘frontline leadership’ without really thinking about it. The phrase stopped the meeting and one of them explained that phrase made little sense to them as the word ‘leadership’ only referred to those with designated leadership accountabilities in formal management positions and hence connecting the words frontline and leadership simply didn’t signify any meaning they could work with. That statement stopped me in my tracks and I’ve thought about it ever since. It would be easy to write such a moment off as a managerial lens which understands the frontline as recipients of leadership with that leadership coming from layers and tiers of managers. However, that conversation was focused on supporting and resourcing the frontline and there was no sense whatsoever that the frontline was not hugely significant to their enterprise and more than capable of making a difference to numerous aspects of the business.

It also would be easy to attribute the confusion to the academic complexities of defining and identifying the frontline (although no such difficulty in the above conversation). As a good example of ‘fuzzy logic’ (Grint, 1997), ‘frontline’ can encompass the bulk of an organisation and of course overlaps with management, making it a term that often struggles to be meaningful. As a broad societal discourse however it remains prevalent and dynamic as it increasingly has been adopted as an adjective to indicate different categories of ‘frontline’ (frontline service, frontline care, frontline teachers and so on). Indeed, it appears to be a term that continually morphs and shifts in meaning to meet changes in organisational, occupational and work phenomena. It has been characterised both as ‘a loaded term’ (Spicksley and Franklin, 2023) and a ‘performative frame’ (Farris et al., 2021) and has become a sub discipline in itself-titled organisational frontlines- and primarily associated with service work (Singh et al., 2017). The term ’frontline’ originated in the military and referenced location primarily at the point of contact with opposing forces but moved into the organisational domain initially to reference those struggling with ‘periphery, power, and obstacles’ at what we could term ground level in a traditional organisation hierarchy (Singh et al., 2017: p. 4). In more contemporary times the term is used to indicate those ‘at the forefront of some area’ (be it functional, occupational or geographical site) ‘and/or in close proximity with someone else’ (often customers, clients, end users) (Farris et al., 2021: p. 286).

Its use in this think piece is perhaps more metaphoric than strictly literal to be suggestive of the multiple meanings the word still carries. The Cambridge dictionary for instance presents three core meanings of the word 1) those involved in conflict and struggle 2) those nearest to the action and 3) those in work ‘dealing with ordinary people and real problems’ that, while not conveying any theoretical definitional precision, do point to an orientation and set of practices that could be distinguished in the main from managerial and knowledge work. This inquiry also nods to a different meaning of frontline as akin to ‘in the vanguard’ (Farris et al., 2021: p. 286) referencing the part of the frontline which can be physically closest to risk and harm (as they are in the empirical material used in this inquiry) and hence need to be understood as significant and primary leadership actors literally at the ‘front’ of health and safety situations (Farris et al., 2021: p. 286). Just like management however, frontline can have multiple delineations and usually includes immediate supervisors, site, shift and team leaders, representatives on committees and taskforces and simply those who act to influence or mobilise their peers. We note at this point that there is a category called supervisory management which can encompass certain aspects of leadership. This literature tends to be mostly theoretical as opposed to empirical and seems to take a soft skills or people management focus. For instance, Wilson et al. (2018, p. 62) propose that the leadership component of supervisory management is ‘an abiding concern to enhance human well-being’ that is ‘‘slipped in’ to the bounded conditions that organisational life routinely entails’ and ‘makes a modest but valuable difference’. This would seem to offer a minimal leadership space for what they term ‘first line’ managers but a leadership space it is nonetheless and one which I would seek to extend. The frontline group who constitute the data in this piece encompass all the above-a supervisor, a team leader, a leading member of the Health & Safety Committee and someone active and central in Health & Safety initiatives and culture without any such role. Earlier published work with that group does detail that they themselves shared a collective leadership identity (over an individual leader identity) and felt distinct leadership responsibility for Health & Safety performance, activity and culture. So ‘frontline’ in this think piece is sited in a nexus of metaphoric, definitional and practice related meanings.

The group of senior organisational leaders introduced in the opening account of a conversation however preferred to work with alternative discourses to frontline leadership-such as frontline engagement, empowerment, responsibility (as opposed to accountability), and participation. The sense I got then was that frontline leadership was an academic abstraction that hadn’t landed in the practice world. However, when I tested that sense broadly with a google search I discovered that frontline leadership most often refers to how senior positional managers lead those on the frontline (as opposed to frontline actors doing the leading). When I search academic databases I get an avalanche of research from the health sector but next to nothing in the broad organisational space and certainly the more specific leadership studies space. It seems then my senior organisational leader conversationalists might have a point. Frontline and leadership don’t appear to trip off the tongue by and large and only rarely are they combined in scholarship.

Like I hope good academics readily do then, I propose to move from conversation to questions: Does frontline leadership exist? If so then what might frontline leadership consist of and how might it differ from not just engagement, empowerment, responsibility and participation but resistance, protest and worker opposition? Given the organisational and leadership literatures don’t appear to have grappled systematically with such questions then I have taken the following approach. Firstly, I’ve gone to focus group data with the frontline themselves to look for evidence of leadership. Given I did find such evidence then I firstly present some excerpts and stories from that data and secondly develop a theorisation that might spark the beginnings of a frontline leadership discourse not just for organisation and leadership studies but also for organisations themselves to put frontline and leadership together to actually recognise the distinctive way the frontline leads and furthermore value and include it in their leadership discourses. Right from the outset, the theorisation that resulted had elements of resistance and the leadership/resistance distinction appeared distinctively porous and hence I have titled this leadership a form of ‘resistance leadership’ in a deliberate paradox that I hope provokes debate and engagement.

I do the above process with what I hope is humility. This is neither a large scale empirical study or an in-depth theory building construction. It is an assemblage of clues (breadcrumbs in a Hansel and Gretel fairy tale sense) between a conversation, group interview data and theoretical tangents that aim to ‘pop’ frontline leadership into visibility and hopefully build future energy, critique and attention into something that feels highly underrated and underexamined.

The three clues come from two collective interviews that were done with a panel of frontline leaders who came to talk to a CEO group participating in a Health and Safety programme. This same group interview data featured in a Human Relations article called ‘Identifying discursive resources for pluralising leadership: Looping chief executive officers and the frontline across hierarchy’ written by my colleague Rhiannon Lloyd and myself and published in 2021. I won’t detail any more about the research process as there is a full write up in that article but I will say these excerpts didn’t feature in that article and hence are new to this one.

Clue one: Resistance

‘There’s a lot of pushing back; we push back to grow more. We push back to things that don’t make sense. The main thing that we push back on is bureaucracy. They want report after report after report which doesn’t make sense, which doesn’t add value, which will add extra work for our guys, and so we will keep the work so that they don’t have to take that load. And so, we work our way around and then we push back. We’ve always been about if it doesn’t add value what’s the point.’ (Frontline Team Leader)

The first clue is unashamedly resistance in the Courpasson et al. (2012) sense of productive resistance where resistance is orientated at bringing a collective voice to change and decision-making from those who might not be formally at the table where those are formulated. The ‘we’ (those directly supervising the frontline guys) push back a lot but primarily on things that don’t make sense and which don’t add value and which add extra work which can be summed up as bureaucracy. If we pause here then there would be much resonance across the board and any level of an organisation against the demands and tyrannies of bureaucracy and hence a case could be made that this is not leadership at all but a typically anti-bureaucratic response. Accordingly, I have titled this resistance (without attaching the word leadership) but do note the collective we and the element of buffering and protecting (we will keep the work so that they don’t have to take that load) that certainly is reminiscent of taking responsibility.

Of course, there is an extensive literature on the oppositional relationship between frontline workers and management which most commonly assumes dissent, contestation, struggle and antagonism between the two or what Courpasson et al. (2012, p. 802) term ‘the expression of an irreducible opposition between workers and management’. Such a view stems largely from Marxist and Labour Process Theory approaches (Thompson, 2016) where resistance is predominantly understood as a response to oppression, demands for compliance and/or stress (Wiedemann et al., 2021). Such resistance traditionally has been conceptualised as either passive in ‘the disagreeing but willing worker’ where any resistance is not particularly disruptive to management activity (Zoller and Fairhurst, 2007) or active but ‘inevitably contrary to the organization’s interests’ in terms of sabotage or productivity constraints (Courpasson et al., 2012).

However this inquiry seeks to build on a ‘more expansive conception of the typical sphere of struggle’ (Mumby, 2020: p. 1) where the frontline move continually between compliance and resistance (Wiedemann et al., 2021) with the latter regarded as capable of being productive in influencing management decision-making and co-constructing change (Courpasson et al., 2012; McCabe et al., 2020). It’s that productive intent that is framed in terms of ‘add value’ in the excerpt that begins this section.

Clue two: Leadership

You can’t ignore anything. If management say that that’s [Health & Safety] important then if 150 near misses for this one thing and you’re not doing anything about it then seriously what message do you send to everyone else? And it’s the voice, and a lot of our conversation goes, “Oh, I saw this was unsafe.” “Oh yep, did you report it?” Goes, “Oh no.” “Okay, put that in.” He’s, “Oh, I have an idea with this.” “Okay, put it in. Put it in the tag and put it in for the next guy.” And it’s like, “Oh, but I wrote one.” “Write it again.” Write it and keep on writing it because if they’re not listening to one tag they will sure as heck listen to 50 of them.

But this is this one conversation that you’re having and it has to be kind of pushed from the director, the shift leaders, the guys that are comfortable because these guys themselves get probably a million ideas of we should do this, we should do that, we should do this. And most of the time they will say, “Okay, what power do I have on the shop floor?” (Frontline Supervisor)

The second clue is a narrative about bringing visibility to H&S issues. It involves taking management seriously (it’s important) and using repeated actions (in this case something called ‘tagging’ which essentially means writing up a mini notice on something unsafe and submitting it). One tag creates no real leverage on management (they’re not listening to one tag) but 50 of them or 150 near misses do. The account of the typical conversation is indicative of sustained mobilising work (OK put that in. Write it again. Write it and keep on writing it.) Note too the large number of leadership actors referenced (the director, the shift leaders, the guys that are comfortable) and the driving, championing nature of the work (it has to be kind of pushed) which is associated with the power one has on the shop floor. Accordingly, I have titled this leadership given the clear sense of leading that emerges from this narrative.

It’s at this point that we need to allow that, while frontline leadership may share many of the practices that constitute any process of leadership, it also can present quite differently and draw from a very different set of assumptions, relationships and discursive resources. We certainly don’t have the research line of sight into leadership by the frontline that we would want but we have some points of reference from research to date that are worth noting at this point. One such point that Fairhurst and Zoller (2007) point out is that what would once be considered management (including leadership aspects of it) activity is now routinely distributed amongst non-supervisory and even frontline workers. They point out that such leadership is often political in ‘the way one or more actors engage the community and its mores in collective action’ (p. 1339).

The collectivity of the frontline occurs repeatedly throughout its literature. Sanson and Courpasson (2022, p. 1695) for instance identify belongingness and collective insubordination ‘as a way of life’, meaning resistance (and surely leadership) are a ‘life-embedded practice’ (p. 1697). They point to collective forces such as ‘shift spirit’ and ‘teamwork’ which create strong social ties often in direct opposition to management and which create cohesiveness, meaning, support and significance for those on the frontline. Zoller and Fairhurst (2007, p. 1348) take this further and draw attention to what they term ‘group level phenomena’ such as assembling and massing (using collective attendance and protest to underscore demands or challenge) which frame individual acts through ‘the visual impact of collective action’ (p. 1349). While speculative, one could consider this collectivity as a challenge for how to identify, attribute and language frontline leadership without necessarily the visibility of individualistic action or a formalised process.

One piece of research that does set out to identify, attribute and language frontline leadership is Lloyd and Carroll’s (2021) ‘Identifying discursive resources for pluralising leadership: Looping chief executive officers and the frontline across hierarchy’. They argue that frontline leadership is often weakly presented as ‘participation resulting from cultural buy-in’, largely at the invitation of the senior leadership team (p. 819) which the authors characterise as ‘performative empowerment’ rather than leadership (p. 6). Their findings show that the frontline characterise leadership almost entirely in collaborative, relational and collective terms in contrast to CEO characterisations of leadership as individual, positional and hierarchical. The inquiry however doesn’t end on such a dichotomy but explores the ability to create connected communication, shared learning, sustained participation and co-ownership between the different leadership(s) at opposite ends of the organisation. The important contribution is the acknowledgement of a distinctive but recognisable form of leadership held by the frontline.

Clue three: Resistance leadership

Where our car park is, our secondary car park, there’s a school as well and there’s a pedestrian crossing. So, sometimes when you need to come out of the car park, go into work, it’s difficult for you to see the trucks coming through. So, the person raised it with someone in management and said, “Oh, this is quite dangerous. We can’t see trucks coming. Can you look at shifting the gate?” So, he went away and said, “Okay, I’ll think about it.” Came back and said, “No, you can’t because it’s too expensive.” In the canteen at lunch time we were all having this discussion and we said, “Okay, well we all go through that car park, we all go through that gate, let’s see if we see the same thing as she does.”

So, we raised, yeah, a couple of us saw the same thing. We raised a near miss. That near miss got raised in the safety pillar. From that we decided, okay, we’ll launch a team, an ORR team. And it took a team to get that capital expenditure and that gate cost $100,000 or something like that for a swipe card access. So, there’s different avenues you need to take before we can get that money. One of the conversations is a straight no because he’s a manager, he doesn’t want to spend that money because it comes from his budget. But then it got highlighted as a near miss by two/three people. We’ve raised a team, actioned it, looked into, like did a risk assessment. (Frontline H&S rep)

The third clue reveals an intentional and conscious process of leading that appears to be sourced and sustained through a resistance energy, spirit and process. The phrasing of ‘resistance leadership’ is thus intentional on my part and speaks to a broader and organizationally orientated leadership that is accomplished through productive resistance activity (as opposed to simply the leading of resistance). Such a process is both collective and emergent (a couple of us saw the same thing), a sequence of actions (‘raised a near miss’, that near miss raised in a safety pillar’, ‘launch a team’) and a clear resistance energy (No, you can’t because it’s too expensive). Acting as a collective, escalating through a series of stages and claiming the responsibility at every point (actioned it) accomplishes a result (get that capital expenditure). There is an awareness here of a different set of interests at work (because he’s a manager, he doesn’t want to spend that money because it comes from his budget), the emergence of leadership energy and motivation through conversation (in the canteen at lunch time we were all having this discussion) and the testing of assumptions and perceptions (let’s see if we see the same thing as she does) which all point to reflexive and relational leadership practice.

A more orthodox use of resistance leadership has tended to be centred on the directing of dissent, opposition and protest. Productive resistance, where resistance is driving or core to a process of organisational change, invites a more complex and expansive frame of both leadership and resistance. Zoller and Fairhurst (2007, p. 1332) for instance argue that bringing an explicit leadership focus to resistance has the potential to highlight ‘the role of mobilization and influence in change’ through ‘emphasizing participant attributions’. As an example they recount a narrative from their data where a factory worker refuses a demand to remain overtime, supports others on the production floor to do the same, influences their supervisor to make a stand and negotiates a potential resolution with management. They depict such leadership as about ‘convincing individual and/or collective performances’ (p. 1347) and make the point that such leadership acts are often emergent, reactive, localised and improvisational as opposed to planned, positional, formal and operational.

In a similar vein Courpasson et al. (2012) reframe attention from ‘resistance’ to ‘resisting’ which they emphasise as ‘skilful’ (p. 802) and a ‘social and material accomplishment’ (p. 816) with the ultimate purpose of requiring ‘top management to recognize issues that had not been acknowledged’ (p. 816). While they don’t use the leadership term explicitly they do talk about acknowledging ‘credible interlocutors’ who facilitate ‘a process of power challenge’ orientated at providing ‘clear diagnoses and recommendations and learn new skills faster than top management can produce defences of its actions’ (p. 816). This appears similar to Zoller and Fairhurst’s (2007, p. 1346) definition of resistance leadership as ‘a process of energy in the community, a deviation from convention’. Such an energy and deviation could be understood as characterising not just their factory worker story but also the work of the frontline workers in the Health and Safety excerpt heading this section.

Theorising frontline resistance leadership

I have called the above clues akin to breadcrumbs that one might follow to arrive at a concept of frontline resistance leadership. At this point I have inserted ‘frontline’ in front of ‘resistance leadership’ to propose that leadership that comes from those wrestling at leadership through challenges of ‘periphery, power, and obstacles’ (Singh et al., 2017: p. 4) to do so in ways that entangle resistance and leadership in novel and distinctive ways. Lloyd and Carroll (2021) after all suggest that even recognising frontline leadership does require a major shift in discourse and ‘frontline resistance leadership’ is offered as such. Both scholars and practitioners need a new language, alternative set of theoretical resources and new points of reference to engage with the actions of the frontline as leadership. Such a discourse, set of theoretical resources and new points of reference is thus the work of this section.

This section does so by attempting to retheorise the frontline resistance leadership arc as it is traced in the excerpts that have catalysed this inquiry - from emergent and localised to processual and collective. Such an arc is centred on the notion of ‘trouble’: firstly responding to an immediate and localised source of trouble, secondly persisting in pursuing engagement and resolution of the trouble, thirdly being proactive about troubling other social actors (both peers and positional) to engage with the process, and finally pushing legitimate organisational processes to their boundaries and beyond to give the trouble visibility and profile. The above sits at the intersections of three theorisations of trouble: Mills’ (1959) Sociological Imagination, Haraway’s (2016) Staying with the Trouble and Miller and Silverman’s (1995) Troubles Talk. A ‘trouble’ discourse charts a porous line between resistance and leadership and this offers a language to engage with what I am proposing to call resistance leadership by the frontline.

Firstly however, what does ‘trouble’ mean? O’Conner and Kellerman (2019) trace it etymologically firstly to ‘disturb’ and then progressively to ‘disorder’, ‘agitate’ and ‘disrupt’. They also reference a ‘fuzzy’ set of meanings of trouble through literature and literary criticism where trouble or troubling (used as a verb) can be associated more ambiguously with ‘undermining’, ‘diminishing’, ‘discrediting’ and ‘challenging’ on the one hand and, primarily as a noun or adjective, connotating confusion, distress, anxiety or mental and even social disturbance. It is not difficult to see the association of ‘trouble’ as a concept to both resistance (undermine, disorder, diminish) but equally to leadership (disrupt, challenge, agitate). Indeed, clearly the same set of actions could be from different places of a system - frontline or executive team for instance. The term ‘trouble would join a lexicon of other similar words such as struggle, tensions, and conflict and does carry similar associations of paradox. What distinguishes ‘trouble’ is its size, progression and scale as it can be used to connotate small and potentially insignificant actions that can accumulate to something more sustained, disruptive and significant (like the tagging examples from the empirical examples). ‘Trouble’, if led skillfully, can influence and change the organisational status quo. As such ‘trouble’ has the capacity to be a potent word for a new formulation of resistance and leadership accomplished by frontline actors through collective processes.

The concept of ‘trouble’ could be understood as anchoring sociology itself. Mills understood sociology as driven by the connection between trouble (personal) and issue (public). While an individual could in theory solve something troubling them on their own, issues needed to be solved in the public sphere, requiring more institutional and collective strategies, what Mills (1959, p. 10) called ‘tracing such linkages among a great variety of milieux’. He coined the phrase of ‘the social imagination’ to signify the ability to not only connect personal and social experience but to solve them. We could argue that the frontline actors represented earlier in this article demonstrated a similar arc to this one associated with the sociological imagination as they moved so readily from one actor’s experience of a potential H&S hazard (requiring one tag) to collective and institutional action (requiring processes bringing multiple tags together to resolve a hazard) that engages at the cultural level of the organisation. We can also note the immediacy, connection and emotional power of driving leadership outward from an encounter with a trouble.

While identifying and encountering a trouble would be an everyday occurrence for most people, tracking, escalating and mobilising around a trouble is suggestive of a leadership response. The second theoretical strand we bring is Haraway’s (2016) ‘slogan’ of Staying with the trouble. She frames trouble as ‘an interesting word’ right from the outset (2016, p. 1) that reflects ‘a hardy, soiled kind of wisdom’ (p. 117). She lists four tasks associated with it (‘to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places’) (p. 1) and locates all four within the grand challenges of climate change and environmental sustainability. However, it is the connotations of endurance and persistence of ‘staying with the trouble’ that most intersects with constructing frontline resistance leadership. This persistence is characterised by Haraway as an attention to the present (‘learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures’) and emergence (‘mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings’). It’s the temporal dimension that has perhaps most to offer frontline leadership studies in ‘the idea of staying-with as opposed to being future-obsessed’ (Sperling, 2018) or alternatively ‘making a future while staying in the present’ (Kortekallio, 2019). The very essence of tags from the excerpts and narratives earlier is about finding and marking trouble right where, when and as often as it occurs. The present then becomes the site of leadership. The fact that one has to do this 50 or 250 times before one gets leverage as in the narrative illustrates that persistence is the chief source of leverage required. Collinson (1992) has previously noted the importance of persistence to ‘the shopfloor’ and worker strategies in general but not especially in leadership itself.

Persistence then drives an unusual institutional focus of action. In the frontline narratives and excerpts transformation happens by over-scrupulously utilising existing organisational processes and in a sense exaggerating their use and pushing them to their limits in order to receive the attention of management. I’ve termed this a form of resistance leadership given, in the excerpts beginning this discussion, leading health and safety from the frontline appears to involve using sanctioned organisational processes in a hyper literal and hyper exaggerated way to propel aggregated personal encounters of trouble into managerial visibility and action. Organisational processes such as tagging and near-miss auditing thus provide technologies that can be ‘co-opted’ to lead those at a management level. If such a premise is accepted then frontline leadership could be easily mistaken for fidelity to process or even institutional compliance.

I bring in a third theorisation centred on the concept of trouble at this point in order to frame the co-option of existing institutional processes as discussed above as resistance leadership. That third theorisation is essentially the social construction of trouble through what Miller and Silverman (1995) term ‘troubles talk’. They argue that what even constitutes trouble needs to be ‘talked into being’ and such talk needs to be collectively accomplished (p. 725). Their immediate focus is the counselling context but their broader frame of reference is decidedly institutional. They take a Foucauldian approach to power where power operates through numerous, ongoing micro-interactions (Carroll and Firth, 2016), meaning it is ‘not so much imposed from above, then, as it is built up through interactants’ collaboration within concrete social settings’ (Miller and Silverman, 1995: p. 726). This appears to be an apt description of the movement from trouble to capital expenditure through a number of decidedly ‘concrete’ configurations-artefacts (tags), collective leadership mechanisms (safety pillar) and talk (canteen at lunchtime) - presented in the final except.

What permeates the micro-interactional perspective is of course power, where ‘some kinds of trouble are more likely than others to be constructed within particular institutional discourses’, meaning constructing ‘entrance into this and other institutional discourses is a local and contingent accomplishment’ (Miller and Silverman, 1995, p, 729). While one would expect health and safety to be an important institutional discourse, there will be a set of assumptions as to what degree something is a localised frustration, personal issue or organisational risk. Frontline leadership processes in the excerpts were essentially acting as ‘organizers or orchestrators of social interactions’ to construct movement across the different ‘hierarchies’ of personal, collective and organisational discursive realities. Miller and Silverman (1995, p. 729) remind us that ‘not all interactants have equal opportunities to initiate entrance into institutional discourses or guide them in preferred ways’, which would support frontline leadership gravitating exactly to such a role.

Conclusion

In this inquiry I have reframed frontline resistance leadership as actioned through ‘discursive practices concerned with trouble definitions, trouble remedies, and the social contexts of…troubles’ (Miller and Silverman, 1995: p. 732) from a set of empirical excerpts which illustrate a whole process constituted from an individual encounter of a trouble to the management acceptance of that trouble as an organisational imperative. Catalysing that process, I submit, is a whole series of resisting and leading activity that involve sophisticated processes of ‘materiality’ (creation of tags and concrete evidential material artefacts), ‘sociality’ (collective mobilisation) and ‘spatiality’ (sites of resisting leadership such as canteens) (Courpasson et al., 2012: p. 815). What in fact comes through as most striking from these empirical and theoretical ‘breadcrumbs’ is that resisting and leading can be so organically intertwined and their conceptual separation could be the core reason why both practitioners and scholars fail to see, recognise and give significance to frontline leadership. This is in spite of a literature which has long aimed to erode the binary of power and resistance (Collinson, 2005; Kondo, 1990) pointing to their ‘interconnected dynamic’ (Fleming and Spicer, 2008: 305). Perhaps it is not so surprising, therefore, that the frontline presents as an organisational site where that dynamic is vividly in play.

The intent of this Leading Questions piece has been to provoke further questions and my hope is that theorising frontline resistance leadership along a trouble/ troubling arc might ‘trouble’ yet more questions such as:

When might frontline leadership (leadership of the frontline) mean frontline leading (leadership by the frontline)?

What might both organisations and scholarship risk by recognising, using, valuing and locating frontline and leadership side by side?

What is possible if leading and resisting are understood as entangled activity and essentially a connected inquiry?

How might organisations legitimise their frontline leading and resisting activity? What would change about organisational leadership practice as a result?

How might the leadership practice of senior and middle managers change once the resistance leadership practice of the frontline is recognised, acknowledged and valued?

How might more established and recognised structures and processes of resistance (such as unions) intersect with ‘trouble work’ whilst supporting the leading from the frontline?

Do ‘substitute’ discourses such as worker/ employee/ frontline empowerment, engagement and participation actually (intentionally or otherwise) exclude these ‘others’ from a place in leadership studies and even leadership recognition?

How might frontline resistance leadership help us understand how some inequalities are perpetuated or generated at the front line itself and what strategies might engage and resolve these?

I imagine a second conversation with the senior organisational group of leaders that catalysed this leading questions piece. I picture conversations which debate whether middle and senior managers are managing or leading and how such leading might intersect with the leading of the frontline. I picture leadership studies scholars in factories, warehouses, construction sites, retail outlets, social movements and community outreach seeking to understand leading and resisting moments, episodes and sequences as essential to what we are prepared to call leadership, who we are prepared to call leadership actors and what we understand leadership to be for.