Forthcoming in Leadership Quarterly

Sensegiving-- shaping how people understand themselves, their work, and others engaged in that work-- is critical to the work of organizational leadership. We propose the “cognitive shift, ” a change in how an organizational audience understands an important element of the organization’s work, as a desired outcome of the sensegiving process. Organizations try to spur these shifts in two categories: about their issue and about their primary constituency, the population it is designed to serve or mobilize. This approach makes two contributions: It re-directs attention from individual leaders ’ behaviors and characteristics to the work of leadership, as opposed to the agents through which it is carried out. Second, it operationalizes the intangible process of meaning-making by breaking it down into discrete units that are relatively equivalent and, therefore, comparable, providing a systematic way to analyze and map cognitive leadership processes