Leadership and Stories
By Hilary McLellan
INTRODUCTION
How do stories relate to leadership? Actually, there are many ways. Stories, including narratives, myths, and fables, constitute a uniquely powerful currency in human relationships. Stories speak to both parts of the human mind - its reason and emotion. Stories provide a tool for articulating and focusing vision. Stories provide a medium of communication, both internally within an organization and externally to customers, potential customers, business partners, business rivals, investors, and others. Increasingly, various companies are becoming aware of how stories can serve as a market research tool, a public relations and marketing tool, and a tool for learning and communicating important institutional knowledge about effective busines practices, adapting to innovation, etc. Stories provide a tool for conceptualizing and identifying challenges and opportunities. Stories provide a powerful tool for capturing and leveraging knowledge, one that is complementary to logical thinking, what we think of as "just the facts."
There's still another way to think about stories. Stories are evocative systems of patterns. They provide a map charting the way to the future. They include travel hints in the form of viewpoints and links to archetypal story structures and themes that inspire and motivate people. As pattern systems, stories reveal patterns and bring to the surface valuable information that might otherwise go unnoticed, unharvested.
Cognitive psychologist Donald Norman (1993) explains, "Stories aren't better than logic; logic isn't better than stories. They are distinct; they both emphasize different criteria. I think it very appropriate that both be used in decision-making settings. In fact, I rather like the ordering that often happens, usually accidentally: First the data and the logical analysis, then the stories. Yes, let the personal, emotional side of decision making have the last word." (p. 128) Norman explains further, "Stories have the felicitous capacity of capturing exactly those elements that formal decision methods leave out. Logic tries to generalize, to strip the decision making from the specific context, to remove it from subjective emotions. Stories capture the context, capture the emotions. Logic generalizes, stories particularize. Logic allows one to form a detached, global judgment; storytelling allows one to take the personal point of view, to understand the particular impact the decision is apt to have on the people who will be affected by it." (p. 129)
LEADERS AS STORYTELLERS
The most effective leaders are fundamentally great storytellers. Creating, fine-tuning, and communicating stories is a fundamental part of the leader's vocation. Howard Gardner (1995) explains, "Leaders achieve their effectivenss chiefly through the stories they relate. Here I use the term relate rather than tell because presenting a story in words is but one way to communicate. Leaders in the arts characteristically inspire others by the ways they use their chosen media of artistic expression, be they the phrases of a sonata or the gestures of a dance; scientists lead through the manipulation of the symbol systems favored in their domains, be they the mathematical equations of theoretical physicists or the anatomical models of neurophysiologists. In addition to communicating stories leaders embody those stories. That is, without necessarily relating their stories in so many words or in a string of selected symbols, leaders such as [General George C.] Marshall convey their stories by the kinds of lives they themselves lead and, through example, seek to inspire in their followers." (p. 9)
Fairhurst and Sarr (1996) report that the essential tool of the leader seeking to manage meaning is the ability to frame. Stories are frames. To explain the concept of framing, Fairhurst and Sarr compare the leader's task to the craft of the photographer: "consider how gifted photographers show us their view of the world through their photographs. They capture a viewpoint for others to understand and appreciate. They focus their cameras and frame their subjects so that by seeing their photographs, others can know what each photographer intended. (p. 3)
A leader is like a photographer, framing a challenge, a crisis, or an issue in terms of the viewpoint or story that she wants followers to accept. "Just like a photographer, when we select a frame for a subject, we choose which aspect or portion of the subject we will focus on and which we will exclude. When we choose to highlight some aspect of our subject over others, we make it more noticeable, more meaningful, and more memorable to others. Our framing adds color or accentuates the subject in unique ways." (Fairhurst and Sarr, 1996, p. 4) A leader must select what's highlighted and what's left out in order to clarify and focus attention upon the vision at hand.
Fairhurst and Sarr (1996) report, "Leadership is a language game, one that many do not know they are playing. Even though most leaders spend nearly 70 percent of their time communicating, they pay relatively little attention to how they use language as a tool of influence. Technically grounded managers may talk a good game on technical matters. Trained in the knowledge and versed in the jargon of a particular field, they easily produce words and sentences that others seem to understand. But the ease with which they speak causes listeners to miss the fact that language cloaks, sedates, even seduces people into believing that many of the so-called facts of our world are objectively rather than socially created. No other reason can explain why the same market fluctuations are seen as problems for some and opportunities for others. No other reason can explain why new visions and programs become future realities in some companies and remain as pipe dreams in others. No other reason can why the same uttered words are treated as gospel coming from one leader but hot air coming from another. " (p. 1)
Fairhurst and Sarr (1996) further explain, "Effective leaders present the world with images that grab our attention and interest. They use language in ways that allow us to see leadership not only as big decisions but as a series of moments in which images build upon each other to help us construct a reality to which we must then respond." (p. 1) Stories, of course, are fundamentally linked to words so there's a perfect match. Of course this storytelling has now been extended via video, mulitmedia, and, most recently, the World Wide Web. Stories provide a way of framing information, including information about values, goals, vision.
VISION
Bennis and Nanus (1985) discuss the importance of vision in leadership: "To choose a direction, a leader must first have developed a mental image of a possible and desirable future state of the organization. This image, which we call a vision, may be as vague as a dream or as precise as a goal or mission statement. The critical point is that a vision articulates a view of a realistic, credible, attractive future for the organization, a condition that is better in some important ways than what now exists." Vision is expressed through stories --- especially stories that feature compelling archetypes in terms of structure, protagonists, and symbols.
Warren Bennis suggests that the leader's sense of vision is the crucial difference between a manager and a leader. According to Bennis and Nanus (1985), "By focusing attention on a vision, the leader operates on the emotional and spiritual resources of the organization, on its values, commitment, and aspirations. The manager, by contrast, operates on the physical resources of the organization, on its capital, human skills, raw materials, and technology. Any competent manager can make it possible for people in the organization to earn a living. An excellent manager can see to it that work is done productively and efficiently, on schedule, and with a high level of quality. It remains for the effective leader, however, to help people in the organization know pride and satisfaction in their work. Great leaders often inspire their followers to high levels of achievement by showing them how their work contributes to worthwhile ends. It is an emotional appeal to some of the most fundamental of human needs the need to be important, to make a difference, to feel useful, to be a part of a successful and worthwhile enterprise." (p. 92)
They report that there are three steps in achieving and communicating vision, which are outlined in the following table:
Steps in achieving and communicating vision
1. Paying Attention: The leader's search for vision
2. Synthesizing Vision: The leader's choice of direction
3. Focusing Attention: The leader's search for commitment
Let's look at these three steps in greater detail.
Paying Attention: The leader's search for vision
According to Bennis and Nanus (1985), the leader must be an excellent listener, with the ability to tune in to new or different irnages of the emerging reality. They report that, "Many leaders establish both formal and informal channels of communication to gain access to these ideas. Most leaders also spend a substantial portion of their time interacting with advisers, consultants, other leaders, scholars, planners, and a wide variety of other people both inside and outside their own organizations in this search. Successful leaders, we have found, are great askers, and they do pay attention."
Quite often the leader's vision does not originate with the leader personally but rather from other people and influences. Bennis and Nanus (1985) report that, "John Kennedy spent a great deal of time reading history and studying the ideas of great thinkers. Martin Luther King, Jr., found many of his ideas in the study of religious and ethical ideologies as well as in the traditions of his own and other peoples. Lenin was greatly influenced by the scholarship of Karl Marx, in much the same way as many contemporary business leaders are influenced by the works of leading economists and management scholars. Alfred P. Sloan's visions for the future of General Motors were greatly shaped by the prevailing cultural paradigm the "American Dream" and the role of capitalism in it. Steve Jobs at Apple and Edwin Land at Polaroid were able to develop their visions from logical processes, mostly by seeking the technical limits of known technologies. "
Leaders need to be able to listen and also to look at things fromm different points of view, weighing the different points of view. As Dupree (1992) explains, "Leaders need an ability to look through a variety of lenses. We need to look through the lens of a follower. We need to look through the lense of a new reality. We need to look through the lens of hard experience and failure. We need to look through the lens of unfairness and mortality. We need to look hard at our future."
As Bennis and Nanus (1985) explain, "The task of synthesizing an appropriate direction for the organization is complicated by the many dimensions of vision that may be required. Leaders require foresight, so that they can judge how the vision fits into the way the environment of the organization may evolve; hindsight, so that the vision does-not violate the traditions and culture of the organization; a world view, within which to interpret the impact of possible new developments and trends; depth perception, so that the whole picture can be seen in appropriate detail and perspective; peripheral vision, so that the possible responses of competitors and other stake holders to the new directon can be comprehended; and a process of revision, so that all visions previously synthesized are constantly reviewed as the environment changes. Beyond this, decisions must be made about the appropriate time horizon to address, the simplicity or complexity of the image, the extent to which it will represent continuity with the past as opposed to a radical transformation, the degree of optimism or pessimism it will contain, its realism and credibility, and its potential impact on the organization. "
Synthesizing Vision: The leader's choice of direction
The next stage is for the leader to synthesize out of various influences a clear, focused vision that articulates a sense of direction for the organization that he or she leads. Bennis and Nanus (1985) report that, "If there is a spark of genius in the leadership function at all, it must lie in this transcending ability, a kind of magic, to assemble out of all the variety of images, signals, forecasts and alternatives a clearly articulated vision of the future that is at once simple, easily understood, clearly desirable, and energizing."
Peter Drucker claims that the essence of leadership is performance. DePree (1992) suggests that "Leadership can never stop at words. Leaders must act, and they can do so only in the context of their beliefs. Without action or principles, no one can become a leader. " (p. 6)
According to Drucker (1993), "The foundation of effective leadership is thinking through the organization's mission, defining it and establishing it, clearly and visibly. The leader sets the goals, sets the priorities, and sets and maintains the standards. He makes compromises, of course; indeed, effective leaders are painfully aware that they are not in control of the universe. (Only misleaders --- the Stalins, Hitlers, Maos --- suffer from that delusion.) But before accepting a compromise, the effective leader has thought through what is right and desirable. The leader's first task is to be the trumpet that sounds a clear sound." A clear sound, a clear vision, a clear and compelling story that attracts and inspires the people who work and strive under the leader's influence and authority.
In setting a course, the leader's choices are ultimately grounded in, and articulated through, the stories and archetypes that attract that person. Max Leadership is a combination of guiding principles and actions that are imbued with those principles.
Focusing Attention: The leader's search for commitment
Bennis and Nanus (1985) explain that, "Leaders are only as powerful as the ideas they can communicate." Bennis and Nanus (1985) emphasize that if the organization is to be successful, the image must grow out of the needs of the entire organization and must be "claimed" or "owned" by all the important actors. As we have seen, drawing upon universally compelling stories and archetypes to frame that vision can provide a powerful tool for communicating a sense of vision and purpose to other people and drawing them into participating in carrying out that vision.
The leader's vision must become part of a new social architecture in the organization. However, this is often fraught with challenge --- challenge associated with the difficulty of adapting to change. So in this stage of searching for and maintaining commitment, the leader must always be aware of certain types of problems.
Heifetz and Laurie (1997) report that "Changes in societies, markets, customers, competition, and technology around the globe are forcing organizations to clarify their values, develop new strategies, and learn new ways of operating. Often the toughest task for leaders in effecting change is mobilizing people throughout the organization to do adaptive work. Adaptive work is required when our deeply held beliefs are challenged, when the values that made us successful become less relevant, and when legitimate yet competing perspectives emerge." (p. 124)
Change may instigate the need for a new leadership vision in the first place, but pursuing that new leadership vision triggers additional change within an organization, starting with the leader. Heifetz and Laurie (1997) explain that "in order to make change happen, executives have to break a long-standing behavior pattern of their own: providing leadership in the form of solutions. This tendency is quite natural because many executives reach their positions of authority by virtue of their competence in taking responsibility and solving problems. " (p. 124)
So leaders must be good learners, adapting themselves so that they can exemplify the new vision and the accompanying changes in business practices, work roles, etc. As Bennis and Nanus (1985) explain, "Leadership, as seen in this light, requires a learning strategy. A leader, from above or below, with or without authority, has to engage people in confronting the challenge, adjusting their values, changing perspectives, and learning new habits. To an authoritative person who prides himself on his ability to tackle hard problems, this shift may come as a rude awakening. But it also should ease the burden of having to know all the answers and bear all the load. To the person who waits to receive either the coach's call or "the vision" to lead, this change may also seem a mixture of good news and bad news. The adaptive demands of our time require leaders who take responsibility without waiting for revelation or request. One can lead with no more than a question in hand."
In addition to personal change, the leader must assist others in adapting to change. Eugene Kennedy has said, "The authority authors growth in another person." Heifetz and Laurie (1997) point out that "adaptive change is distressing for the people going through it. They need to take on new roles, new relationships, new values, new behaviors, and new approaches to work. Many employees are ambivalent about the efforts and sacrifices required of them. They often look to the senior executive to take problems off their shoulders. But those expectations have to be unlearned. Rather than fulfilling the expectation that they will provide answers, leaders have to ask tough questions. Rather than protecting people from outside threats, leaders should allow them to feel the pinch of reality in order to stimulate them to adapt. Instead of orienting people to their current roles, leaders must disorient them so that new relationships can de velop. Instead of quelling conflict, leaders have to draw the issues out. Instead of maintaining norms, leaders have to challenge "the way we do business" and help others distinguish immutable values from historical practices that must go." (pp. 124-125)
Mobilizing an organization to focus on a new vision, to adapt its behaviors in order to thrive in new business environments is critical. In mobilizing an organization to adapt to change, a number of issues are likely to emerge which the leader must be prepared for. Heifetz and Laurie (1997) have identified four issues, which are shown in the table below.
The leader's tasks in mobilizing an organization
1. Maintain Disciplined Attention (i.e., focus on the vision)
2. Regulate Distress
3. Give the Work Back to People
4. Protect Voices of Leadership from Below
Maintain Disciplined Attention
The leader must strive to keep people's attention --- as well as their enthusiasm and commitment --- focused upon the new vision that is the inspiration for the change that requires adaptation.
Regulate Distress
Change can cause distress. It has a tendency to shake up people's sense of expertise and relevance as well as calling for new learning and new behaviors. Distress can't be eliminated, but it can be modulated. The leader must strive to achieve this.
Give the Work Back to People
In order for the new vision to succeed, people must be given a sense of ownership in the vision and the new practices that are underway. the leader must keep this sense of ownership alive and focused.
Protect Voices of Leadership from Below
Heifetz and Laurie (1997) report that, "Giving a voice to all people is the foundation of an organization that is willing to experiment and learn. But, in fact, whistle-blowers, creative de viants, and other such original voices routinely get smashed and silenced in organizational life. They generate disequilibrium, and the easiest way for an organization to restore equilibrium is to neutralize those voices, sometimes in the name of teamwork and "alignment." The voices from below are usually not as articulate as one would wish. People speaking beyond their authority usually feel self-conscious and sometimes have to generate "too much" passion to get themselves geared up for speaking out. ...To toss it out for its bad timing, lack of clarity, or seeming unreasonableness is to lose potentially valuable infor mation and discourage a poten tial leader in the organization. The leader must work to listen to diiferent voices within an organization and to adjust the course of change if it's warranted. There is always room for more good ideas. Some companies, like 3M and Rubermaid are successful in large measure because of how effectively they draw out and pay attention to ideas from within the organization.
Related to this, DePree (1992) uses the example of a jazz band to describe this reciprocal dimension of leadership: "A jazz band is an expression of servant leadership. the leader of a jazz band has the beautiful opportunity to draw out the best of the other musicians. We have much to learn from jazz-band leaders, for jazz, like leadership, combines the unpredictablity of the future with the gifts of individuals." (p. 8-9) DePree (1992) further explains, "One way to think about leadership is to consider a jazz band. Jazz-band leaders must choose the music, find the right musicians, and perform --- in public. But the effect of the performance depends on many things --- the environment, the volunteers playing in the band, the need for everybody to perform as individuals and as a group, the absolute dependence of the leader on the members of the band, the need of the leader for the followers to play well. What a summary of an organization!"
To succeed in getting people to commit to a new vision, the leader must have trust. Drucker (1992) explains: "The final requirement of effective leadership is to earn trust. Otherwise there won't be any followers- and the only definition of a leader is someone who has followers. To trust a leader, it is not necessary to like him. Nor is it necessary to agree with him. Trust is the conviction that the leader means what he says. It is a belief in something very old fashioned, called "integrity." A leader's actions and a leader's professed beliefs must be congruent, or at least compatible. Effective leadership-and again this is very old wisdom- is not based on being clever; it is based primarily on being consistent." So consistency and adapting to change --- ever faster change! --- must be balanced. Stories and archetypes can help in achieving and maintaining trust.
In summing up the role of vision in leadership, Bennis and Nanus (1985) report that "Over and over again, the leaders we spoke to told us that they did the same things when they took charge of their organizations they paid attention to what was going on, they determined what part of the events at hand would be important for the future of the organization, they set a new direction, and they concentrated the attention of everyone in the organization on it. We soon found that this was a universal principle of leadership, as true for orchestra conductors, army generals, football coaches, and school superintendents as for corporate leaders." Leaders paid attention to what people were saying, throughout and in the literature, whatever that might be, reflected and snthesized a vision for the organization, and then mobilized commitment to that vision.
COMMUNICATION
Communication is critically important to leadership. Fairhurst and Sarr (1996), "Leadership is about taking the risk of managing meaning. We assume a leadership role, indeed we become leaders, through our ability to decipher and communicate meaning out of complex and confusing situations. (p. 2)"
MARKETING AND PUBLIC RELATIONS
"Surveys and focus groups can take you only so far. If you hope to understand what drives consumer behavior, search out the true-life anecdotes that reveal what your customers really want." Ronald B. Leiber
For example, Lenscrafter conducted interviews with customers (in addition to surveys). The interviews uncovered an unarticulated desire for speed and convenience that did not show up in the surveys. Knowledge is not the same thing as data or information. In the case of Lenscrafter's efforts to understand customer motivations and desires, the surveys uncovered data, information, but the interviews probed more deeply, successfully uncovering unarticulated knowledge that was more valuable. Critical local knowledge is out there. It just takes finding it (Postrel, 1999).
Clothing maker Patagonia makes a point of soliciting true tales about how customers live and use their gear. Through these "true tales: Patagonia keeps its product line ahead of the demand curve. It also finds inspiring stories that can enhance its marketing efforts. So stories feed into product development and marketing at Patagonia.
At the heart of this new brand of customer research is a search for subtle insights into human behavior--not only the emotion-laden anecdotes but also unspoken impulses. Just think, for example, of the last time you made eye contact with an
attractive stranger. A whole range of feelings washed over you, and at that moment it would be hard to argue with the hoary notion that at least 80% of all human communication is nonverbal.
LEARNING
According to Mary Catherine Bateson, "Wherever a story comes from, whether it is a familiar myth or a private memory, the retelling exemplifies the making of a connection from one pattern to another: a potential translation in which narrative becomes parable and the once upon a time comes to stand for some renascent truth. This approach applies to all the incidents of everyday life: the phrase in the newspaper, the endearing or infuriating game of a toddler, the misunderstanding at the office. Our species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories." (p. 11) Humans have a style of learning from from experience that is centered around stories; stories serve as a vehicle for remembering.
Computer scientist Roger Schank, whose specialty is artificial intelligence, has a fascinating theory that fundamentally links stories with intelligence --- and learning: "the issue with respect to stories is this: We know them, find them, reconsider them, manipulate them, use them to understand the world and to operate in the world, adapt them to new purposes, tell them in new ways, and we invent them. We live in a world of stories. Our ability to utilize these stories in novel ways is a hallmark of what we consider to be intelligence. (p. 220)"
Schank theorizes that intelligence has seven features, all linked to this notion of intelligence based on stories and storytelling: (1) data finding; (2) data manipulation; (3) comprehension; (4) explanation; (5) planning; (6) communication; and (7) integration. Stories are fundamental to the way people structure information. Facility in story generating, story comprehension, and story linking or matching capabilities, based on the seven features identified above, is related to intelligence. For example, finding a relevant past experience that will help make sense of a new experience is at the core of intelligent behavior. Events are labeled and stored in memory as stories. In terms of data manipulation, some people can find matches (between a current experience and a story in memory) that do not directly fit and, instead of rejecting them, use them. They have learned how to adapt old data for use in new situations. And some people can figure out what a new story might mean even when there is no obvious candidate old story to which to relate it. They have learned how to invent coherency for otherwise incomprehensible data. And some people can tell stories that are not simply direct descriptions of what has happened to them. They have learned how to generalize, crystallize, and elaborate so that they tell stories that express insights not obvious in the original story. And these people have become (or have not forgotten how to be) curious (Schank, 1990).
Roger Schank's Model
Data finding
Data manipulation
Comprehension
Explanation
Planning
Communication
Integration
Support for Schank's ideas comes from a recent study of jurors' decision-making. Pennington & Hastie (1991) found that jurors structure evidence into stories in an attempt to understand vast quantities of disconnected evidence, often presented in a confusing order. An experimental simulation of a murder case was presented to a group of people playing the role of the jury. The study showed that trials can result in opposite verdicts depending on how the jurors recount the information to themselves and fill in the blanks with situations, events, and motives not presented to them as evidence. Pennington (quoted in Goleman, 1992) reports: "People don't listen to all the evidence and then weigh it at the end. They process it as they go along, composing a continuing story throughout the trial that makes sense of what they're hearing."
Pennington & Hastie (1991) conclude: "When we hypothesize that jurors impose a narrative organization on evidence, we mean that jurors engage in an active, constructive, comprehension process in which evidence is organized, elaborated, and interpreted by them during the course of the trial. In part, this activity occurs because comprehension is inherently a constructive process for even the simplest discourse." (p. 523) These researchers propose four certainty principles --- coverage, coherence, uniqueness, and goodness-of-fit --- that govern which story will be accepted, which decision will be selected, and the confidence or level of certainty with which a particular decision will be made. (p. 521-522) Keep these principles in mind when you are developing scenarios! This study of juror decision-making demonstrates how stories are used to organize and structure information.
Pennington and Hastie (1991) define stories as "human action sequences connected by relationships of physical causality and intentional causality between events. In its loosest form, a story could be described as a "causal chain" of events in which events are connected by causal relationships of necessity and sufficiency." These researchers further specify, "a story may be thought of as a hierarchy of embedded episodes. The highest level episode characterizes the most important features of "what happened." Components of the highest level episode are elaborated in terms of more detailed event sequences in which causal and intentional relations among subordinate story events are represented. (pp. 525-6)" The episode and causal structure of the story provides an "automatic" index of the importance of different pieces of evidence for jurors.
Pennington & Hastie's Model
Coverage
Coherence
Uniqueness
Goodness of fit
Through his company Cognitive Systems. Inc, Roger Schank has developed a number of training programs based upon his model of intelligence and learning centered around stories. Others have seen the importance of stories for learning, including Harvard professor Robert Coles (1989) and John Bransford and his colleagues at Vanderbilt University, who have developed a series of story-based multimedia programs for teaching math and problem-solving to children. And a number of companies have recognized the importance of stories for learning and acculturation, including the Xerox Palo Palto Research Center Brown and Duguid, 1987; McLellan, 1994) and Price Waterhouse Coopers (Knapp, 1999).
CAPTURING AND LEVERAGING KNOWLEDGE
Stories are very important for the social construction of knowledge. Narratives play a vital role in the transfer of information and discoveries. And stories help people keep track of their discoveries, providing a meaningful structure for for remembering what has been learned. there is increasing evidence to support this emphasis on stories as a tool for learning, understanding, and remembering (Bateson, 1994; Coles, 1989; Finnegan, 1994; Hasselbring, 1992; Honan, 1990; McLellan, 1992, 1993a, 1993b, Norman, 1993; Pennington & Hastie, 1991; Rheingold, 1993; Schank, 1990; Schank & Jona, 1991).
John Seely Brown (1989), Director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, describes stories as "expert systems" for storing, linking, and readily accessing information whenever a new situation calls for it. Stories are very important for the social construction of knowledge and contextualized or 'situated' learning. As 'war stories' are shared, fragments of stories are melded together with them that enhance the meaning of the original stories, as well as transferring information about the discoveries to others. Xerox has reshaped its training program for technicians to include the dimension of stories, which encapsulate 'the voice of experience' in a memorable way (Suchman, 1987).
Virginia Postrel (1999) suggests that the difference between information and knowledge is that knowledge includes the articulated knowledge that information captures but knowledge also captures the much more elusive element of unarticulated knowledge. Increasingly, people are becoming aware of the importance of this unarticulated knowledge. T. S. Elliott once wrote, "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" Stories provide a vehicle for recapturing --- and leveraging --- knowledge and wisdom.
STORY PATTERNS AND LEADERSHIP ROLES
What are the roles that a leader must be prepared to take on? Wells (1996) describes a set of roles that leaders must be able to perform, including: sage, visionary, magician, globalist, mentor, ally, sovereign, guide, and artisan. Wells also explains that leaders must understand when and where the different roles should be applied. Wells recommends that leaders need to be very aware of these different roles and they need to actively gain skill in each of these archetypes, each of these sets of traits and skills, so that the different talents that they represent can be deployed effectively in the practice of life and the practice of leadership.
Sage |
Globalist |
Sovereign |
Visionary |
Mentor |
Guide |
Magician |
Ally |
Artisan |
But there are other ways of conceptualizing the roles that a leader plays. For example, Gardner (1995) differentiates between direct and indirect leaders. Gardner explains: "Most creative leaders exert their influence indirectly through the symbolic products that they create; most political leaders relate their stories directly to their audiences." (pp. 293-294) It's important to note that the discussion of themes above addresses the issues faced primarily in direct leadership.
And in modern culture, sports provide a rich source of archetypes. For example, in football, the quarterback is associated with certain qualities, certain skills. When Bob Dole selected Jack Kemp as his running mate in the 1996 presidential election, former football player Kemp commented, "A quarterback is always ready." And when President Franklin Roosevelt took office, he compared himself to a quarterback trying out different strategies until one succeeded in his efforts to overcome the challenges that the nation faced during the Great Depression. It's interesting to note that this archetype of the flexible, strategizing quarterback symbolized Roosevelt's freedom from the tedious constraints of ideological rigidity. Roosevelt was not lacking in admirable deeply-held core values, but his archetypal touchstones permitted a practical approach --- thinking outside the envelop to solve exceptional problems.
Furthermore, FDR was very skilled at evoking archetypal images that would generate support for his policies. For example, when FDR proposed the Lend-Lease Program to provide Great Britian with a lifeline of military resources during World War II, before the U.S. committed to joining the war, he explained the proposed policy with the image of someone loaning a hose to a neighbor to water his garden. This simple image or archetype of neighborliness proved compelling. The Lend Lease Policy was passed.
Vogler (1994) emphasizes that it is important to understand that archetypes should not be perceived as fixed roles but as functions performed temporarily by characters to achieve certain effects in a story. "Looking at the archetypes in this way, as flexible character functions rather than as rigid character types, can liberate your storytelling. It explains how a character in a story can manifest the qualities of more than one archetype. The archetypes can be thought of as masks, worn by the characters temporarily as they are needed to advance the story. A character might enter the story performing the function of a herald, then switch masks to function as a trickster, a mentor, and a shadow." (p. 34)
Vogler continues, "Another way to look at the classic archetypes is that they are facets of the hero's (or the writer's) personality. the other characters represent possibilities for the hero, for good or ill. a hero sometimes proceeds through the story gathering and incorporating the energy and traits of the other characters, fusing them into a complete human being who has picked up something from everyone she has met along the way." (p. 35) Related to this, Vogler points out that one can view the archetypes as personified symbols of various human qualities. So this is very relevant to our understanding of leadership vis-a-vis stories.
Leaders take on different roles in the course of their work, roles that are imbued with associations that go back in time to mythic stories, such as the stories of the ancient Greeks and the stories of mythic leaders such as King Arthur, Merlin, and, more recently, Obi-wan Kenobi, Princess Leia, and the other characters of Star Wars. May the force be with you!
We can think of archetypes as types, including types of roles or characters and types of story structures as well as the symbols associated with these character and story patterns. Archetypes have to do with patterns. Plato and later Jung, as well as others, noticed patterns that recurred among different people, across different cultures, as well as the recurring patterns that can be observed within a single individual.
Jean Houston (1995) explains that archetypes are about derivations, categories derived from primal entities. Archetypes are the spiritual and symbolic resources of mankind. Archetypes are drawn from many sources. As Houston explains, archetypes are "the primary forms and constellations of energy that govern the psyche or that inner self we sometimes call the soul." According to Houston, "Quintessentially, archetypes are about relationships." And furthermore, "archetypes must be coded into myths to be understood." Houston identifies a number of different archetypes, including the twelve disciples and the heroes in Greek mythology. Houston reports that psychologist Carl Jung held an archetypal image of Americans as "extroverted as hell."
In some cases, the organization's story is associated with the leader and embodied in that leader's story. In this case, the leader provides a form of archetype or symbol. Probably the leading example of this today is such as Microsoft, which is intrinsically associated with its founder, Bill Gates. The convergence of Microsoft's identity with that of Bill Gates has recently come to be a problem for the company so Gates has relinquished the role of CEO, although he still remains the Chairman of the company.
There are archetypes not only for the roles that the leader must play, but also for the forces that the leader confronts. Vorhaus (1994) reports that there are three types of comic conflict: man against nature, man against man, and man against self. A comic premise for a story can be built on one, two, or all three of these types of conflict. For example, in the cartoon strip Calvin and Hobbes, all three types of conflict are present: Calvin is constantly in conflict with himself; the conflict between Calvin and Hobbes represents the struggle of man against man; and Calvin's conflicts with parents, teachers, and everyone else represents the global struggle of man against the larger world. Tragic and heroic stories can also be built upon these premises.
Hillman (1996) analyzes in great detail the types (archetypes) of that a leader can deploy. These types of power, include the language of power, control, influence, resistance, leadership, prestige, authority, exhibitionism, charisma, ambition, reputation, fearsomeness, tyranny, purism, subtle power, growth, and efficiency.
One set of archetypes or patterns that is gaining recognition and that leaders must address is the contrast between continuity and discontinuity. Our traditional stories tend to give us the impression that ideally, stories, including our life stories, should embody continuity: things happen in a logical progression without any breaks or discontinuities. But in an increasingly complex world, people's lives embody less and less continuity so that they often feel out of sync with the traditional story archetypes and run the risk of feeling a sense of failure because their life doesn't match the archetype of continuity: beginning, middle, end. But today, instead of the continuity of lasting marriage, we often have divorce and other discontinuities...mergers, downsizings, changing directions in response to market forces. It's no longer so easy to "live happily ever after"....if it ever was at all, outside of the stories that articulate the ideal pattern. Leaders must develop stories that help people adapt to change effectively.
Creative leadership needs to address this issue of discontiuity --- for the organization and the people who belong to it. One example of this comes from Lucent. This company currently has an extensive group of workers who are laying down cable in order to establish a telecommunications network. But these jobs are temporary, targeted to last for 5 years. To help the workers make the transition from their current jobs, Lucent is underwriting tuition costs for these workers to take college courses so they will be better prepared to face discontiuity once their jobs end.
Still another profoundly important set of archetypes or patterns is the contrast between linearity/hierarchical structures and nonlinearity/hypertextual structures. Linearity/hierarchy is associated with continuity while nonlinearity/hypertext is linked to discontinuity --- instead of following a set path, you can move around more flexibly. But this new pattern takes some getting used to --- a few people cannot make the transition to this new pattern, which requires a deep, fundamental change in mindset. Associated with nonlinearity/hypertext is a sense of immediacy --- so much information can be accessed --- and reacted too --- immediately. Think of the traders on Wall Street who specialize in transaction cycles that are based on changes in stock prices within an 8-hour day. And the financial data from markets all over the world is available instantaneously, all the time --- not at the end of an hour or a day or even a minute --- but instantaneously.
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Tech Head Stories is published by McLellan Wyatt Digital.Hilary McLellan and Roger B. Wyatt