The Leader's Guide to Storytelling

by Stephen Denning

  Howard Gardner contrasts the different fortunes of Margaret Thatcher, who became prime minister of the United Kingdom in 1979, and Newt Gingrich, who became Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1995:

  Thatcher strove as prime minister to show that Britain could recover its greatness through ingenuity and reliance on the private sector. The fact that she herself had succeeded through courage, cleverness, and hard work meant that she embodied the story she was telling and this contributed to her success. By contrast, Newt Gingrich, who rose to become Speaker of the House after the 1994 election, aimed at sparking a similar political revolution, but without the same consistency. He called for term limits—for others. He was for the private sector, but had been on the government payroll for most of his life. While promoting family values, he had several messy divorces, as well as an affair with an intern while he was attacking the Clinton presidency for the Monica Lewinsky affair. The gap between the story that he told and the story of his own life hampered the communication of his political message.11

  It takes courage to tell a strong personal story, because the story implies certain values that you will hold to even if the world changes. Thus, you will need to be clear about what you believe and base your actions on those beliefs, time after time, even if this makes you unpopular.

  Focus the Story on a Turning Point in Your Life

  The turning points in life are a fruitful source of stories. These are moments of disruption when some incident gives us a glimpse of the regions of deeper feeling.

  The following anecdote was related by Anita Roddick, chairman of The Body Shop. She was born in 1942 and raised in the southeast of England, near Brighton. Her Italian immigrant mother and American father ran a café where early on she was instilled with an intense work ethic. As she told it:

  Although I went to a Catholic school, my mother hated the local priest. When my father died, I remember sitting on the stairs in our house while my mother was furiously scrubbing the linoleum in the hallway. There was a knock on the front door and the priest was there to tell her that she was very lucky that my father was going to be given a Catholic funeral. Mother just picked up the bucket of dirty water and threw it over him. I'll never forget that. Acts like that push you onto the edge of bravery. It is no wonder, having a mother and an upbringing like that, that I learned to challenge everything I was told—school, at church and in every other institution.12

  Roddick turned a strong work ethic, an interest in social justice and respect for the environment, and a willingness to speak out into a thriving global business. Through telling a story apparently about her mother, she also communicated what sort of person she was. Rather than a direct discussion of her deepest feelings, she alluded to these feelings by implication. If the listeners follow and understand the story, they get a good sense of Roddick herself.

  Why choose a turning point in your life? People always live on several levels. On the surface, we live a life that consists of the routine, predictable activities of the human animal: we wake up, we eat, we drink, we go to work, we get our job done, we relax and chatter about this and that, we get tired and go to sleep, perchance to dream, and get the tired mind and body ready for the next day.

  But below this surface of routine, predictable activity, there exists a realm of deeper feelings—of the joy and exhilaration of being alive, of the desire for loving and being loved, of the pain of realizing that we may not realize all our deepest ambitions, of the dilemmas of balancing our own goals with those of others, of a looming sense of our own mortality. The nature and intensity of these feelings may vary from person to person, but the existence of this realm is not in question.

  It is the former aspect—the superficial, routine side of life—that we typically present to others in the workaday world, even though it is in the latter domain of deeper feeling that our uniqueness as human beings is revealed. There are of course good, commonsense reasons for generally keeping these deeper feelings to ourselves—a desire for privacy, a lack of time to share these matters, a practical wish to avoid embarrassing our associates with the burden of our deepest feelings, or just simple ignorance of what our deepest feelings really are. Yet it is these deeper realms of feeling that provide the primary subject matter for stories that communicate who we are.

  In communicating who we are, the balance to be attained is delicate. If we reveal too much of the deeper realms, we may be seen as wallowing in an unseemly public display of feelings that would be better kept under wraps. If we reveal too little, then we may remain a colorless cipher, living on the superficial level of the routine, the predictable, the conventional—a mere stereotype.

  Characteristically, a suitable balance is best achieved not by direct confession of your deepest feelings but by a story that reflects a turning point in our life.

  Tell a Story with a Positive Tone

  For a leader, it is important for the story to show how he or she derived something positive from the experience. The message thus needs to be one of hope, that it is possible to accomplish something of importance, something of value that can carry the enterprise and the human spirit forward. The story may be about adversity and setbacks, but it will reflect what was learned from the experience (as in Anita Roddick's story) or how adversity was overcome.

  Tell Your Story with Context

  The story of who you are will implicitly reflect your fundamental views about the world and perhaps allude to how you developed these views.

  It will follow the lines of a traditional story. It will talk about what happened to someone—the hero or heroine, usually you, the storyteller. There is a plot. The stories are typically told with feeling and context.

  Identity stories are thus unlike the minimalist or springboard stories designed to spark action that I discussed in Chapter Three. The aim of the identity story is to put a human face on you as a person—the manager of the organization—and indicate that you have a heart.

  Plot, setting, the sounds, the sights, and the feel of the place all help communicate what it is like being you. You want the audience to identify with you, even vicariously to be you, to be there facing the adversity you were facing so that they gain insight into what you are made of.

  Use Humor to Brighten Your Story

  The moment of disruption may also be a moment of comedy, when some unusual incongruity occurred, when nothing serious was at stake, but your action and reaction in response to it, a sympathetic pleasure in human idiosyncrasy, reveals what sort of a person you are. Thus, the telling of an experience of pain and difficulty can be lightened by a touch of humor. By referring to painful events in a humorous way, you demonstrate that you have mastered the experience, rather than that the experience has crushed you. Some examples:

  John F. Kennedy: In 1960, John Kennedy made fun of two apparent drawbacks to his candidacy as president—his inherited wealth and his Catholic religion—as a way of admitting his political liabilities and making light of them. On one occasion in the campaign, Kennedy held up what he said was a telegram from his “generous daddy” and read it aloud: “Jack, Don't spend one dime more than is necessary. I'll be damned if I am going to pay for a landslide.”13

  Amos Oz: Israeli writer Amos Oz explains that as a child in Jerusalem, he hoped to grow up to be a book: “There was fear when I was a little boy. People would say, Enjoy every day, because not every child grows up to be a person. This was probably their way of telling me about the Holocaust or the fame of Jewish history. Not every child grows up. I know the Israelis become tiresome when they say that the whole world is against us, but back in the forties, that was pretty much the case. I wanted to become a book, not a man. The house was full of books written by dead men, and I thought a book may survive.”14

  Don't Overstate Your Good Qualities

  Psychologists have shown that human beings tend to see their own lives in more positive terms than an objective appraisal would warrant.15 These optimistic illusions can work well for us as long
as they are not too extreme. When we believe that life is relatively good and we are in control of our fate, we tend to cope better with adversity and meet challenges with confidence and hope.16

  It's important, however, not to let this overly positive image be communicated because it will sound like boasting. Hence, talk about adversity overcome. Don't glamorize too much. Be gracious toward all those who contributed to your success. Rather than talking about how you won a smashing victory and demolished the opposition, talk about how you were able to overcome great obstacles through the help of your colleagues.

  Where You Tell Your Story

  People don't seek in a leader someone who is grappling with inner demons, who is angry and bitter at the inevitable injustices that life hands out.17 Instead, they seek in a leader someone who has brought the opposing parts of life together into a harmonious whole, both for the prospective leader as a person and in terms of the new stories that may be generated for others. In fact, since no one achieves perfect coherence, any prospective leader will have unresolved tensions—with a spouse, a child, a parent, an employer, a business partner—that might be counterproductive if exposed to the light of day.

  To communicate that you have achieved the requisite degree of integration, choose a part of your life story that links to the broader story of the audience. You communicate that you are someone who is likely to improve their lives in some way.

  In 1992, Bill Clinton presented himself as the embodiment of resilience—someone who could bounce back from apparent disaster. As the self-styled Comeback Kid, the Man from Hope, he was implicitly telling a story of hope about the United States. The stories about the candidate and the country were aligned, by design. Clinton successfully made the case that a vote for him would make the country come out stronger.

  In 2000, George W. Bush played the role of the prodigal son. He had gone astray in earlier years, but through personal resolve and faith, he had reestablished moral clarity. Implicitly he was telling the same story to the country: after moral delinquencies of the Clinton presidency, Bush persuaded voters that a vote for him was a vote for bedrock beliefs and integrity.18

  It's usually best to choose a story that not only reflects the way you overcame adversity but also points to its relevance to the audience in front of you. Present your story so as to suggest an analogy to the way you would handle the problems of today.

  Make Sure the Audience Wants to Hear Your Story

  One of the key tasks when telling your personal story is to make sure that your audience has the time and interest to listen to it. Avoid digressions, wasted words, and the epic tale. CEOs in particular need to resist the temptation to assemble the troops and force them to listen to epic tales from their youth.

  Choose the occasion for telling your personal story carefully. Personal storytelling may be appropriate in moments like these:

  First encounter: When someone is nominated to a position, people are likely to be very interested in learning who the appointee is. This is an obvious opportunity to satisfy that interest with some concise and aptly chosen personal storytelling.

  A difficult decision: When a difficult decision is about to be made or has just been made, interest in or suspicion of the real reasons for it often runs high. Are the official reasons the reasons that drove the decision-making process? Or were there some other undisclosed factors that, behind the scenes, caused the chips to fall the way they did? Even if such factors don't exist, opponents or skeptics will be quick to supply them and distribute them through the rumor mill. Linking the decision to your personal life story and pointing out the consistency of the two can be one way of solidifying the authenticity of the decision you have made, as well as constraining the grapevine. Even where people do not agree with you, they will respect your integrity if your decision flows from the deeply held principles that your life story embodies.

  Coaching and counseling: When employees or associates come to you for advice when disaster strikes, direct advice can appear facile and unhelpful even when it is soundly based. In these settings, a personal story about how you handled an analogous crisis may be an effective method of getting the message across.

  Understand the Audience's Story

  The counterpart to being clear on the story of who you are is grasping the story of who the audience is. Just as you prepare for a presentation by figuring out your own life story, so you also invest effort in understanding the audience's interests, authority, and roles.

  Thus, relevance is contextual. The more you know about the audience's story—what matters to them, what drives them, what they expect, what they fear, what makes them tick, what ticks them off—the more likely you are to be able to choose a story that is relevant to their needs. Ultimately it is the audience that decides whether you are relevant to them.

  Make Sure the Audience Hears the Story You Tell

  When you tell the story of who you are, the story must come from within, but its practical impact depends on what story the listener goes away with. You might be telling a story about how you overcame adversity to win a high school hockey competition with the objective of communicating your courage, your persistence, and your strength of character. But if your listeners are thinking, “What a boastful jerk!” then clearly your story is having the opposite effect of what you intend. It doesn't matter how brilliant your storytelling, the listeners are creating a different story from the one you are telling.

  With your story, you endeavor to make a compelling aesthetic statement by integrating your remembered past, your perceived present, and your anticipated future. You don't discover your story from predetermined elements; you create yourself through telling your story.

  The Transformational Leader Becomes the Organization

  Communicating who you are is of vital importance in transformational leadership, because it transforms followers' self-concepts and links their identity with that of the organization. Transformational leaders forge this link by embodying the values of the change they are urging and emphasizing the intrinsic rewards of pursuing it. The leaders' clear sense of identity helps followers gain confidence and a sense of self-efficacy. It works by bonding followers and their self-concepts to the organizational identity, a concept to which I turn in Chapter Five.

  A Template for Creating the Story of Who You Are

  This template is a set of steps to be used in crafting stories that communicate your identity and help your audience build trust in you:

  1. The story of who you are is usually a prelude to some other communication—your main communication. Be clear on the purpose of this main communication—proposing a change, announcing a decision, or marketing or selling a product, for example.

  2. Review the events of your journey through life, and select an event that was a turning point for you, say, when things did not turn out as you expected. Describe it briefly.

  3. Is the turning point relevant by analogy to your main communication? If yes, continue on to step 4. If not, try to find a turning point that is relevant by analogy to your main communication. A story about how you fell sick at a restaurant might be an interesting, even gripping, story, but if it is not relevant to your main communication, it may be distracting and counterproductive.

  4. When and where did it happen—for example, “In July 2003, in London, I was…”

  5. Will the event in itself be of interest to your audience? If not, can the story be told so that it could become interesting to your audience?

  6. Does the story reflect the values that you as a person espouse? If not, can it be adjusted so that it does reflect those values?

  7. Does the story show by implication how you felt about the event?

  8. If the story has a positive tone, that is, a happy ending, is there a risk that it will sound like boasting? If the story has a negative tone, that is, an unhappy ending, does it show what you got out of the experience?

  9. At the conclusion, does the story link to your main communication—for example, �
�What this experience taught me was…”?

  5

  Use Narrative to Build Your Brand

  The World of Social Media

  “Customers know everything about your company…. That has changed the rules of business forever.”

  Harvard Business Review1