I was running a workshop in a small country hotel in the Netherlands a couple of months ago. It is a quiet tulip-decked, canalside retreat and I had seen a pair of spring hares shadow boxing in their meadow as I arrived to set up the event.
On the ubiquitous, waxy, slightly wobbly hotel flipchart, I had written some suggestions for certain qualities that people looked for and expected in their leaders, amongst them the art of storytelling. I had expected this to be a fairly uncontroversial claim and possibly even a gentle bridge to eliciting some leadership stories from my group of participants - thus quite neatly validating my contention. Not so fast, Mr Facilitator...
The term 'storytelling' obviously touched a raw nerve or two somewhere - whether in its Dutch translation or its playground connotations, I'm not really sure. 'Storytelling', I was told with no little vehemence, is what 'management' have been doing to us for years. 'Every day there's a new story which contradicts the old one. All they can do is tell stories instead of giving us the facts!' I was snookered and not for the first time by my desire to represent the workplace as a more poetic, engaging forum than it actually can be in widespread, weary experience. We completed a fairly prosaic workshop together thereafter in perfectly good spirit and with the timely aid of some excellent, freshly-baked almond marzipan 'gevullde koeken'.
On returning home to reflect on my Dutch rebuff, I took down Anette Simmons' enchanting 'The Story Factor' from my shelves and re-read it. She makes a simple and persuasive case for all those charged with the leadership of organisations large or small to be able to call upon a fund of six generic stories, all true, concise and authentically told. These big six according to Simmons are:
'Who I am' stories
'Why I am here' stories
'The Vision' stories
'Teaching' stories
'Values-in-Action' stories
'I know what you are thinking' stories
She goes on to illustrate through her examples a number of compelling points that link narrative coherence to leadership charisma. Great leaders, it transpires, tell great stories. It's often the simple page-turning power of wanting to find out what happens next that drives followership.
What's your story?
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