Leading and Leadership

I have been intrigued to discover what I call the difference between leading and leadership. In the first are the practices that build up a people and in the second the environment of mutual trust and respect that makes it possible. I point this out because I suspect that in human sociality the majority of people aren’t as interested in having a leader as in having leadership. Of course one cannot occur without the other but I think it serves to locate the primary task of leaders as “environmentalists” while reminding us that our role cannot be fulfilled in a vacuum: we need people. It’s oxymoronic yet so fitting in the grander scheme of life that what we need to accomplish our mission is also that which defeats it. Leaders and perhaps particularly narrative leaders then dance the perpetual steps of the unconvinced but always moving toward a destination, taking people with us.

Member Values

Re-narrating even working practices involves an appeal to transcendent values and asks if the practices that represent those values are the best way of relating to the world. Changing them requires another story, another way of looking at the same truth but through eyes freshened with possibility and that takes into account the myriad ways custom and technology creates new opportunities. When I say, “transcendent values,” I compare that term against another: “transactional value.” I’ve parsed an individual’s values as being held as transcendent or transactional (the language is mine). Values held transcendently are absolutely right or correct, non-negotiable, and resistant to change. Values held transactionally are those needed to transact a person’s living in a given situation or course of life. An example of this is one person’s comment that if the practices of the church changed she would “keep an open mind, evaluate it, and see if it’s something that the other members want to do.” When asked if other members were to change their position regarding the Bible being inerrant would she go along with that? Her response was a firm, “No.” “That’s one thing I won’t change.” The willingness to change and even adapt to a practice not completely of her liking so long as it was “something that the other members want to do” would not extend to every practice. Clearly, there was more than a single value or a single narrative at work.

What are the Origins of Narrative Leadership?

The expression, “narrative leadership,” doesn’t explore the vast knowledge base regarding leadership but references an underlying notion that leaders use narrative in their practice of leadership. Though “narrative leadership” is used in current leadership and organizational vernacular, its use in critical literature is limited. This sparseness of use is also reflected in its definition. Fleming (2001) who may have been earliest in its use provided no succinct definition except to say that narrative equips leaders in their sensemaking role. He held sensemaking as the ability to question an outdated interpretive scheme while providing a new alternative. Key to this is the leader’s ability to tell stories. Taking an altogether different tack from Fleming yet still grounded in the emotive nature of the leader’s speech, Gahmberg (2002) interpreted narrative leadership differently. He viewed narrative leadership as an analysis of the leader’s emotions, “particularly the dimension of enunciation” (p. 1).

To determine what Narrative Leadership could mean in a non-critical sense and in the current vernacular, I surveyed the course offerings of various educational institutions and consulting firms in the USA and UK and arrived at a somewhat unified description. Among them is that of Wales (2008) where narrative leadership is “storytelling as a change management technology and a tool for engaging others.” Cass (2008) described narrative leadership as using the “power of story for organizational and personal change.” Similarly, Hartford (2008) as well as Alban (2008) held it to be the use of “narrative for personal and organizational change” while Denning (2008), a popular business consultant and author in narrative, seems to take pains to not use the two words, narrative and leadership, as a conjoined expression. In an instance of his doing so, it refers to techniques that “use well-targeted and well-deployed emotion to stimulate self-motivated, coordinated action” (p. 1).

It is possible, if not likely, that the term “Narrative Leadership” emerged from other appreciative forms of leadership, particularly transformational leadership (Burns, 1978) and strategic leadership (Hunt, 1991). While this isn’t clear it is telling that common to each is the idea of talking with people about the organization’s future (Boal & Schultz, 2007) and what their individual futures may look like (Driscoll & McKee, 2006). In this vein Boje and Rhodesb (2005) appears to have provided the critical definition to which Fleming alluded and the various course offerings appealed. He stated,

The role of a narrative leader is to facilitate the transformation of one way of narrating the corporation to another, in this case from epic to novelistic. In terms of narrative strategy this is a transformation to more novelistic or polyphonic narration. It is also a means of reformulating meanings and changing organizational cultures and transmitting tacit norms. (p. 101)

In this understanding, narrative leadership assumes that to make sense of their worlds people and their organizations rely upon story (Allan, Fairtlough & Heinzen, 2002; Boje, 1991; Brockmeier & Harre, 2001; Owen, 1999). Thereby a possibly newer form of leadership emerges, one where a person’s storied connections are prized and developed (Boje, 2005).

For a complete list of cited references please follow this link.