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 He held sensemaking as the ability to question an outdated interpretive scheme while providing a new alternative.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.