The Secret Language of Leadership

HR & Storytelling: in Human Resources magazine

From Human Resources: Australia's leading information resource on Human Resource issues HR and the art of storytelling By Melinda Finch FOR HR LEADERS, organisational storytelling is a useful way to help implement change and growth in their business, according to Stephen Denning, author of The Leader ’ s Guide to Storytelling. Although it is still an emerging discipline in HR, Denning said HR professionals can benefit from storytelling because it’s an effective way to communicate with people. “The ability to tell the right story at the right time is emerging as an essential leadership skill for coping with, and getting business results in, the turbulent world of the 21st century,” he said. Storytelling is a flexible way of communicating strange, complex new ideas and getting people into action quickly and enthusiastically, he added. “When leaders have to move an organisation from good to great, they find that the traditional management techniques of command-and-control don't work. “Instead of command and control, leaders need to engage and enrol: storytelling is uniquely adapted to this challenge, because human beings tend to think in stories, and base their actions on stories,” Denning said. He has worked with some of the world’s largest companies including Coca-Cola Amatil, IBM, McDonalds, the US Army and the Australian Federal Treasury. “It enables managers to lead organisations into the future ethically and successfully by increasing the communication within organisations – becoming an essential skill all managers should develop,” he said. Speaking at a recent Humanagement event on leading transformational change, Denning said storytelling can be used by HR professionals to improve the own interactions or to effect change in the organisation, enhance the performance of existing leaders as well as identify and train future leaders. “The emerging discipline of narrative deals with leadership more than management. Management concerns means rather than ends. Leadership on the other hand deals with ends more than means,” he said. “It concerns issues where there is no agreement on underlying assumptions and goals – or where there is a broad agreement, but the assumptions and goals are heading for failure. “In fact, the principal task of leadership is to create a new consensus about the goals to be pursued and how to achieve them. “Once there is such a consensus, then managers can get on with the job of implementing those goals. It is essentially a task of persuasion,” Denning said. HR professionals can help executives and managers to understand their organisation's story by becoming better listeners, especially to staff and clients. They must also pay attention to the discrepancies between the stories that are heard. “If what you hear is not to your liking, think long and hard before assuming that the staff on the front lines or the clients are wrong,” he said. “If you don't like what you're hearing, the task is not to change the market's idea of who you are but actually to change who you are. And that can take a generation.” One of the keys to successful organisational storytelling is understanding that different narrative patterns have different impacts. “Grasping which narrative pattern is suitable for which leadership challenge is key to making effective use of the power of storytelling,” he said. Then it’s “simply a matter of getting started and practising. Storytelling is a performance art and one acquires skill by practice”.

27 July 2005

From Human Resources magazine: June 29, 2005 The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling By S Denning Jossey-Bass, 2005 $38.95 Storytelling has been around for thousands of years in one shape or another, however it is experiencing somewhat of a renaissance in the corporate world. This is largely due to the work of Stephen Denning, a former executive with the World Bank and now author and consultant in the world of storytelling. His latest book, The Leader ’ s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative, examines how leaders at any level, from the CEO, middle management or the frontline, can lead by using stories to effect change. The book shows how storytelling can help in handling the principal and most difficult challenges of leadership: sparking action, getting people to work together, and leading people into the future. He elaborates upon this with a number of case studies from companies such as Coca Cola, The Body Shop, IBM and Starbucks. Denning includes an interesting chapter on taming the grapevine of gossip and rumour. He believes conventional management techniques are generally impotent and advocates that storytelling can neutralise untrue rumours by satirising them out of existence. All in all, the book is a refreshing read on how to apply an ages-old art to the corporate world.

28 June 2005

Find out more at http://www.stevedenning.com

Narrative: A Core Competence for Leaders

·      A large global bank recently discovered – to its astonishment – that its outstanding managers had one key thing in common: they were all very good at telling stories.

·      A large global chemical company surprised itself recently when it realized that in order to get from “good” to “great,” it must assign to storytelling a role, equally important as mission, strategy and values.

·      A major news organization (CBS Evening News) announced recently that it will be using storytelling as its strategy for revamping its daily television broadcast.

What these companies have stumbled on is that narrative is emerging as a core competence for leaders today – a conclusion of central importance for HR departments.

Historically, much of the work on organizational narrative has emerged from the field of knowledge management. This is where both I and Dave Snowden have come from. However the ambit of organizational narrative is of course much wider than KM. My recent books (The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling and Squirrel Inc) for instance have focused on the role of narrative in all aspects of leadership, not simply leading KM.

During my trip to Australia, I came in contact with a number of people from HR, in part because the trip was organized by Greg Weiss, who comes from the HR side and has put together an interesting network of forward-looking HR thinkers among Australian corporations. (Is there such a thing as a forward-looking HR thinker? Many HR departments are still living in what Greg calls “Jurassic Park,” and focusing merely on the mechanics of the job. In Australia, Greg has been able to identify a group of leaders in HR who are interested in moving people issues from the periphery to the strategic center of the organization.

The potential of a marriage between narrative and HR is very powerful. Thus most of the difficult challenges that leaders face to today – sparking change, communicating who you are, managing the brand, transmitting values, catalyzing collaboration, taming the grapevine, communicating the future – are ill-suited to conventional command-and-control approaches to communication, but are well-adapted to narrative techniques.

The question for HR departments becomes: do you want to be part of an organization where the managers can’t spark change, can’t communicate who they are, can’t the manage the brand, can’t transmit values, can’t catalyze collaboration, can’t tame the grapevine and can’t communicate the future? If so, then maintain your current conventional HR practices, and ignore narrative capacity in the recruitment and training of staff.

If, on the other hand, you’re interested in having an organization where the managers can handle these central leadership challenges, then you really have to start thinking systematically about making narrative capacity a core competence for the organization. This has implications for recruitment, promotion, career development and training policies for the organization.

It also has ramifications for the very nature of the HR function, which needs to change its name from “the HR Department” (and stop calling people “human resources” as though they are things or commodities) and, like Southwest Airlines, start calling itself something like “the People Department.”

Find out more at http://www.stevedenning.com