Manage-Wise

Why leaders need to communicate

Leaders use stories first and foremost to get their points across in a memorable way. If you think about it, we humans have been listening to stories since before the beginning of time. Consider the cave paintings in France, the hieroglyphs in Egypt, and the line drawings in Australia. What are they but stories? The same goes for the Iliad and the Odyssey. From Homer through Herodotus and on through Chaucer and Shakespeare, we love the telling of a tale. And with a tale, a leader can make a point, not with a proverbial hammer, but with style, deftness, and wit.

A powerful way to communicate a key message is by telling a story. Lincoln used fables and folklore; Kennedy wrote profiles and related anecdotes; Carol Bartz and other business leaders narrate the accomplishments of their employees. Stories are an effective means of placing messages into organisational context. Stories can imbue information with humanity, enabling the communicator to make a connection between the rational and the emotional. In doing so, stories become conduits that make leadership messages meaningful and facilitate intended results.

Holistic leadership communication

You can even consider leadership itself as an expression of a story with multiple properties. For example, stories are embedded into the backbone of an organisation; they are both the expression and the echo of the culture. Stories are the sinews that bind one group to another; as sinews, they can bend and twist but do not break. Stories also are like muscles—strong, flexible, and powerful. And in another way, stories are like charged particles zinging this way and that throughout the organisation with no defined direction. At the same time, stories are the tissues, the organic fabric that draws people together into cohesive whole.

Given the complexity of story properties, it is no an easy task to manage. One reason is that it is not simply a task. For leaders, the task is to inspire and set direction. For managers, the task is to inform and follow up. For followers, the task is to pay attention and provide feedback.

For everyone, the task is to listen to one another. The challenge is to embrace all aspects of communication in order to succeed. And one way to do this is to frame communication into leadership stories.

Creating result-driven heroes

Storytelling is a natural communication tool for leaders. An outcome of storytelling is the creation of results-driven heroes, people who have arisen from within the organisation to achieve, contribute, and succeed by producing results.

Telling these tales in conversations, dialogues, and speeches communicates possibilities; in turn, people become inspired. Now, in the wake of corporate governance scandals, as well as or uneasy economic times, the need for inspiration has never been greater. Rather than looking up, though, it may be wise to look around. The CEO has fallen off the pedestal; the person who tells the truth and “walks the talk” is the genuine article.

Organisations need people of integrity to remain in place those people in positions where they can manage others and lead by example. Results-driven heroes come in all shapes, sizes, and guises. You can find them on the shop floor teaching other the job. You can find them in the office suites making the case for customer rights. You can find them in the boardroom arguing for what is good for society rather than expedient for the company.

The underlying theme in heroism is integrity—the ability to stand up and be counted. From integrity emerges courage—the willingness to do what is right even at personal cost. And finally, heroism is about putting the needs of other people first. Companies have heroes throughout their ranks; it is a matter of finding them and elevating them as role models. As logical and aligned as we desire our organisations to be, sometimes the best way to fulfill the vision is to allow people to step out of bounds—not morally, but creatively.

Leaders need to create environments where risks are acceptable and encouraged as long as those risks are in line with the mission, culture, and values of the organisation. Therefore, stories about risk-takers, those who succeeded and those who did not, can do much to enable people to take managed risks for the good of their organisations.

Storied path

Another way to look at leadership is as a journey, a shared experience between leader and follower that occurs over time and space. As such, the journey itself becomes the central story line. There may be dozens and dozens, maybe hundred of smaller individual stories and anecdotes, but the spine is the push for results.

The individual stories are absolutely critical because they imbue the journey with a human dynamic, but the journey from vision to results is the grand heroic story.

Noted consultant, author, and editor Nick Morgan writes in his seminal book on public speaking that a good speech can be structured along a single story line. By extension, you can look at the entire leadership journey from vision reality.

People need communications to point the way, but they need a strong story to give momentum to the journey and many smaller stories to enrich the journey.

Excerpt from ‘How Great Leaders Get Great Results’ by John Baldoni. Reproduced with permission © 2006, Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited. E-mail: vishwanath_mum@tatamcgraw-hill.com