I have felt some pain at the hands of a large organization and lived through the kind of experience that anyone might encounter and overcome.
I have come to terms with the experience and can view the familiar antics of Dilbert-style management through the lens of laughter.
I am unexpectedly frank about how things happen in organizations today.
I am talking from the experience of having accomplished something significant in a difficult organizational context.
Overall, I am seeking to convey that I—a stranger—am someone who might be worth listening to. It does no harm that I am also drawing on a narrative archetype—the story of David and Goliath, in the form of a single individual facing a gigantic and apparently hostile organization and ultimately triumphing.
Why You Tell Your Story
The first reason to tell your story is to show people who you are—to stop being a stranger. Once upon a time, several eons ago, a stranger was a rare phenomenon. In a calmer, slower, more intimate time, people knew who you were. By reputation. They knew your family. They knew your upbringing. They knew your history. They knew what you had done. You had lived together. You had grown up in the same village. You were already known.
Now, in these turbulent, fragmented, rapidly morphing times, it's hard to know who anyone is. People don't have the background about one another. And they are often asked to trust others about whom they know very little.
Confronted with the stranger, people strive to put together the fragments of information they can find and weave them into some kind of coherent story. These fragments may come from announcements, newspapers, articles, handouts, biographical data, or even a brief encounter, but ultimately it's not the facts that are important. What everyone is groping for is understanding what the facts mean. What sort of person are they dealing with? Is this someone who can really be trusted with matters of importance?
Thus Kenneth Freeman, chairman and CEO of Quest Diagnostics, says about his early days as CEO:
You have to establish your credibility. One thing I faced going in the door was people in the company saying, “Who is this ‘glass guy’ from Corning, coming to us with no lab experience? He has no health-care experience to speak of. He's not a ‘laboratorian.’” At the time, we had 14,000 employees. I reached to the bottom to reach up, to establish my credibility first with the rank and file of the company.2
If you are a manager who has been appointed to take charge of a group, or an aspiring leader who is asking others to trust you, or merely someone about to give a talk to a new audience, you need to recognize the audience's dilemma. What expectation will they have about you? In today's low-trust corporate world, it's risky to assume that it will inevitably be positive. It's safer to be alert to the possibility, even probability, that the starting assumptions will be caution, skepticism, mistrust, or even distrust. In effect, you may need to take active and rapid steps to communicate who you are.
Reveal Who You Are Implicitly
How do you communicate who you are? People want to know what is driving you, what values you espouse, or what goals you have in life, what makes you tick. How will you act in a crisis? Will you level with people? Will you save yourself while stabbing others in the back? Are you someone who goes whichever way the wind blows? Or are you someone of character who stands up for what is good and true and right?
If you assert directly that you are an honest and trustworthy person, then the audience may begin to wonder: Why is this person saying such things? Since an honest and trustworthy person does not typically go around boasting of honesty and trustworthiness, the audience begins to suspect that there must be some reason for asserting this—and maybe you aren't honest or trustworthy at all.
Reciting your curriculum vitae won't help, because your uniqueness as an individual—your very identity—doesn't lie in the roles you have filled. It resides in the one-of-a-kind person that you have become as a result of the experiences that only you have had.
If the audience can understand the critical experiences that have formed you as an individual, they can begin not only to understand the unique individual that you have become but also to infer how you may act in the future. Giving them an account of one or more turning points in your existence can enable listeners to get inside your life, to go through what you have been through so that they can themselves experience what sort of a person you are. So you tell your story and let the listeners live your story as participants. They come to their own conclusions as to what sort of person you are. Because they have experienced you from the inside, their conclusions are likely to be more trusted than if they are asked to take them on faith.
Exploit the Fractal Nature of Identity Stories
Your character is generated not from a single incident, but from a whole lifetime of experiences. Even an uneventful lifetime might take many volumes to describe superficially, let alone in depth. So how could the account of a single incident possibly convey the richness of experience that has forged your character?
The answer lies in the fractal nature of identity stories. Just as the tiniest sample from your living body—blood, flesh, bone, saliva—can reveal the DNA of your whole biological person, so a brief, well-chosen story can shed light on your entire life history. A story you tell about an apparently trivial incident can expose the entire fabric of your character.3
Consider the following experience related by Michael Dell, founder and chairman of the $23 billion Dell Computer Corporation, about something he did when he was twelve years old:
The father of my best friend was a pretty avid stamp collector, so now naturally my friend and I wanted to get into stamp collecting, too. To fund my interest in stamps, I got a job as a water boy in a Chinese restaurant two blocks from my house. I started reading stamp journals just for fun, and soon began noticing that prices were rising. Before long, my interest in stamps began to shift from the joy of collecting to the idea that there was something here that my mother, a stockbroker, would have termed “a commercial opportunity.” …
I was about to embark upon one of my very first business ventures. First, I got a bunch of people in the neighborhood to consign their stamps to me. Then I advertised “Dell's Stamps” in Linn's Stamp Journal, the trade journal of the day. And then I typed, with one finger, a twelve-page catalog … and mailed it out. Much to my surprise, I made $2000. And I learned an early, powerful lesson about the rewards of eliminating the middleman. I also learned that if you've got a good idea, it pays to do something about it.4
From this incident, you can infer a great deal about Michael Dell, the person. He is entrepreneurial, bold, aggressive, and direct—someone who sees life as a business opportunity. The story gets its significance from several dimensions:
The bare facts of what he did at the age of twelve
His current perspective on the importance of what he did back then and the meaning that he now sees in those events
The trajectory from then to now, and its implications for where he may be heading in the future
Thus, you don't have to communicate the entire lifetime of experiences that have made you what you are to communicate identity. Your audience can determine who you are from a small sample of stories, even a single example.
Decide Whether Your Life Has a Purpose
The question of whether your life story is consistent is related to another question: Does your life have a purpose? Is your life story thus far connected to some longer-term goal that has become and remains the principal focus of your energies?
Some people drift through life without any particular aim. They slip happily and comfortably into whatever role society assigns for them—wage earner, manager, spouse, citizen, whatever. They may make a useful contribution to society in these various roles and be relatively contented. Indeed, for millennia, most people had few, if any, other realistic options. In stable traditional societies, one's future was largely determined by the context in which one was born. In modern changing so
cieties, many people still go along with the most obviously available options for the conduct of their lives.
Or they may identify a goal they are willing to commit themselves to accomplishing, and they devote their life energies to it above all others. The goal may be an ordinary one—simply being a good mother—or it may be grandiose—to reduce global poverty. It may be religious in nature—to be a God-fearing Christian—or it may be unashamedly secular—to amass great wealth. It may be moral in tone—to do good in the world—or frivolous—simply to have as much fun as possible. The commitment to the goal may remain lifelong, or it may shift from time to time, perhaps because the chosen goal no longer seems attainable or because some new goal now appears more attractive. The choice of a life goal thus inevitably remains in some sense provisional—a work in progress that may continue to evolve throughout life. Only when someone has died, and the life goal shows up in the obituary, can it be said that a lifelong choice was definitively made.
No moral judgment is being made here as to whether it is better or worse to have chosen a life goal. People who have made a definite choice of a life goal may appear to some as admirable but also obsessive and driven and difficult to live with, as Nick Hornby amusingly illustrates in his novel How to Be Good.5 People who have made no choice of a life goal may appear to others as easy to get along with but also, at the extreme, indecisive, unfocused, and insubstantial.
Even if you've made up your mind where you're heading, you still have an important decision as to whether to communicate it. An explicit commitment to some overriding goal is typically a polarizing event. The communication of the goal may attract actual or potential supporters, but it may also alert potential skeptics, opponents, and competitors of your intentions, and it may enable them to take countervailing action to try to prevent or slow down the accomplishment of your goal.
For instance, in politics, an explicit articulation of your overriding goal to become president or prime minister can create antibodies: rivals and competitors may undertake explicit spoiling actions aimed at pigeonholing you as an overambitious upstart and preventing you from attaining your goal. In an organization, a specific commitment to head in a certain direction may be a liability for advancement in that organization if the top management decides to head in a different direction.
There are thus reasons pro and con for communicating where you're heading in life. Before deciding to do so, weigh the pluses and minuses of going public. In some circumstances, there may be no other way to attain your goal except by declaring it.
Take Nelson Mandela.
In 1964, Nelson Mandela was arrested by the government of South Africa and brought to court to face an apparent death sentence for treason. Mandela made a statement from the dock: “During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to the struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But, if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”6 He was sentenced to life imprisonment. During his prison years, he rejected several offers to be released if he would endorse the government's policy of apartheid. Upon his release from prison in 1990, he spoke not in anger but in the language of reconciliation: “Comrades and fellow South Africans, I greet you all in the name of peace, democracy, and freedom for all.”7
Mandela's unambiguous opposition to apartheid won him worldwide renown and eventually led to his being elected president of South Africa, a position he held from 1994 to 1999.
Since the communication of your life goal to others raises the stakes, it is not a step to be undertaken lightly. It effectively transforms a secret and privately held intent that can be changed without loss into a publicly declared promise likely to generate expectations from your audience that cannot easily be changed. By communicating your life goal, you are giving your word as to your intent. Henceforth people will judge you in part by whether you live up to the goal that you have articulated. If you don't, then your credibility will suffer, perhaps irrevocably. If you do live up to your goal, then you may win people's respect, even if they disagree with you, because they will know where you stand, where you come from, what's driving you.
Be Authentic
An effective leader's life story is authentic—something that comes from inner conviction. It is to be distinguished from the derivative life stories of those who attempt to trim their image to fit the current fashion. Such people treat themselves as a transaction in the making, allowing their value to be defined by others—an organization, a boss, a recruiter, a partner, an electorate—in other words, a commodity whose worth rises and falls according to the marketplace.
Such people may lubricate the machinery of the traditional management. But they will never be genuine leaders. Because they have no authentic life story, they will lack the traction needed to lead.8
There are many reasons that John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, lost the 2004 U.S. presidential election. One of the more important ones was his seeming inability to communicate who he is. His actions in Vietnam as a soldier and then afterward as a war protester, his votes against the First Gulf War and then for the war in Iraq but against the funding for it—all these actions tended to pose questions in the minds of voters as to his real motivation—doubts the Republicans did their utmost to accentuate. Kerry seemed unable to come up with a succinct story that would communicate why he had conducted his life the way he had. Even ardent Democrats such as the editors of the New Yorker magazine found his efforts to explain himself “discouraging to behold.”9 The Republicans presented him as someone who went with whichever political wind happened to blowing at the time. The absence of any compelling countervailing story from Kerry himself made it easy for the Republicans to charge him with “flip-flopping on the issues.” As a result, although he won the presidential debates, voters who disagreed with his opponent, President George W. Bush, on the issues and who felt that the country was heading in the wrong direction were still reluctant to vote for Kerry.
According to psychologists, people typically begin to form a story about who they are in late adolescence, when they leave the comfort and protection of their family and confront head-on the question of what to do with their adult lives. Consciously and unconsciously, all of us begin working through the basic choices we are going to make.10
As we move into adulthood, we generally create and refine several main characters, since our lives are generally too complex to be handled by a single pattern. These actual or imagined personas become central protagonists within the self that interact—and sometimes conflict—in the making of identity. Hero or victim, leader or follower, wanderer or settler, warrior or nurturer, lover or loner, parent or celibate, employee or entrepreneur, creator or adopter, citizen or anarchist, believer or atheist, enthusiast or cynic: the potential characters we might become are infinite. The culture offers up role models that offer potential choices. Each of us ends up making a unique set of choices or nonchoices that reflect the course of action that we take or don't take, and embodies those choices in a personal story.
The resulting life story is usually a mix. Some patterns are consciously chosen as explicit goals: specific decisions as to a course of life. Other patterns may emerge over time: you look back and discover that you have made a series of decisions over a number of years that have pointed your life in a very different direction from what you believed you had explicitly chosen. Whether explicit or emergent, there is always a life story of some kind.
And it's this story that you as a leader need to tell.
How to Tell Your Story
The story that you tell as a leader to communicate who you are will not be the entire story of your existence, but it will be a representative selection from your authentic life story. It will be a story that communicates key choices that you have made in life. It wil
l not be a story concocted for the occasion only, since that will quickly be exposed for what it is—a mere veneer over a different reality. As your actions become known, an unrepresentative selection will result in a backlash against you as an untruthful storyteller. Instead, your story will reflect your authentic self—the choices that you have made in life as a person, reflecting where you have come from, where you are now, and where you are going.
“Know thyself,” say the philosophers, but it's easier said than done. For most of us, our hopes and fears tend to get in the way of realistic assessment of who we are. Usually the dissonance is mild and might be considered a foible. Where the dissonance between self-image and reality is so extreme as to cause difficulty functioning in the world, it may be necessary to seek therapy.
Your story will need to reflect a certain degree of coherence that has been attained in terms of reconciling the various competing personas in your life. Given that a personal story is always an ongoing work of construction and creation, the telling of your story can be a step toward tightening that coherence. In fact, the more you tell your story, the more likely you are to progress toward coherence. This of course is one of the underlying principles of psychotherapy: by creating a situation that requires personal storytelling, participants discover (or rather create) a degree of coherence that wasn't there before.
The Leader's Guide to Storytelling Page 11
