by Lee G Bolman
19. De Pree, M. Leadership Is an Art. New York: Dell, 1989, p. 69.
Chapter 14
Great Leaders, Great Stories
As you think so shall you lead. Much of the literature on leadership, as well as courses and programs to develop leaders, focuses on the style, attributes, or actions of leaders. That makes sense, because we expect leaders to get things done. But thinking needs to precede action. Otherwise, action is a shot in the dark by mindless leaders who haven’t thought enough about why they are choosing one path or another. The quality of leaders’ thinking depends ultimately on the stories they tell. Drawing lessons from life experiences, all leaders weave stories over time that they carry with them wherever they go. Even though sometimes demeaned, “war stories” are the living literature, the lore of leadership. Leaders live within the stories they have created, and invite others to join them on the adventure.
Human lives are packed with stories. We get them from books, newspapers, movies, and TV shows and from swapping tales with friends in person or online. When we’re not taking in the stories of others, we’re spinning our own. We daydream while awake, and at night our dreams are filled with strange, wondrous, or terrifying tales.1
Storytelling is our most basic and powerful form of communication. It transmits emotionally charged information in a form that is accessible, attractive, and memorable to others. Stories are also a basic form of social glue, bonding groups and organizations together through historical legends and memorable tales.
WORLDVIEWS, FRAMES, AND STORIES
Figure 14.1 presents a model of how leaders interact with the world around them. A leader appears, bringing a worldview and a personal story to a particular time and place. The setting provides a context with its own organizational story. The leader’s worldview and personal story influence how she responds to the organization’s story. She may hear and appreciate or ignore or discount or misread the narrative of her new locale. However she makes sense of the organization’s story and circumstances, she constructs a narrative to guide her and the organization going forward. Then she asks constituents to become participants in a shared story. When Alan Mulally, for example (Chapter Twelve), arrived at Ford as the new CEO in 2006, he brought with him a worldview and a personal story acquired over his lifetime, including his many years in leadership roles at Boeing. He quickly concluded that Ford had lost touch with its own story and identity, and set to work to engage constituents in a revival of a great drama that went back to the legend of Henry Ford.
Figure 14.1. The Leadership Process
The Leader’s Worldview
We can think of a leader’s worldview as containing four key elements that influence how he or she makes sense of the world:
Concepts and categories: What’s out there? What are the ideas and things I might notice and pay attention to? Leaders need mental models with enough breadth and depth to help them see and make sense out of the most important elements of their situation. We saw in Chapter Eleven, for example, that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has a rich and deep palette of concepts in the areas of structure, process, and metrics, but a much sparser set of human resource concepts. It is not surprising that Amazon is at the frontier in areas where Bezos is strong and struggles in the areas that he is weak. Bezos is one of the world’s most admired business leaders, but his company is not likely to appear on lists of best places to work. Media accounts of Amazon’s human resource practices are usually highly critical. A basic point of this book is that the four frames or leadership lenses can guide leaders in recognizing where their own mental models are rich or impoverished.
Beliefs: How do things work? What actions lead to what outcomes? Even if leaders see what they need to see, they act on the basis of their beliefs about causality: What will happen if I do one thing or another? We saw an example of this in Chapter Four with Ricardo Semler. After he took over his father’s company, his initial effort to fix things relied on a belief that tighter structure and more elaborate controls would produce better results. This approach worked at first, but ultimately became self-defeating. Semler then went in search of something different, and gradually developed a philosophy that achieved extraordinary results for him, built around the premise that if you empower workers and tap their wisdom, they will accomplish things you never thought possible. Jeff Bezos believes that success comes from ignoring Wall Street’s advice and investing in anything that will improve the customer experience. Howard Schultz sees passion for coffee and community as the bedrock of his company’s remarkable growth. In contrast, Ron Johnson’s beliefs led him astray—the new, hipper JCPenney’s stores he created alienated old customers without attracting new ones.
Values: What’s good or bad? What’s important or not? One of Ricardo Semler’s first experiments was to eliminate the practice of searching employees on their way out the door to make sure they weren’t stealing anything from the plant. He had decided that trust was vital and that it didn’t matter much if theft went up or down. Conversely, Jeff Bezos coddles his customers but not his employees because the customer experience tops his priority list, while employee satisfaction lags far behind.
Self-image: Who am I? What do I care about? What are my leadership strengths and weaknesses? Self-awareness is a vital skill for leaders; without it they will have difficulty understanding or anticipating how their constituents see and respond to them. Ron Johnson’s habit of using one-way video links as a preferred medium for communicating with JCPenney employees distanced him and made it hard for him to get feedback that he was losing credibility with the troops. A year later, it’s hard to know what he learned from the experience, but he told one journalist that the accounts of his tenure there were “lacking in depth, largely inaccurate, and surprisingly uninformed.”2
The Leader’s Story
Consciously or not, leaders create a personal leadership story to guide their work, a story built over the course of a lifetime’s experience. Organizations also fabricate a story, gleaned from their past and adapted to present circumstances. A manager of a Ritz-Carlton Hotel remarked, “It’s hard to be a legend without a great story.” Some organizations maintain connections to their roots; others lose contact and become rootless.
As new leaders assume their roles, a dialogue opens, an interplay between the leader’s story and that of the organization. New questions come to the surface:
Where have we been?
Where are we now?
Where should we go from here?
How will we get there?
Alan Mulally’s remarkable turnaround at Ford provides a particularly clear and instructive example. Mulally arrived at Ford with a story shaped on his way up the ranks to the number-two position at Boeing. His worldview was rich in concepts from all four frames, with a particularly strong respect for history and culture. His self-image combined low-key Midwest-ern humility with quiet confidence, strong intellect, and the courage to take on impossible missions. He held a set of beliefs about what worked that he had honed over his years at Boeing, in an industry that presented challenges much like those at Ford.
Mulally was clear-eyed about the problems at Ford, including a weak product line, excessive bureaucracy, political infighting, lack of direction, a cash crunch, and a skid toward bankruptcy. As soon as he took the job, Mulally began the task of blending his own story with the current narrative at Ford. Like other great leaders, Mulally worked quickly but systematically, building a new, historically anchored storyline and testing it as he went along. He knew that Ford people had a pressing need for a narrative that provided guidance and reassurance, but he also knew that the tale had to make sense and point in the right direction.
He studied Ford’s history and used it to construct a core message: Ford would once again become the company that Henry Ford would want it to be. He distilled that into the mantra of “One Ford,” which implied a leaner, simpler, more focused, and unified company that would leverage its global assets to build cars people wanted at pr
ices they were willing to pay. His story of “how we’ll get there” included significant initiatives on multiple fronts. He invested substantial personal capital in building relationships with the many constituents whose support was vital. He worked with the United Automobile Workers union to agree on a new contract that let Ford sell cars made in the United States at a profit. He made a risky decision to max out Ford’s credit card, accumulating cash that enabled Ford to avoid a government bailout when GM and Chrysler both had to take their begging bowls to Washington. He sold off storied European car lines such as Jaguar in order to focus on the Ford brand. He put in new structures and processes designed to reduce bureaucracy while producing more transparency and unity. When fearful employees asked if Ford was going to make it, he told them, “We have a plan, and the plan says we are going to make it.”3
Contrast Mulally’s success at Ford with Ron Johnson’s short and tragic era at JCPenney (see Chapter One). Johnson arrived at JCPenney with a story he had evolved during successful leadership stints at Target and the Apple Stores. He seemed like an ideal candidate to shed JCPenney’s image as a tired brand with aging customers. His story sounded plausible and exciting: JCPenney would eliminate the confusing flood of phony sales and coupons and become an exciting destination retailer where hip consumers could sip a latte and have their kids entertained.
Why did he fail? Johnson skipped the key step of testing his story against JCPenney’s circumstances. His narrative was conjured up in the hip environs of California’s Silicon Valley, and seemed ill-suited for a midmarket retailer based in Texas. Johnson spent little time in the stores or at the Dallas headquarters, sometimes communicating to JCPenney staff via videocasts from his home in Palo Alto. Because Apple didn’t do market testing, he figured JCPenney didn’t need to either. Even as sales fell and customers deserted, Johnson kept insisting that he was on the right track, seemingly oblivious to the disaster that was unfolding in the stores.
The divorce that finally ended the marriage of Ron Johnson and JCPenney could have been avoided. Johnson never seemed to grasp the essence of JCPenney’s story. The company had been in decline and needed a creative, successful merchant—someone with Ron Johnson’s track record—to make the stores relevant in a fast-moving retail environment. Johnson could have moved to Texas, immersed himself in the JCPenney stores, exchanged ideas with veteran staff, and taken the time to test and evolve his story. But Johnson was so sure of his narrative that he didn’t see the need for any of that. As happens for so many leaders, Johnson’s attachment to his story and unwillingness to learn from JCPenney’s history did him in.
Leaders’ stories exchange energy with an organization’s story, present and past. Lou Gerstner’s story on arrival as IBM’s new CEO was that of a hard-nosed strategic thinker. He inherited a company commonly seen as a “bloated whale” whose fortunes were sinking fast. The old IBM, recognized in some leadership circles as a “national treasure,” was fading. Gerstner mounted a search for the glories of the past.
He discovered a cultural icon in the person of Thomas J. Watson Sr., whose story cast a long silhouette on the fledgling enterprise: “It was a magical time and Thomas Watson Sr. was the wizard who waved the magic wand, creating the enchantment and excitement.”4 Over subsequent decades, Watson’s magic and values dissipated, giving way to a stodgy, inward-looking bureaucracy. Gerstner recognized this and resurrected relevant parts of Watson’s story and values to reenergize the company.
By all accounts, Gerstner himself was a gifted storyteller and used stories to illuminate IBM’s past, present, and future:
It was a meeting on Wall Street where Lou Gerstner, the CEO of IBM, met the market analysts . . . So we go into a room and there are people from the various banks and the brokers and the analysts and Gerstner starts telling them stories. Stories about IBM. Stories about the future of IBM. These were stories. He couldn’t tell them facts about the future. He was telling them what IBM was going to do. It was all stories. And it worked. It really worked.5
CONCLUSION
Great leadership begins when a leader’s worldview and personal story, honed over years of experience, meet a situation that presents both challenges and opportunities. Great leaders use multiple frames so as to see what they need to see, and craft a story about what will work. Meanwhile, organizations have evolved their own narratives. The interplay of leaders’ and organizations’ stories gives rise to an emerging script that, at its best, provides a compelling image of where a group or organization is, where it needs to go, and how it will get there. The story serves as a drama in which both leader and constituents become actors. Great leaders test and evolve their story over time, experimenting, polishing, abandoning plot lines that don’t work, and reinforcing those that do. Bad stories often lead to disaster, but good ones conjure magic.
NOTES
1. Gottschall, J. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. New York: Mariner, 2013.
2. Thau, B. “Ron Johnson Speaks, Calls Reports on His J.C. Penney Tenure ‘Largely Inaccurate and Surprisingly Uninformed.’” Forbes, Oct. 29, 2013. http://www.forbes.com/sites/barbarathau/2013/10/29/an-open-letter-to-ex-j-c-penney-ceo-ron-johnson-who-calls-reports-on-his-tenure-surprisingly-uninformed-when-youre-ready-can-we-talk/.
3. Taylor, A., III. “Fixing Up Ford.” Fortune, May 12, 2009. http://money.cnn.com/2009/05/11/news/companies/mulally_ford.fortune/index.htm.
4. Bolman, L. G., and Deal, T. E. The Wizard and the Warrior: Leading with Passion and Power. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006, p. 180.
5. Prusak, L., Groh, K., Denning, S., and Seely Brown, J. Storytelling in Organizations. Burlington, Mass.: Elsevier, 2004, p. 4.
APPENDIX: LEADERSHIP ORIENTATIONSa
This questionnaire asks you to describe yourself as a manager and leader. For each item, assign the number 4 to the phrase that best describes you, 3 to the item that is next best, and on down to 1 for the item that is least like you. You can also take the assessment online at http://www.josseybassbusiness.com/2013/07/assessment-leadership-orientations-self-assessment.html.
My strongest skills are _____ a. Analytical skills
_____ b. Interpersonal skills
_____ c. Political skills
_____ d. Flair for drama
The best way to describe me is _____ a. Technical expert
_____ b. Good listener
_____ c. Skilled negotiator
_____ d. Inspirational leader
What has helped me the most to be successful is my ability to _____ a. Make good decisions
_____ b. Coach and develop people
_____ c. Build strong alliances and a power base
_____ d. Inspire and excite others
What people are most likely to notice about me is my _____ a. Attention to detail
_____ b. Concern for people
_____ c. Ability to succeed in the face of conflict and opposition
_____ d. Charisma
My most important leadership trait is _____ a. Clear, logical thinking
_____ b. Caring and support for others
_____ c. Toughness and aggressiveness
_____ d. Imagination and creativity
I am best described as _____ a. An analyst
_____ b. A humanist
_____ c. A politician
_____ d. A visionary
SCORING AND INTERPRETATION
Computing Scores
Compute your scores as follows:
ST = 1a + 2a + 3a + 4a + 5a + 6a
HR = 1b + 2b + 3b + 4b + 5b + 6b
PL = 1c + 2c + 3c + 4c + 5c + 6c
SY = 1d + 2d + 3d + 4d + 5d + 6d
ST ____ HR ____ PL ____ SY ____ Total ____
The total should be 60; if not, check your work.
Interpreting Scores
The Leadership Orientations instrument is keyed to four different conceptions of organizations and of the task of organizational leadership.
Plot each of your scores on the appropriate ax
is of the chart in Figure A.1: ST for Structural, HR for Human Resource, PL for Political, and SY for Symbolic. Then read the brief description of each of these orientations toward leadership and organizations.
Figure A.1. Plot Your Leadership Orientation Scores
Structural leaders emphasize rationality, analysis, logic, facts, and data. They are likely to believe strongly in the importance of clear structure and well-developed management systems. A good leader is someone who thinks clearly, makes the right decisions, has good analytical skills, and can design structures and systems that get the job done.
Human resource leaders emphasize the importance of people. They endorse the view that the central task of management is to develop a good fit between people and organizations. They believe in the importance of coaching, participation, motivation, teamwork, and good interpersonal relations. A good leader is a facilitator and participative manager who supports and empowers others.
Political leaders believe that managers and leaders live in a world of conflict and scarce resources. The central task of management is to mobilize the resources needed to advocate and fight for the unit’s or the organization’s goals and objectives. Political leaders emphasize the importance of building a power base: allies, networks, coalitions. A good leader is an advocate and negotiator who understands politics and is comfortable with conflict.
