Leadership through story telling

Posted by adi on Mar 4, 2009 in Work

As regular readers of the blog will know I’m a fan of story telling in a wide range of contexts and I’ve been reading about how they can be used in a leadership context, especially when you’re trying to convince sceptics or change opinion.  The suggestion comes from Stephen Denning, a Stanford Business School professor.  He suggests that story telling in a leadership context should take three forms.

1. Gaining Attention

Your first story should aim to get the attention of your audience.  Negative stories often work well in this context but in general your story should be one of the following:

• Personalized
• Evoking an emotional response
• From a trustworthy source
• Concise

2. Eliciting desire for a different future

This is where positive stories come into their own because you get to tell how the future can be better.  At this stage listeners are usually bombarded with analysis and review of various options.  Denning suggests that these should be ignored in favour of a story.  It doesn’t have to be a big ol’ epic of a story, just one that elicits a positive response from the kind of change you’re hoping to evoke.

3. Reinforcing with reasons

What the change will be, the story of how the change will be implemented, the story of why the change will work.  All of these occur in the final section.

The basic jist being that decisions are more often made emotionally than rationally, so use stories to appeal to the heart rather than the head.

Tags: Leadership, management, Stanford Business School, Stanford Graduate School of Business

The Arsene Wenger approach to recruitment

Posted by adi on Feb 26, 2009 in Work

Jacqui Smith poked the nationalist hornets nest recently by announcing that the government were making it harder for foreign nationals to enter the UK for work.  This comes on the back of calls by Gordon Brown for British jobs to go to British workers last year in the Commons.

So it comes with some relief that the Chartered Management Institute have shown a high degree of common sense in declaring that an individuals skills are the primary concern when employing them, and not their nationality.

What I like to think of as the Arsene Wenger approach.  The Gooners manager has often been criticized by the media for not picking English players and his general argument is that he picks the best players regardless of nationality, with the intonation that the young English players at the club simply haven’t been up to the mark until recently when more English youngsters have made first team appearances.

In the global economic crisis we’re stumbling through it’s incredibly important that markets, both financial and labour, remain open and flexible.  The moment we start following protectionist policies is the moment we start entrenching this recession deeper and further than we can possibly imagine.

So well done to the CMI for sticking its neck out for what’s right and proper.

Tags: foreign, labour, management, migrants, Recruitment