Narrative Leadership: What’s Your Story?
Besides being a good friend of Leading Thoughts, Nick Nissley is Executive Director of The Banff Centre’s leadership development unit and a well-respected thinker in the area of arts-based management education.
Of late, Nick has been exploring the idea of “narrative leadership,” basically the use of stories — personal and otherwise — to effectively lead others. He delivers an entertaining overview of the idea, and throws in a few stories for good measure, in a TedX presentation from Calgary.
If you’re in a story and you don’t like it, change the story.
Here’s the clip. At the 6:00 minute mark, Nick tells us what researchers are learning about “narrative competence.” Researchers with the Center for Creative Leadership, for example, looked at how leaders develop; how do they learn what they need to know? The answer: 50% comes from experience; 20% from hardship or failure; 20% from mentors; and 10% from formal learning. That means that 70 percent of what leaders learn comes from their experiences, both positive and negative. “And we make sense of these experiences through stories,” Nick says.
At the 8:40 minute mark, Nick explains how effective leaders know their own story and lead with it. He follows it up at at 9:00 minute mark with the story of the M.S. Hershey Foundation and its role in lifting Nick out of life-limiting storyline and giving him a new script.
At the 13:30 minute mark, Nick says “we become the stories we tell ourselves,” with the implication being that we can change the world by changing our stories.