Leadership ConneXions - Issue 4

Welcome to Leadership ConneXions Issue 4.   Leadership ConneXions currently reaches out to more 1000 subscribers.

This issue has the theme “metaphors”.  By this I don’t mean the run of the mill definition of a metaphor.  I like to include all things that can be a generalisation of some deeper meaning. 

Linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson in their book “Metaphors We Live By” say the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.  Therefore metaphors capture the essential nature of an experience while expressing it in a different form.  Metaphors are an extremely important part of our life.  As Lakoff and Johnson state:

“In all aspects of life, ... we define our reality in terms of metaphors and then proceed to act on the basis of the metaphors. We draw inferences, set goals, make commitments, and execute plans, all on the basis of how we in part structure our experience, consciously and unconsciously, by means of metaphor.”

So in this context, metaphors can include language, art, poems, photos, fables – indeed anything that can be interpreted by an individual to give a richer meaning that what is physically presented. Metaphors play a big part in the way we communicate and it pays to learn how to use and identify them in a leadership context.

Metaphors

By Roger Ellerton Phd, ISP, CMC, Renewal Technologies www.renewal.ca

A metaphor is an indirect way of communicating through a story or figure of speech. It may reveal the culture of an organization or the inner thoughts of an individual. It can also imply a comparison (be quiet as a mouse) or parallel the patterns of a problem to offer solutions or suggestions (a fairy tale: The Boy Who Cried Wolf). In Neuro Linguistic Programming, a metaphor includes similes, parables and allegories and is rich in its ability to enhance communication.

Deep Structure of Thought

The deep structure of thought is based on inner feelings, memories, beliefs and values. This is revealed through our behaviours and for individuals is referred to as our personality and in organizations, we call it corporate culture.

At work you may hear an individual say we need some ammunition, put on your flak jacket, rally the troops, bring out the big artillery or need to out flank them. These are figures of speech and reveal the inner beliefs of an individual (i.e. work is seen as war) or if held by a group of people the culture of an organization or team. Other people may see work as a zoo or life as something to be endured and their actions and words will reflect this. The metaphor you have for life, or work or home will colour how you see things, will surface in your behaviours and in the words you use, and will influence your interactions with others.

Understanding a persons or an organizations metaphor can provide insights to their inner feelings, memories, beliefs and values and provide you with an opportunity to be of assistance.

Working with Metaphors

If a person or organization finds that their metaphor is not serving them, it can be changed to trigger different ways of thinking or to see the issue from a different perspective. Instead of a war metaphor (indicating conflict), you may assist a team to change it to a sports metaphor (indicating competition). That is, move the ball forward, avoid being offside, need a big play. Or you may wish to take a win-win perspective and see how each person can support the other. Changing metaphors often gives you new insights and opportunities to pursue and is a useful way to transfer learning or concepts between different contexts.

Communication with the Unconscious Mind

Metaphors communicate indirectly. An interesting story bypasses any conscious blocks or resistance and slips into the unconscious mind, where it triggers an unconscious search for meaning, resources and learnings. This is why fairy tales can have such a great impact on children. Metaphors are a good way of communicating with someone in a trance.

Metaphors can be developed for a general audience (e.g. presentation), or for a specific person. While listening to a metaphor, your unconscious mind will seek meaning and learnings appropriate for you.

Author: Roger Ellerton is a certified NLP trainer, certified management consultant and the founder and managing partner of Renewal Technologies. He can be reached at Renewal Technologies www.renewal.ca or by e-mail info@renewal.ca

Clean Language

Metaphors are a generalisation.  They say or show things in a few words, images (even sounds) that each of us can immediately give a richness of meaning (even if it is only our own meaning).  So if I was to say that my current project is difficult, it is like pulling teeth, you can immediately put this metaphor through your own perceptual filters, life experience, and memories and come up with an understanding of just how difficult it might be.  Saying the same thing to a room of twenty people will yield 20 interpretations but all will "understand". 

But what happens when some uses a metaphor when communicating to you.  You receive a generalisation.  What did they really mean?  Are you getting your understanding of this generalisation (based on your perceptual filters, life experience, memories etc) or do you truly understand them.

One way to get to their deeper meaning is to reflect their metaphor back to them and seek more information.  This means that you are not interpreting what it might mean.  Instead you are asking them to supply more about what they mean.  This technique is called Clean Language and was developed by psychotherapist David Grove in the 1980s.  With this background, it has obviously been used extensively in therapy but it can also be quite effective in the workplace.

For example, my current “Thought for the Day” on my email is: “Holding a grudge is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”  Now, when I first came across this quote, I immediately thought of a person that I knew to be holding a grudge and how it can, at times, consume them in a very non-productive way.  I was immediately putting my experience into these words.

So let’s imagine this was said in a conversation, only this time, the listener responds with Clean Language.

Person A:          Holding a grudge is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.

Person B:          And... holding a grudge is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die..... And what sort of poison is that poison?

Person A:          It is something that bubbles up in side you and takes over your body.

Person B:          And... it is something that bubbles up in side you and takes over your body........And what is it that bubbles up in side you and takes over your body?

Person A:          Anger, anger from being betrayed and getting hurt.

Person B:          And....anger from being betrayed and getting hurt..... And what happens next?

Person A:          I don't trust her, I always suspect the worst.  I worry about being hurt again.  So I start arguments, put her down.  I try to push her away before she can hurt me again....

This is a made up example and probably over-simplified.  However, it does show an example of reflecting back the person’s own words and then taking it a bit deeper.  This technique should only be used after you have established rapport with the other person and then it allows you to achieve greater empathy and even deeper rapport.

If you want to read more on metaphor and Clean Language, I can recommend visiting:

http://www.cleanlanguage.co.uk/

Barry Lawson

Once upon a time, in a land far awaaaaaaay………………………

What happens when you hear someone say these words?  No matter what your age, I suspect that you quickly go into story mode.  You probably relax, you may even begin to notice your breathing shift and your heart rate slow down.

Stories have this effect on us.  They touch both our conscious and subconscious and it is because they do this, they provide an excellent way to get our message across.

The following article comes from Scott Arbuthnot who will be known to many of you from leadership programs

Storytelling  -  Leadership Influence You Already Have 

By Scott Arbuthnot

It's amazing how many members of communities and organisations share the negative fantasy:

"I can't make a difference"

This delusion can also be a comfortable and unconscious avoidance ploy because accepting responsibility for the differences you make is more demanding than remaining the passive, helpless victim of things you can't change. Sadly, bitching is easier and often more popular than leadership.

This column spells out how you can use story telling as a leadership influence tool. In fact, you have probably already been using this tool for many years. Your deliberate use of story telling starts now.

Consider the statements of Edgar H. Schein, of the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Stephen G. Haines, President of the Centre for Strategic Management in San Diego, who have respectively said:

"Training is irrelevant.  Learning is cultural"

and

"Culture beats Strategy"

You can quickly see that leaders need to deeply understand their organisational cultures to facilitate any development or strategic focus. One window to an organisation's culture is the stories and mythologies perpetuated within them.

Ask people what stories epitomise the character and virtues of their organisation and you will hear well-known and often repeated tales of organisational values in action.

Not the espoused values of press releases or those etched in plaques in the lobby. Stories report the real values behind peoples' actual behaviours.

Story telling is such a powerful part of all human cultures. From the sharing of oral histories to the creation of instant folk heroes in modern movies, there's something very human about being absorbed by a good story. People have always shared parts of themselves and learned so much from stories. It's even comfortable and appealing for people to settle down to hear a story they have heard many times before.  Stories are more than mere entertainment as they engage people in deep and personal ways.

In one way, all stories are metaphors because your unconscious mind always takes things partly personally. Even though the story might be about an animal in a country you've never been to, part of your brain associates with the identities in the story.

If the animal is reported to be very clever, part of your mind associates with "I'm clever too". If the character in the story is threatened, part of you wonders how you would feel and respond in similar circumstances.

This unconscious association is at the very heart of the nature of metaphors. One key observation about how you engage with stories and metaphors is:

The identities change and the relationships stay the same.

This is how people can associate with fairytales. Even though the tale may begin with "once upon a time there were two rose bushes growing up in a garden …" part of the listener's mind associates with growing up and a relationship with someone they grew up with or near.

Bedtime stories can be sleep inducing as children imagine themselves "into the story" and begin their dreaming.

True stories can be equally engaging. If a story starts with, "I knew a person once who …" an engaged listener will be consciously and/or unconsciously wondering, "were they like me?" and "does any part of them resemble me, what I'd like to be like or anyone I know?"

Stories engage us very personally at conscious and unconscious levels. From folk history to parables and every-day rumours, stories are always partly about who we are and who we want to be. Stories are how we share our passions, our virtues and even our resentments.

Great storytellers have always had great influence. Think of the influence from ancient and modern storytellers like Aesop, Shakespeare and George Lucas (creator of the Star Wars trilogies). Fairytales in space and folklore are all rich with humanity, comedy, tragedy, the struggle of good and evil, heroes' and heroines' journeys of learning and the remembrances of virtue.

Great leaders are commonly great storytellers. They can engage, inspire and motivate people with their stories of vision and virtue. As a leader you can convey a teachable point of view, a key concept to be shared by stories to unite people.

Blair Singer, a leading business educator, has said:

"Give people a story to tell.  If you don't, they'll make one up".

Are the stories your colleagues share in informal moments encouraging and inspiring or discouraging and resentful? What sort of stories do you tell yourself? If someone tells a negative and resentful story about the past, do you join in and empathise with another negative story?

Negative story telling can be contagious. It might feel like empathy but it tends to prove that misery loves company and two wrongs don't make a right.

Think about how you can best exert your influence. What is the most constructive way for you to deliberately participate in the emergence of the organisational culture you're part of?

If your organisational culture has a well-learned helplessness and people assume they cannot:

•         make a difference or

•         be the first ones to change things or

•         act without some sort of permission,

you might tell stories about the impact individuals and small groups have. You could quote Margaret Mead, who studied social systems and cultural change all over the world, and wrote,

"Never doubt that small groups of committed people can change the world.  

In fact, it is the only thing that ever has."

If your organisational culture is not very aware of itself and people generally assume:

•         they all leave their human and emotional states and needs at home and

•         they are completely professional, clinical and rational at work

you might tell stories about the dynamic balance of intelligent and emotional processes as a means of sustainable success. You could tell stories about people you have known whose at-work relationships were more than just functional relationships and how they had the ability to challenge and push each other because they actually trusted and cared for each other.

What makes a good story? How do you form an engaging story-vehicle for the influence you wish to have in your world?

The best stories engage people by helping and allowing them to project themselves into the story. They have a conscious or unconscious "yes" answer to the questions: Is this about me, my relationships or things I can identify and relate with?

Even if the story starts with "Once upon a time there was a cup of tea who felt empty" the listener may, at some level, think "sometimes I feel empty" and engage with the story.

Fairytales are great metaphor examples but most organisational culture influencing stories are best being true and obviously less abstract. In the briefest of terms, leadership-stimulating stories often have:

1.   The situation or problem.

2.   What you or they did, learned or changed in leadership terms.

3.   The business or performance outcomes that resulted.

Leadership-stimulating stories do well to have some struggle and learning to overcome the situation or problem. These story elements can add some useful drama and suspense as well as allowing your listener to share the learning and project it into their own lives.

The below examples follow this simple format.

A new team leader was appointed to a geographically diverse engineering organisation. They had a fairly angry history of industrial unrest and regional teams perceived they weren't considered or cared about. The new team leader travelled to each region and was greeted with a dose of hostility and resentment about perceived previous betrayals.

On returning to head office the new team leader was advised to bring regional managers in to attend a team building training session to overcome their historical resentment and align them with organisational goals. Contrary to this advice, the new team leader spent far less money than the training would have cost, and invested in upgrading some of the workplace facilities people had been complaining about.

All the new team leader did was air-condition some accommodation and buy microwave ovens for some site kitchens. This simple and practical action proved "I heard you" and disproved the legendary and assumed uncaring nature of management. The new team leader had effectively earned the right to engage people in real dialogue and begin to build a better working relationship with the regional teams.

People who hear the above story automatically begin to wonder "What simple and practical things can I do to build better relationships in our organisation?"

Another example story:

An isolated Australian community had a serious domestic violence problem. Many community, charity and government groups had tried in vain to constructively influence this disturbing problem.

One external group decided to align with strong existing community values and sponsor a local sporting team. Sport was a central and powerful part of the community. As a condition of the sponsorship, players were asked to sign an agreement pledging they would not be involved in any domestic violence.

The influence of this alignment with community pride in sport has worked. Domestic violence in the community has dropped by 60%. The sponsorship was just five thousand dollars. Much more had been spent in many other ways and this was the simple way that made all the difference.

People who hear this wonderful story automatically begin to wonder "How might I leverage my influence by values alignment?" This is also a great story to tell people who believe they don't have the financial resources to achieve their goals.

Beyond your understanding of why and how storytelling works is your ability to emotionally engage and move people by the way you actually tell the story. People are not moved and inspired by the information alone. Your personal influence and passion are required.

Aristotle explained to be persuasive you must:

•         first be obviously ethical (ethos),

•         then you must make sense and be obviously logical (logos) and

•         then you must be passionate (pathos) and obviously believe in what you are saying.

This sequential combination of ethos, logos and pathos will help you and your story engage your listeners emotionally as well as intelligently.

Aristotle's explanation includes your allowing yourself to feel and show your passion. Other people need to actually feel your passion. Knowing you're ethical and logical is not enough. People need to be energised by your passion to be inspired to repeat and share your story with others.

Another powerful way to engage your listeners is to be sure you are telling your story in their interests. Ask yourself, "What is your intention in story telling?" and "Are you seeking to increase their choices?"

Making people wrong or just showing off is generally not engaging.

In addition to your passion and intention in storytelling, you can also allow the ambiguous nature of your metaphors to mean whatever they mean to your listener. Instead of strictly prescribing the meaning to your stories by explaining what their lessons and influences are, respect your listeners enough to allow them the interpretation role. Assume your listener will interpret your story in ways most appropriate for them.

Allow your metaphor to be the gentle hint to stimulate their wisdom and their insight. Their own insights and ideas will always be so much more appealing to them than anything you might be able to prescribe to them. They are, after all, smarter than you in their own perceptions.

The bottom line with story telling is really about responsibly choosing how you exert your influence. You have probably already been participating in the gentle art of story telling for almost as many years as you could speak.

Now you have some immediately useful tools to deliberately craft metaphors from your real-life learnings and experiences to best serve your colleagues. Your deliberate use of story telling starts now.

***

Scott Arbuthnot is an Australian training designer and facilitator who specialises in organisational development, leadership development and performance management.  Scott Arbuthnot can be contacted at 07 3425 3380 or scott@arbuthnot.com.au

Communicating Through Poem

When it comes to communication complex notions in simple form, nothing beats a poem.  This poem was submitted by Vol Norris from Longreach.

Deep Currents

In the swirling ocean of public aspirations,

Surface turbulences boil and froth,

But deep currents meander quietly.

Surface froth is pummelled by every wind blown from shore

whipping up action and endeavour in its path.

The deep current drifts on unfazed.

White-tops and surface froth revel in transient power,

Pounding keels and splintering masts.

But deep currents will move continents.

Wrecks thrown aside by the turbulent surface

are carried to distant graves in the cupped hands of deep currents.

The occasional tower of strength stands up,

A pillar of froth reaching for the clouds,

cutting a path through the swell,

consuming breakers.

But the deep current winds slowly on.

Deep currents are hidden,

disguised in a wry smile or a downcast eye.

But froth is unmissable,

Its glaring contrast against the deep background

visible from miles above.

To the airborne technocrat, the ocean is the froth.

Dazzled by the insistent white-tops yelling their words across valleys of swell,

the lofty leader sees only arm-waving,

hears only roaring and splashing.

Seldom feeling the salt spray of angry spittle

from the strident mouths of the white-tops,

he is a world away from the deep current.

The icy imaging of public words freezes the froth into crystalline sculpture,

For earnest viewing in quiet offices.

Preserved from their subtext

The white-tops are caught in mid-speech,

their postulates hanging in the air,

discussable at length.

Meanwhile the deep current has moved on,

Sliding from under the snapshots of technocrats.

Deep currents are unknowable without immersion.

If you’d be a leader, a helper of people,

Soak yourself and dive deep.

Leave the surface itch of froth and white-tops,

And drift with the deep currents.

They’ll go places you’d never know.

Vol Norris

2002

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