My 4P of Narrative Leadership
I've recently gotten into a daunting subject of leadership. I never really considered it before, but this year I was drawn to it through my interests in decision-making, ethics, and storytelling. It turns out I know quite a lot about leadership already! In December I did a 1.5-hour lecture and a 4-hour workshop for Nestlé. To my own surprise, that went really well.
My main area of expertise is presentation skills, so the approach to leadership that I'm exploring is called narrative leadership. It's similar to what Marshall Ganz teaches at Harvard Kennedy School. I was inspired by him, but of course I have my own quirks. The core job of a leader is to be competent, the second job is to tell stories. Question is, what should these stories be about?
Marshall Ganz has one answer, he has five leadership stories: origin, struggle, revelation, dream, and coming out. Why these five specifically? I'm not sure, but I guess it's some kind of empirical generalisation. I have a slightly different answer. Not radically different, just a different angle.
Revelation is certainly an important event in everyone's life, but what exactly was revealed? What was the revelation about? As I tried to answer this question, I climbed the Olympus of corporate consulting and came up with my own 4P model. Yes, if you don't create your own 4P model in 15 years, they kick you out of the guild, so I had to do it. It was time.
My 4Ps are:
Personality
These are stories about your character's true qualities that give you an advantage as a leader. Maybe you're particularly humble, honest, open, conscientious, or low in machiavellianism. This is your origin story: why your character is the way it is and why you think that's a good thing. This is where you talk about your parents and upbringing. By doing that, you create positive expectations, you make promises, just like a politician campaigning for office. On the surface, you're talking about your past, but people don't care about your past, they care about their future. Are you going to be a good leader? This is the question you’re trying to answer.
Purpose
This is a conversation about your stakeholders, the problems that you “own”, the new opportunities for solving them, and about the ideal future, about your vision. Here you can tell stories about struggles, dreams, revelations.
Principles
I initially started thinking about values, but then I realised that values don't work well for the purpose of storytelling. They are too abstract, they don't tell us exactly what to do. It makes much more sense to talk about principles, norms, priorities (go for option A over option B), ”if-then-else" constructs. This is where we tell stories about our most cherished beliefs. There shouldn't be too many of them. You can start with just one. At some point, you'll need a second one to balance the first out, one is never enough, too extreme. How did you discover these principles? Did you learn it from your parents, books, experience, or by meditating under a tree? This might be a revelation story.
Practices
The task of a leader, in the end, is not to establish a personality cult, but rather to build institutions. Establishing practices, rituals, habits, processes, procedures is the first step in this direction. As a leader, you should practice what you preach, so what is it that you're practicing?
So, four P's: Personality, Purpose, Principles, and Practices. Why these four P's? This is an expansion of Aristotle’s idea of Ethos. These are the three popular approaches to moral leadership: authentic (Personality and Practices), ethical (Principles), and servant leadership (Purpose). Taken together, they roughly add up to transformational leadership. These are also three contemporary approaches to ethics: consequentialism (Purpose), deontology (Principles), and virtue ethics (Personality and Practices).
The idea is to tell stories about these things, until your eyes water and your voice begins to tremble. This is how you know you're doing it right. It can be a bit tricky and requires preparation. But I tried that with managers at Nestlé and it worked very well. I know this because I was listening to conversations in groups and my own eyes were watering. Apparently, people love talking about these things! I've read that self-affirmation, talking about one’s values activates the same areas in the brain as sex and chocolate, it also protects you from stress and burnout.
So, I’m very proud of myself, if I had to pick one Uber-achievement for this year, this would be it. Many thanks to everyone who was helping me, you know who you are. You really helped a lot. I don't have any open seminar about this yet, but maybe next year I'll come up with something. If you're interested, please like this post with the heart emoji ❤️ if you’d be willing to spend around 12 hours (4 weeks x 3 hours) of your discussing this over Zoom.