The Leader's Voice

Story Types

Nick Morgan has an article in a current issue of Forbes, in which he guarantees success by using one of five classic story forms. Check out his thoughts in the longer article.

I've followed his thoughts and career since 2001 and will have to say I appreciate his efforts generally. But I tend to believe he sells the number of story themes short. Limiting a list to five (literally a "handful") of exemplars does make them easier to remember, but there are many more story forms to consider than he has listed.

Where I do agree is that a well told story illuminates the facts you are presenting and can be the emotional conveyance for how you feel about the facts. Stories can explain, reveal, illustrate, and simplify our concepts. Heck, even a well done case study is simply another kind of story.

Let me know what you think of Morgan's thoughts.

Point of View

This wonderful little video demonstrates visually how great communicators can reorient a person's point of view.

(Love the music).

Leadership and Starting a Movement

Take a look at the video below from the TED talk series. It's only about three minutes long and the speaker uses the video to make several substantial claims about creating a movement and the nature of leadership.

After viewing, please consider these questions and post some responses. I would love to read some posts reflecting your thoughts about:

• To what degree does this video clearly show leadership behavior?
• In what ways, if any, is the speaker stretching the video dynamics to make his point?
• To what degree do you feel this shows the "emergent" nature of leadership?

In a later post I will highlight some of my thoughts and respond to the ideas and questions you raise.

The Economist and Symbolic Communication

Among the reasons I enjoy reviewing The Economist is the way it combines symbolic verve with contemporary critical thinking concerning current economic, political, and financial news. It uses well worn symbolic phrases like "In the court of public opinion," and "Financial markets are buoyant, business confidence is rising, and global growth seems increasingly robust."

It also uses slightly more selective metaphorical phrases. In a recent article concerning the Goldman Sachs difficulties with Congress it reiterated the bank's 1999 mission as outlined in its prospectus. The statement used the typical verbiage concerning client interests being first, serving clients ensures success, and that if the bank's people, capital, or reputation were diminished the most difficult to restore would be reputation. To this statement The Economist wrote, "Only the most naive investor read that as a commitment to do-goodery rather than calculated self-interest. And only the most priggish today would argue that financial institutions are obliged to be fluffy."

Later in the same article it suggested, "No firm has combined such red-blooded dedication to profit and high pay with so little appreciation of the state's generosity..."

But in every issue the writer's go one step further in their symbolic sleight-of-hand and combine fact with rare imagery that sets this venerable periodical apart. Such as these lines from the April 24th, 2010 issue concerning a volcano (subscription required).

"The Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokul produced a thrilling show - and may continue to do so - but did most of its damage simply by shutting down air traffic in and out large parts of Europe for nearly a week. Rather than bereavement, it brought the eeriness, and sometimes the joy, of displacement. Colleagues were absent from their desks, and teachers and pupils from their classrooms; the clear blue skies were bereft of the silver needles that sew the world together. Birdsong made loud the silence of the jets, florists' vases missed the bright blooms of far-off fields, and far-off farmers missed the cash those blooms would have brought. But, this time, almost all that went missing will be returned."

I'm not saying becoming a poet is necessary to enhance your leadership communication ability.

But it couldn't hurt.

Emotional Channel and Movement

Have you ever heard or used expressions such as these?

"She lifted my spirits with her positive outlook."

"During the downturn my hopes were dashed on the rocks."

"My heart sunk when the earnings report came out."

"I felt high as a kite when I landed that job."

These metaphorical expressions, and others like them, use movement in association with positive and negative feelings. This is not accidental. For a long time studies and language analysis has shown that mood, feelings, and emotional categories are associated with body movement, especially in the up and down directions.

"Positive emotions are implicitly associated with upward movements and and negative emotions with downward movements," according to researchers Daniel Casasanto and Katinka Dikstra in a paper posted in a recent edition of Cognition. These researchers simply asked people to remember episodes from their lives as they moved marbles either from the top of a box to the bottom or vice versa. The simple act of movement colored the resulting amount of positive or negative feelings associated with the memory, whether the participants were asked to remember a good time or a bad time in their lives.

In my workshops I demonstrate how spontaneous body movements are and how important certain types of body language and gesturing are in conveying information on the emotional channel. In my view a great deal of emotionally relevant information is suppressed in environments where people feel compelled to over-control their body language. And a great deal of emotional channel confusion can result from poorly controlled body language expressions.  

I'm not suggesting Wall Street trading floor levels of gesticulation are appropriate for most meetings, but a lot of emotional information is appropriately conveyed in our hand movements and facial expressions. What is important is that leaders learn to use their natural repertoire of movements to convey what they mean. 

As the two researchers conclude, "Motor actions can influence how efficiently people recollect emotional memories, and can also partly determine whether people choose to remember episodes with positive or negative valence."

The Future and Delayed Rewards

"Taken together, our results reveal that vividly imagining the future reduced impulsive choice," concludes Dr. Peters. Jan Peters and Christian Büchel report in the April 15, 2010 issue of Neuron about their study concerning imagining the future before making a delayed gratification choice.

The results seem intuitive, but its good to know intuition can be backed by investigation. Individuals who were asked to vividly imagine what their plans were over the very short term, 30 to 45 days. Then they were asked to decide if they wanted €20 now or €35 forty-five days from now. Thinking about the future first significantly increased the amount of delayed gratification, with more folks deciding to wait than the control group that was not asked to consider the future.

The implications for leadership are clear. Constantly inviting folks to think about the meaning of what's ahead, in vivid, compelling terms, is essential in helping all of us look for labor rewards later than in an immediate sense. The idea that you can communicate about the future in mere programmatic or project update terms likely will not produce the results of more vivid imagery.

Better Communication - A Gift of Time

Peter Bregman writes a blog for Harvard Business Review. In a recent post he shares the top three things that a survey of 400 senior managers counted as the most time wasting:

1. Unnecessary Meetings
2. Unimportant Emails
3. Protracted PowerPoints

All three can be resolved with better communication. If the meeting is unnecessary (or of dubious quality) - create a short video of what you think is important and send it to folks. See if the meeting is important before holding it. I recommend a short video (30 seconds or so) simply to distinguish it from #2.

For the longest time I have recommended that the way to lower your inbox count of unimportant emails is to stop originating so many in the first place. Imagine the consequences if everyone reduced their email output by just 10%. That seems manageable to most, but my advice is to reduce it by 75% or more. That often feels impossible, but consider how much time you can save by writing better emails, reducing unwarranted emails, and eliminating your CYA blizzard of protection. Add to these factors the idea that one short voice or video call could not only enhance communication (as well as relationships) but reduce email traffic (and that may be more important than reducing your commute).

Lastly, while I could go on for hours about poorly constructed, visually assisted presentations, I won't because we all already know how to make better presentations. The best advice I can give for those who are irretrievably tethered to slide shows is to turn the projector off. Make your comments from memory or hand written notes and provide the slides as a backup (or gift for those who like to think positively). Use more Q&A and less Show & Tell and you might be surprised that at the end your audience feels invigorated rather than fatigued.

Cinderella for Turkish Children

Think about the following two things:

1. Imagine you had to rewrite the Cinderella story for Turkish children. What would help you do a good job?
2. Imagine you are seven years old. School has been cancelled and you have the rest of the day off and can do anything you'd like to do. What would you do?

With some provisos, both of these spark greater creativity in adults, than simply asking individuals to be creative. In the March, 2010 issue of the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, lead researcher Angel Kay-yee Leung found asked adults to write the Cinderella story after a short briefing on Turkish cultural history.

But to make this assignment a bit more interesting, the adults were assembled in five groups after everyone had been given the Turkish overview. The first group went straight away to the assignment. The second group received some additional stimulation in the form of a review of American culture. The third group was shown images and information about Chinese culture. The fourth was shown information about American and Chinese culture. The fifth was shown information about Chinese-American culture in America.

The two groups that were more creative were number four and five. The other three groups were relatively less creative. The effects of this stimulation on creativity held over a five to seven day period when the adults were tested again.

In the second study (Journal of Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts) Darya Zabelina and Michael Robinson found that merely asking adults to imagine they are a child before completing a task boosts creativity.

Play and play-time have been shown over and again to boost creativity. Yet in a productivity-minded, efficiency oriented world we are constantly confronted with mandates, inhibitions, and rules that defeat our participation in such activities. Add a downsizing recession to the mix, and you have adults with so much to do, there's not a moment to imagine how a seven-year old might solve the problem.

Maybe that's what Congress should do about health care. They are behaving like children, so maybe they should think that way about the problem.

I Will & I Have Done versus Will I? & I Was Doing

A fascinating study by Ibrahim Senay at the University of Illinois may put a dent in the way self-help gurus instruct individuals on how to use self-referential communication. Most affirmations are framed in the positive, active voice that often starts, "I will..." You can fill in the blanks with whatever statement suits your individual interests.

Senay has shown that using "Will I?" as the beginning of self-talk actually increases motivation towards task completion more than statements such as "I will." The results are suggestive about motivational language in general, but even Senay says the effects should be studied more thoroughly.

In a separate study, William Hart and Dolores Albarracin, showed that using past imperfect verbs ("I was doing research in the area of") versus past perfect verbs ("I completed research in the area of") stimulated a stronger reenactment of those memories about activities and processes a person has learned which enabled a stronger use of them in considering future contexts. 

I often use the metaphor of movie-making as a general metaphor for a great deal of mental activity in which communication plays a role. These two studies show how refined we are becoming at looking a the specifics of language in its larger roles of motivation and future planning. They both also show our commonly held biases may be less effective than we think.

Sleep and Communication

"To sleep, perchance to dream, ay, there's the rub..." (Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1)

Are the dreams we have each night what the famous sleep disorder pioneer William Dement (gotta love the last name's relation to dementia) calls, "the permission for each and everyone of us to be quietly and safely insane each night," or is there more to it than that? 

The past ten years have advanced a powerful notion about the effects of sleep on memory, problem-solving, insight, and retention of information. A number of researchers from a variety of countries have weighed in on the investigation and the research shows some remarkable results.

Sleep does appear to important to consolidating procedural memories. This means anything new you have learned is enhanced through sleep (indeed, not sleeping reduces learning). Problem-solving abilities can double after a short nap, if you reach REM sleep. Learning complex associations between groups of information is enhanced by sleep as well, as reported by Walker and Stickgold (another great pair of surnames) - "Although all subjects show improved performance, those tested after a night of sleep (as opposed to others trained in the morning and tested that evening) showed a disproportionate 25% advantage in correctly inferring the most distant relationships. Such findings emphasize the ability of sleep to link separate yet related items, producing useful and efficient unitized representations and conceptual schemes." 

Walker and Stickgold commentary concerns the decade research review by Diekelmann and Born, both primary researchers on sleep functions.

Dreams may simply be the abstractions of the information consolidation a sleeping brain churns. Our brains are as active when we sleep as when we are awake and concentrating on something. Consolidating information, learning schematic and semantic relationships about our lives, our work, our relationships, and the practical problems we are trying to solve influence the stuff of dreams.

My purpose for alerting us to this research is to comment on sleep's effect upon leadership communication. When we have consistent, clear, powerful ideas we use as leaders to aid a group's unity around work destinations, goals, and the meaning of work, sleep literally ripens the communication and fosters greater clarity and deeper associations. If we are inconsistent in our messaging or unclear about what we mean two things happen. First, constituents work overtime to try and make sense of the messages or try to gain more information so they can be clear. Secondly, over time (after periods of sleep) constituent's try to incorporate and reconcile the unclear or inconsistent messaging into some order, which eventually will happen. However, each person will reconcile the information in a potentially unique manner, which erodes a leader's need to promote alignment. In fact you can be assured the reconciliation of inconsistent or unclear messages will cause associates to create understandings in their minds that are opposed to the leader's intent.

The opening portion to Hamlet's famous, "To sleep, perchance to dream," is the more famous "To be or not to be, that is the question." The question for leaders is simple. If you are unclear what it means to lead your group, what it means to connect their abilities, or what your collective effort means to each other and society at large, constituent's dreams will not improve your chances at alignment.

But if your messages are clear and consistent (and hopefully powerful as well) then deep sleep will take these messages, as Walker and Stickgold suggest, and integrate them into longer-term memories which helps map our past and predict our future through a rich associative process of sleep consolidation.

So just think about it. Telling your folks to get a good night's rest may be the greatest boon to productivity you can make.