Leadership Lessons From Master Storytellers (Part 1 of 2)

What global leaders can do to increase engagement, mitigate biases, and improve results.

Roma shone on Oscar night. Mexican Director Alfonso Cuarón’s story produced by Gabriela Rodriguez —the first Latin American woman to earn a Best Picture Academy Award nomination for her work— told through the eyes of Cleo, an indigenous domestic worker, was not only a cinematic breakthrough but a profound societal one by inclusively telling the story of those whose stories have not been told before.

With Cuarón’s Oscars on Sunday night, it means that a Mexican has won the Best Director award for five out of the last six years. Director Guillermo del Toro won in 2018 for his film “The Shape of Water.” Director Alejandro González I?árritu won in 2016 for “The Revenant” and in 2015 for “Birdman.” Cuarón won his first director Oscar in 2014 for “Gravity.”

What is it about these diverse voices that are capturing the imagination of Latino and non-Latino audiences alike?

For one, they are using the universal connecting power of story to shed light on what makes us both different and the same to one another. In Cuaron’s words “[Roma] shows how that the human experience is one and the same... This is a film about a very specific family, in a very specific society, in a very specific time in history, but at the end I think it is about existence, and about something that we all share as humans (…) this film, and the emotional reaction of people that watched the film, gives me hope for diversity”. In Hollywood – as well as in the workplace – it makes a difference that diverse  voices are telling their own stories of triumphs, sorrows, and aspirations. As a matter of fact, the recently published UCLA’s 2019 Hollywood Diversity Report shows that diversity is more than ever before essential for Hollywood’s bottom line.

In the case of the Mexican Oscar winners, it does matter that they are Mexican. The stories that they wove and shared are not only powerfully effective because of the mastery of their cinematic craft, but they are also inherently differentiated in their creative expression because of a unique cultural experience. In the corporate world, we are also experiencing this paradigm shift: there is more acknowledgement that different leaders from other cultures with different perspectives can bring unique and valuable ideas at a time where innovation and disruption are essential.

CEOs and other corporate leaders can learn from this. To capture the imagination of their employees and customers not only do they need to emphasize technical and professional excellence, but also unleash the power of the unique and authentic stories of those who work for them and those they serve. When leaders ignore, dismiss or minimize the different voices all around them they miss out on optimizing performance, innovation, and marketplace growth. Organizations are preparing and investing for digital disruption and new technologies, but very often the power of personal biographies and demographic disruption tends to go under the table.

Roma achieves this thanks to a breakout performance by lead actress, Yalitza Aparicio —a newcomer who had never acted before discovered in a rural area of Mexico—and a look at an era intimately known by Mexicans but never narrated from the perspective of someone historically ignored, and blockbuster ratings in reaching a diverse array of audiences.

The power of storytelling

Stories and narratives have a powerful effect in our minds. Neuroscientists share proof of this as their research demonstrates that our brains respond differently to stories compared to data. Telling people an engaging story is far more persuasive than reciting facts and figures or showing a PowerPoint presentation with bullet points or images. Stories stimulate multiple parts of our brains, particularly the parts that control emotions and decision-making. And stories told by diverse voices stimulate our brains and emotions even more.

But stories can also have a dark side. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie reminded us in her powerful TED talk The danger of a single story : “The single story creates stereotypes… and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story” (…) “The single story shows us people as one thing, and only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.” Chimamanda talks about her own experience while she was living in the U.S., and the stories she heard every day in the news about “illegal aliens” coming from Mexico to the US, and how ashamed of herself she was when she discovered the plurality and richness of people and culture in Mexico while promoting some of her books in her first visit to Guadalajara at "la Feria Internacional del Libro", the largest book fair of the Americas. In her words: stories matter, many stories matter. It is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person, without engaging with multiple stories of that place or that person. “The consequence of the single story is this: it robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult.”

Unconscious Bias: #Trendingnow

Recently, there has been a lot of attention to the topic of unconscious bias in the public arena: from politics, to academia, to corporations. A significant number of research, articles, social media videos, and podcasts are constantly sharing findings about the science and of our sneaky brains, illustrating how much our own unconscious biases influence what we do every day.

But the concept of bias is nothing “new” if we consider the fact that psychologists, neuroscientist and social scientist have been studying the ways our brain work and what causes some of those biases for many decades: from free associations (Freud) to implicit associations (Benaji, Greenwald), from social attitudes (Allport) to the theory of planned behaviors (Ajzen & Fishbein), from selective attention (Broadbent) to social stereotypes (Tajfel), from micro- inequities (Rowe) to micro-aggressions (Wing), from social constructionism (Berger & Luckmann) to collective unconscious (Jung); the point is, there is a great amount of research, models, theories and data around the subject of conscious and unconscious bias. 

What is relatively new is the element that this is no longer just a subject of academic studies and dissertations. In our contemporary society, new technologies are bringing a zoom to our private lives, making us more interconnected with people from all over the world: every word, action or situation (especially from leaders in positions of power and influence) is now a matter of more scrutiny in the public opinion. Our thoughts, feelings and actions are confronted to different perspectives from broader communities with different backgrounds everywhere, every time. More than ever before, nothing can be done in isolation of other communities -particularly those that are not necessarily present in the moment, and those that have views that are very different from ours-. That’s the paradigm shift in the 21st century: the constant presence of a plurality of actors who from their different perspectives can judge what is being said or done or enacted.   

Master storytellers like Del Toro, Cuarón, and González I?árritu have been successful at cracking the code of how to navigate the barriers and challenges that those outside their cultures have about their cultures through storytelling. What other leadership lessons can corporate leaders learn from the master storytellers from Mexico whose stories have become part of our popular culture? 

In part 2  of this piece we will explore what to do to engage more with others, mitigate systemic biases, and achieve better results.