The link between leadership and narrative at the heart of the HR function's role

Marshall Ganz explores the role of leadership and the power of stories as a source of mobilization. Ganz is a professor of Leadership, Organizing, and Civil Society at Harvard, and his frameworks aided Obama's first presidential campaign.

In this brief re-elaboration of part of his work, also referring to the role of HR as a Change Agent according to the model proposed by Dave Ulrich , I try to highlight how the link between leadership and narrative is at the heart of the HR function's role.

A leadership story

A leadership story is about allowing people to collaborate to achieve a common purpose in a situation of uncertainty or potential action. These situations of uncertainty and potential action can be transformed into a constructive purpose by adopting an approach based on response (active, intrinsically motivated action) rather than reaction (event-driven action).

This is the difference between a leadership story and a management one. In one, the common purpose is achieved through a collective response fueled by intrinsic individual motivations; in the other, it is achieved through separate actions in roles and tasks guided by a single extrinsic motivation.

Building this response – the who, what, how, and why – is the task of leadership. Ensuring that this response can be adopted individually and that it becomes a collective response through the organization is the task of HR.

The story of self

A leadership story is the union of three stories.

The story of self is the individual story, of why I am who I am, of the experiences that shaped me as a person and a professional, of the skills that define my ability to contribute to the organization, and of the values that drive me to act.

We all have a story of self. The journey we take to become who we are is what makes us unique.

When we join an organization, we offer our story of self. This fact becomes evident in the recruitment process. As candidates, we find ourselves telling our story, hoping that the other party finds coherence, a match with the story they are seeking, and that they accept our offer.

The effectiveness of the process of selecting and attracting the right candidates is directly proportional to the clarity with which HR understands the collective story in which the individual one could fit and to the ability to communicate it.

Building relationships

Organizations gain value (knowledge, motivation, and skills necessary to express themselves collectively) through the relationships participants establish with each other.

Performance, the ability to achieve goals, and competence, the set of resources and energies mobilized in achieving these goals, are emergent phenomena that exist not from the sum of individual efforts but from the interrelationships among them. Therefore, the ability to develop the density of connections among individual stories of self is a fundamental practice of leadership and HR.

The density of relationships among people promotes the creation of individual and collective identities, mutual understanding of individual skills, and the development of new collective capabilities, which Dave Ulrich calls Organizational Capabilities, determining the effectiveness of the organization.

Connections among talents, skills, processes, measures, and infrastructures allow the distillation of Core Competencies that enable the organization to achieve its business objectives.

The story of us

This collective story is the story of us. It is the story of the experiences and values that we, as a community/movement/organization, share, which characterize our common experience and invite us to do what we were called to do.

Belonging to the community is marked by learning to tell new stories individually and collectively. We belong to the organization when the story of self becomes, at least in part, the story of us, and we tell it as our own story.

Translating into words what we share is a central element of the story of us; there is no "us" if people do not share their stories. Therefore, the role of HR in transcribing the story of us into elements of culture, in touchpoints of the employee experience and in employer branding campaigns, and of leadership in representing the story of us by telling it firsthand is fundamental.

Creating meaning

It is important to emphasize that this effort to create meaning focuses on storytelling as a source of individual and collective action rather than as a cultural constraint or marketing parameter.

This means that ideally, individual micro-behaviors should not be influenced through behavior codes and rules linked to extrinsic negative reinforcements or through establishing a transaction linked to extrinsic positive reinforcements. The motivation behind the behavior is generated by the coherence between the story of self and the story of us, between individual values and collective goals.

Therefore, it is important for leadership and HR to become reproducers of cultural codes in support of an effort to influence the organization to adhere to a certain interpretation of events that represents a shared framework of meaning.

The story of now

The third story that constitutes and completes a leadership story is the story of now.

It is the impulsive urgency of the present moment, the understanding, matured after sharing values and aspirations, that the world out there is not as it could be.

The difference between these two visions, what is and what could be, creates a positive tension, a potential for action. It is in telling this story and thus creating this potential for action that leadership and HR create engagement. Not with ping-pong tables and free breakfast, but by showing an untapped possibility, providing challenging yet achievable tasks.

In other words, this energy is released by making visible and readily understandable the coherence between the organization's objectives, collective resources, and individual values.

Designing strategy

The opportunity to act generated by the situation of uncertainty or the potential for action requires a fundamental component that only leadership, with the support of HR, can provide, which is hope, a sense of possibility.

Faced with difficulty, challenge, uncertainty about the future, it is the awareness that these can be overcome, that the world as it is can indeed be transformed into how it could be, that leads to action, thus avoiding the paralysis of dismay.

The significance of development programs and career plans goes beyond people's need to grow personally and financially. Through these tools, HR provides people with a perspective on the future, an additional connection between the story of self and the story of now, a sense of possibility that ties the individual and the organization.

Guiding mobilization

Based on this hope, the leader transforms the potential for action, the moral of the story, into concrete actions, into a strategy, and mobilizes the organization and its resources, transforming these actions into goals consistent with the values of the community itself.

It is through this coherence that leadership and HR succeed in mobilizing the organization to achieve a common purpose, business objectives, through a powerful collective response fueled by individual motivations and resources and by the interrelations between them.

Giorgio Pivetta OLI - Adriano Olivetti Leadership Institute