Mayors as Chief Storytellers

There is a mayor running for President who is getting a great deal of attention. Part of this is because of who he is — but part of this is because he is a mayor.

“To me there's two things that can happen when you are conscious of your identity, one is it turns into all these ways we separate ourselves from each other, and it just turns into one big, you don't know me. But the other way we can do it is we can say, OK I've got this experience, you've got this experience, what can we talk about that brings us together?”

– Pete Buttigieg

That quote is a very “mayor-y” thing to say. It is practical, it is structural and it illustrates a primary focus of most mayors: unity.  Mayors wish to bring the people of their cities and towns together because … well, they are together. They live in the same place. They are neighbors. And unlike national, state, and even county politics, the motivation of most mayors is not to push forward a progressive or conservative agenda but to find an agenda that serves all the people. It is to serve the CEO as well as the striking union worker. It is to serve the immigrant business person as well as the struggling farmer. Anyone who lives in the mayor’s town or city should be able to tell their story and be heard. And most mayors want to hear it.

So if a primary focus is to unify residents, how does a mayor do that when people are so different — when some might even hate each other?

Ask a mayor and they will likely answer the question in concrete terms. They will talk about how everyone needs their garbage collected, how everyone needs roads fixed, and needs firefighters to protect them.  They will find unifying programs to talk about when the underlying truth to what they are doing … is finding and telling the town’s master story.

A master story is fundamentally a unifying narrative. It is born out of the personal, biographical, historical, and cultural stories of a specific group of people. Homer’s “Iliad” is a master story, as is “Huckleberry Finn”, and “Grapes of Wrath”. Great historical fiction is great because it is a master story — it is unifying in its images and narratives. It brings a specific group of people together by describing a common thread of identity: “migrant worker,” “underpaid schoolteacher,” “transgender student,” “veteran.” We all carry certain themes around with us and these themes make up our identity. We have an individual identity. Our family has an identity. Our neighborhood has an identity. Our city has an identity. Identities are collections of stories — and I believe the mayor is the person who is charged with identifying and telling the identity story of their town.  

I recently had the privilege of working with a mayor on his State of the City address. My job was to help him with his storytelling skills. His job was to tell the master story of his city. The city is comprised of people with different ethnicities, different religions, different paychecks, and different political beliefs. He had just been elected and this was his first major address.

I am not a communications specialist. I am not a public relations professional, nor am I studied in marketing or advertising. I am a storyteller, so my advice to him was to do the following:

Tell the truth.  

Storytellers are masters of knowing and telling the truth. This is not to say that we always work with data and facts. Our craft is aligning our words with our feelings. We must believe in what we are saying. When we say, “the cow flew up into the air” we must believe that this happened. If we believe it, then our listeners believe it, and they get to be transported to a place where cows fly. If we don’t believe it, then our listeners don’t believe it either and they smile politely as they listen to a nice story. The best way for a storyteller to believe in the story is to believe that the story is bigger than its details. The story of the Iliad is bigger than the clear historical inaccuracies. The story of Huckleberry Finn is bigger than the fact that no such individual ever existed. Storytellers deal in mythic truth, not factual truth — and the truth is, most people tend to listen to mythic truth over factual truth. They prefer the big stories well told over a list of measured facts.  

So when I told the mayor to tell the truth, what I meant is to avoid selling anything. To avoid convincing anyone of anything. I told him that in order to tell a good story, he needed to find the images that mean the most to him, and believe in them. He believed it when he said, “We are a welcoming community” and anyone in the room with him knew that he was telling the truth. It was both the mythic and factual truth.  

The mayor and I worked on other skills. We worked with pausing. We worked with emphasis. We worked on gestures and we worked on standing — but all of these skills had to pass the truth test. They had to be authentic. They had to be aligned with his feelings. They had to be true.  

We live in a world of well-crafted messages and staged selfies. Everyone is competing for our attention with flashy colors and provocative catchphrases. Politicians who need to get elected work very hard to stay in the public eye and often follow the same old path of pandering, offending, dividing and bullying. This doesn’t work for mayors. It makes their jobs harder because the person they might have offended lives next door. The object of their bullying might be cutting their hair or serving them lunch.  Mayors need to listen. They need to pay attention — and more than anything, they need to tell the truth. Mayors are the chief storytellers of their community.