Managing Leadership^®

As noted yesterday, a recent reading of Doris Kearns Goodwin‘s A Team of Rivals brought to mind the current emphasis on story-telling as an important – even central – technique in communications. Goodwin’s brilliant rendering of Abraham Lincoln‘s life and work, together with the intimate role played in them of his penchant for story-telling, suggest that that role was of much more fundamental importance to Lincoln than the mere colorful illustration of a moral for the benefit of his listeners. Rather, it seems to have played a vital part in helping him to develop and maintain his own understanding of that moral.

Consider this assessment of Lincoln’s meaning to the United States, offered by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

He is the true history of the American people in his time. Step by step he walked before them; slow with their slowness, quickening his march by theirs; the true representative of this continent; an entirely public man.”

Goodwin offers an exceptional development of this aspect of Lincoln’s personal character and political acumen. He was one of us. He knew who we were, how we felt about the world and the events shaping it, and when we were ready to be persuaded to try something new. How did he arrive at this intimate connection with Americans across the land?

I think he did it by using stories to plumb the depths of people interacting in society. He tried to understand their thoughts and feelings, then rewove them into stories which he told back to them. He gauged their effect, refined them, and repeated the process until he knew he had their pulse, could hear the chord playing across American lives, and cause it to grow in strength, harmony, and mutual comprehension through his oratory and, in particular, his stories.

Eventually, the listeners, the stories, and the storyteller became one; they were in harmony. Then he knew that he understood, that he could make people realize he understood, and that he could use the same stories to help them recognize what they had taught him to understand.

But a fine, expressive, and powerful yet delicate instrument needs to be kept in tune. And Lincoln did this by continuing to tell stories throughout his life and career. He tapped the strings, listened for the harmonic overtones to rise, adjusted the notes and meter until the parts of the apparatus were once again in sync.

In this way, he used stories to maintain his pace, step by step – not really before us, but alongside, arm-in-arm, confronting what we faced, puzzling over what mystified us, using our strengths to pick a path with us through our weaknesses.

From this unity, he could understand where he thought we ought to go. And, of primary importance, he knew where we were at any given moment, where we were capable of going, and, with the rhythmic sense and timing of the true storyteller, when we were capable of going there.

He knew not just how to tell stories; but which ones to tell, and when. And he knew these things because they communicated as much from us to him, as from him to us.

There’s a moral in that for all of us, don’t you think?

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Technorati Tags: Doris Kearns Goodwin, story-telling, communication, Lincoln, United States, Ralph Waldo Emerson, America