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280 PART 4: THE LEADER AS A RELATIONSHIP BUILDER
meaningful to organizational members. People seek meaning in their daily work
and want to understand their role in the larger context of the organization. It is
up to leaders to provide that context for followers, to frame activity with discrete
meaning. By using language rich in metaphor and storytelling, leaders
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can make sense of situations in ways that will be understood simi-
Action Memo
larly throughout the organization.
Stories need not be long, complex, or carefully constructed. A
As a leader, you can use stories and
metaphors to help people connect
story can be a joke, a metaphor, or a verbal snapshot of something
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from the leader’s past experience. Jean-Pierre Garnier, CEO of
emotionally with your message and the
GlaxoSmithKline, used the metaphor of a snake to encourage his
key values you want to instill. You can
100,000 employees to stamp out bureaucracy and work smarter and
symbolize important messages through
faster: “Say you’re in a plant and there’s a snake on the fl oor,” Garnier
your appearance, body language, facial
expressions, and daily actions.
said in his year-end address. “What are you going to do? Call a consul-
tant? Get a meeting together?” Instead, Garnier said people should do
“one thing: You walk over there and step on the friggin snake.” Garnier’s
image has people talking in a more colorful way about his request that
they simplify processes and “don’t accept that every time something comes up you
have to get a whole team of people to discuss it.” 62
Some believe that the true impact of a leader depends primarily on the stories
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he or she tells and how followers receive them. Storytelling is a powerful way to
relay a message because a story evokes both visual imagery and emotion, which
helps people connect with the message and the key values. People are almost
always able to apply some aspect of the story to themselves, and a story is often
much more convincing and more likely to be remembered than a simple directive
or a batch of facts and fi gures. 64
Evidence for the compatibility of stories with human thinking was demon-
strated by a study at the Stanford Business School. The point was to convince
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MBA students that a company practiced a policy of avoiding layoffs. For some stu-
dents, only a story was used. For others, statistical data were provided that showed
little turnover compared to competitors. For other students, statistics and stories
were combined, and yet other students were shown the company’s policy statement.
Of all these approaches, students presented with the story alone were most convinced
about the avoiding layoffs policy.

Informal Communication

Leaders don’t just communicate stories in words. They also embody the stories in
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the way that they live their lives and what they seek to inspire in others. Leaders
are watched, and their appearance, behavior, actions, and attitudes are sym-
bolic to others. Even the selection of a communication channel can convey a
symbolic message. In other words, members of an organization attach meaning to
the channel itself. Reports and memos typically convey formality and legitimize a
message. Personal visits from a leader are interpreted as a sign of teamwork and
caring. The very modes of communication are symbolic, such as when students
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gauge the importance of a topic by the amount of time a professor spends talking
about it, or when an individual experiences indignation at receiving a “Dear John”
letter instead of having a relationship terminated in person.
Symbols are a powerful informal tool for communicating what is important.
Many people don’t realize that they are communicating all the time, without say-
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ing a word, by their facial expressions, body language, and actions. Leaders
strive to be aware of what they signal to others in addition to verbal messages.