Leadership development: A place for storytelling and Greek mythology?

Abstract

This article explores how storytelling and Greek mythology within classroom-based leadership development may facilitate learning to deal with ambiguity and social construction in leadership practice. We aim to show how using narratives and making explicit tacit plotlines can disrupt thinking and enable participants to experience the emergent process of re-storying. We argue that the projective focus of the re-storying process encourages critical self-reflection and discussion of the socially constructed nature of organisational roles, relationships and leadership. The use of Greek mythology archetypes in combination with re-storying helps participants to question taken-for-granted assumptions of leadership practice, explore emotions and reflect on the past, present and future of a story. Drawing on reflections from practice, we propose a re-storying leadership development workshop and highlight complexities of working within the realm of re-storying and critical self-reflection. This article concludes with an outline of avenues for future research and leadership development practice.

Working with Language: A Refocused Research Agenda for Cultural Leadership Studies

“…Ladkin 2006Ladkin , 2008Pye 2005) and as a means to enrich leadership development practice (e.g. Edwards et al 2015;Schedlitzki et al 2015;Sutherland 2013). Drawing particularly on the insights from this body of work around storytelling, sensemaking and projective techniques would help to complement discursively focused approaches by tapping not only into thought, but also into emotion and feelings, and should as such be part of ethnographic projects contributing to our proposed leadership and language multiplicity research agenda.…”

Widening the leadership mythology: in the search for Simorgh

“…Narratives and stories are not just encouraging participants' critical reflection and imagination, but can also facilitate sensemaking and learning (Schedlitzki, Jarvis, and MacInnes, 2015). For example, arts-based methods could enable participants to apprehend the essence of a complex concept (Schedlitzki et al, 2015;Taylor and Ladkin, 2009).…”

“…Narratives and stories are not just encouraging participants' critical reflection and imagination, but can also facilitate sensemaking and learning (Schedlitzki, Jarvis, and MacInnes, 2015). For example, arts-based methods could enable participants to apprehend the essence of a complex concept (Schedlitzki et al, 2015;Taylor and Ladkin, 2009). Also, the use of storytelling and re-storying could invoke in-depth discussion of the socially constructed nature of organization and leadership (Berger and Luckmann, 1966;Schedlitzki et al, 2015), which is crucial in understanding the critical aspects of leadership.…”

“…More importantly, it has been noted that storytelling could be the overlooked process in which the meanings of leadership were constructed (Auvinen et al, 2013). As storytelling and re-storying have been regarded as imaginative and effective sensemaking processes (Schedlitzki et al, 2015), the story of Simorgh could be used to appreciate the fluid and constructed meanings of leadership.…”

“…Instead, building on a narrative approach to leadership, we argue that the understandings of the critical leadership studies could be embodied and enhanced through storytelling and narrative approaches. Similarly to Schedlitzki, Jarvis and MacInnes (2015), we argue that working with storytelling, 'where participants experiment with different plotlines and possible endings' (p. 2), could help develop a deeper understanding of the socially constructed and ambiguous nature of leadership (Boje, 2008;Gabriel, 2000).…”