Leadership through Story: Diverse Voices in Dialogue

Stories, ancient as life itself and deeply embedded within family and cultural traditions, transmit knowledge and shared meaning, linking people together in a human chain of history and memory. Leadership through Story offers a way for leaders and members (followers) to understand and experience the way a powerful story, when shared with others, serves as both a catalyst and vehicle to accomplish leadership. Leaders and members tell stories to achieve goals, experience compassion, manage change, solve problems, and/or promote social justice in democratic communities. To utilize stories to their fullest, leaders need to be aware of how the mutual exchange of stories and the meaning created from this exchange, promotes the changes we seek within and among us. Listening to diverse voices and locating turning points in dialogue—places where we are influenced and changed by others—inspires moral imagination and commitment, altering our lives together. In this way storytelling and dialogue serve as a foundation for personal and social transformation as well as cultural survivance in human communities.