And Then There Were Stories ... Lessons From A Lifetime of Leadership

3 Leadership Stories to Help You be a Better Manager

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Before long, he began making investments in railroads, bridges and the oil industry. He was a student of success. He not only figured out the keys to being a great leader, but he also shared them with Napolean Hill. Thanks to that relationship, we have an excellent record of his insights. Carnegie shared 30 traits of successful leaders. Here is his list:. Every one of them had these traits to some degree. But no one is perfect. No leader is perfect.

30-Second Bio: Doris Kearns Goodwin

For the majority of us, we can go through life learning and improving as we go. But, sometimes life forces our hand, and all we can do is act. This happened to in to the polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton. During his trans-Antarctic expedition, disaster struck. His ship, the Endurance , got trapped in the ice packs. The 28 men were at the mercy of Mother Nature.

If the packs broke up, they could continue. If not, the ship would get crushed and maroon the men on the unforgiving ice. With each day the ice squeezed the ship. The men made it off with their dogs, supplies, and lifeboats as they watched her go down. Shackleton had the men set up camp and then started to develop a plan. Given the weather, they had no choice but to stay put. There was no way to make it across the Antarctic on foot. They had too much ground to cover. So they waited for months in unbearable conditions.

As the weather changed and the ice started to break, they dragged the ships towards the water. The three lifeboats set off to reach Elephant Island. It was a mile journey in tiny wooden boats, across some of the roughest seas in the world. After making landfall, they had another problem. The crew still had to travel to the South Georgia whaling station.

At this point, they have been stuck in the Antarctic for over a year. Sailing to South Georgia would be the toughest test. Knowing the danger, Shackleton took a skeleton crew. By some miracle, they spotted the island. They were stuck riding out the storm in the ocean. The following day they finally made it to shore. Unfortunately, they were on the wrong side of the island.

Not willing to press his luck at sea, Shackleton and two others decided they would make the crossing by land. No one had ever attempted this before. It was a suicide mission. Before setting out, they pushed screws into their boots to help them climb the ice. They grabbed some carpenter hammers and one 50 foot section of rope.

WHAT MAKES STARTUP STORIES WORK

They set off on the mile journey, crossing mountains and braving the terrible weather. They could have died countless times. Shackleton persevered, and after 36 hours they made it to the whaling station. I was in awe after reading about this journey. Somehow Shackleton kept his men alive and moving forward.

It took years, but he did it. Any average person might have given up many times on that journey. Leaders are not born, they are made. Every skill that Andrew Carnegie talks about is something every one of us can learn. Whether it was sports, my community or jobs, there was always a chance to lead. He recalls one particularly cold, harrowing night in Afghanistan when the Marines needed to defend an airfield in the middle of hostile territory. The general spent hours standing a post side-by-side with a year-old soldier, talking to him to understand what his experience in the Marines had been like, how he was feeling, how things could be better.

Here was a man in charge of all of the forces in the region, and he made it his business to fully comprehend the life of one soldier, Faul says. Obviously, running a tech startup is different, but the principles of good leadership are strikingly similar. This degree of empathy is closely tied to the first of three different types of stories Faul believes every manager should tell frequently and deliver compellingly.

Read on to learn how to develop each of these narratives and tell them in a way that moves people. Being genuine builds trust. It also gives people permission to take bigger risks in their own work. If your team knows about times you tried to do something and failed, they will also see that you recovered and went on to succeed. The way she told these stories, the people were very real to us. The feelings they experienced when they failed were very real.

But the idea that the company was learning and moving forward was also very real. Now he feels responsible for modeling this approach to the managers on his own team. I had to work through that, acknowledge the failure, apologize for it, discuss it over and over again. It was incredibly hard for me to do. Instead of sweeping the episode under the rug, he now tells this story again and again. Whenever his team confronts a similar situation or makes a mistake, he recalls it. Because the truth is, he did get through it.

His team at Pinterest not only survived but went on to other successes. Knowing that recovery is possible on this level generates productive psychological safety for everyone involved. After he was at Facebook for a while, Sandberg — his manager at the time — hired someone new to take over a large part of his job.

Because this is what he knows people he manages will experience. If this is the case, start small, Faul says. The more people you try to reach this way initially, the more pressure you will feel, and it can break you. You want to get some success under your belt. Open up to just one person, or two people you really trust.

See how they respond and how it changes their work style and ethic. Plus, it will give you a chance to strike your own balance between vulnerability and confidence. The second tactic for nailing failure stories: Choose your words carefully in advance. When he prepares what he wants to share, he always asks: Is my message clear?

Does it evoke emotion? Is it the type of story that members of your team will tell your friends in a conversation about why they love their job or the company? The answers all have to be yes. One of the best stories to encourage great work, behavior, actions, etc. For instance, Faul has continually noticed how hard it is for people to offer feedback to managers, particularly those a couple tiers higher in the organization.

To save agriculture from climate change, we need better weather forecasting

As a result, leaders often get the least amount of constructive advice for improvement, when they should probably receive the most. To show that that type of courage — to say something difficult to help boost performance — will be rewarded. You want good example stories to become part of company lore. This is how values truly become the fabric of your startup — not by posting them on the walls or repeating them during an all hands. Repetition is your key to success here.

Stories about other people living these words are the best way to make them meaningful. Everyone got to see our mission and the way we want to work in action through these stories every other week. Getting good at this is vital for early stage companies. Telling stories about people doing good work that maps to your highest priorities will align everyone around what they should be doing. This solves another common issue too. When you tell a story about them, you kick their motivation into hyperdrive, and you make them a model for the rest of the team to follow their lead.

One of the best ways to build a good example story is to slowly zoom out. Faul gives customer operations as an example. Perhaps a support team member had an incredible win and saved an account for the company. Then you use what they did to explain why the customer support function is so invaluable to your company strategy. From there, you can talk about the level of service you want to provide company-wide and what this looks like. And finally, you can touch on how this will power the overarching mission. Instead of telling everyone how important it is to hit deadlines, or castigating a team over a missed deadline, you can take every opportunity to acknowledge the people who excel on time.

With one narrative, you can fuel a top employee, set a positive example for an entire functional area, underscore company values, and connect the work of individuals to the bigger picture. This is what makes the good example story indispensable. To do this, we need everyone to know how high-quality our products are and how aspirational our brand must be.

So everyone needs to be pushing for this all the time. The stories he and his fellow executives tell are about people who believe every tiny detail matters and act accordingly. The people who are immediately responsive over email to customers. The people who think through more graceful packaging solutions. The person who decided to use a certain color thread in Athos' garments to give them their premium look and feel. These stories get told repeatedly over email and in meetings, until everyone automatically connects these actions to the long-term vision of the company.

Telling an effective inspiring story starts with psychologizing your audience — and, to an extent, building an audience you know will be receptive to your message. For instance, at Athos, Faul knows that employees are passionate about athleticism, about helping athletes achieve better performance. Many of them have a background playing sports or doing yoga or strength training.

He himself was heavily involved in high school and collegiate sports. These people will always do better work than those that choose to be there for the money or the brand association, or even because they think the product is cool or the problem is interesting.

Life lessons on leadership

Inspiration requires even more rehearsal than the other types of stories. Whenever Sandberg needed to rally people behind a project or cause, they would dedicate hours to refining their language, practicing and infusing their words with the emotion they wanted people to feel. Now I take the time to think through every inch of these stories. I feel that I owe it to my team. Knowing what you want to say is a good start, but you really need to have the right structure.

You want to sit down and outline.

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