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What’s your story…?

In about April this year I came across a fantastic academic paper. It’s not often I get to say this, as they have a tendency to be dry, and… well… academic. This paper was, like two or three others I will blog about soon, far from dry, but spoke very clearly into situations I see on a day to day basis.

The paper is titled “What’s your story?” A life-stories approach to authentic leadership development, written by Boas Shamir and Galit Eilam, two Israeli academics. In the paper the authors argue, very persuasively,  the root to authentic leadership is found through developing authentic narratives of what bought us into ‘leadership’ in the first place. The story a leader develops is intrinsically linked to their life experiences and the meanings which are captured within these experiences.

Shamir and Eilam pull from real life developmental situations to show the learning which leaders undertake, like working through struggle, finding a cause and learning from experience. They go on to argue that this narrative, or story, then provides followers with a primary source of information on which to base their judgement on a leaders authenticity, and the extent to which they will ‘follow’.

If you have access to an academic library, real or on-line, I’d strongly recommend getting hold of this paper…

(Shamir, B. and Eilam, G. (2005). “What’s your story?” A life-stories approach to authentic leadership development, The Leadership Quarterly, 16 395-471.)