On Becoming a Servant Leader Issue No. 3

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In late March of 1996, I sat across from a multi-hospital CEO named Rick Cagen for my master's degree final paper research. I had gone in believing that executives led their teams mainly through positional power based on chain of command and I expected him to talk about strategy, systems, and control. Instead, he told me a story about a loading dock.

The guy on the loading dock cannot run the hospital, he said, but the guy on the loading dock can lead the people on the loading dock into the future of the loading dock business and have more influence than the manager of the loading dock. I have never heard a more clever and clear statement of real leadership without hierarchal authority.  It cemented for me how important using metaphors in  communication is for effective influence as a leader.    

In my final paper, I  was studying how healthcare executives used metaphorical language to shape culture. What I found in Cagen and the 2 others I interviewed was that they were not primarily providing policy and controlling middle managers based on written and verbal directives.  They were creating shared meanings for all the people in the organization and social architecture (culture) regardless of chain of command.

The thesis I wrote back then carried at its core a simple claim, and I believe it is truer today than it was then. Effective leaders are meaning makers. They intentionally use language on purpose to build a shared understanding that becomes the glue holding a team together in the social architecture. Thirty years later, in an AI driven world of complex and constantly changing global projects, that is the claim I most want to hand to you.

Most of us were trained to believe our value lives in the project plan. We build the schedule, assign the tasks, report the status, and assume the plan is what moves the team to execute and stay aligned. Yet when you look back honestly at the mentors and leaders you followed most willingly, they were rarely the ones with the cleanest meeting reports, project charter and scope document. They were the ones whose words made the work make sense.  They gave us the purpose, the ‘why’ behind our project assignments. 

Consider with me where a project or program manager sits in organizational structure. Information flows toward us externally from the plan sponsors, key internal executive sponsors or PMO bosses, from the cross functional leads, from the project team doing the work, from associated vendors, and from the end user, and then it flows back out again through us. In my 1996 study I called the effective executive leader a ‘power broker’, and I was careful about what that phrase meant. The power broker is not the person who hoards formal authority. The power broker is the one who sits at the intersection of the information flow and brokers real meaning through it to everyone in the organization. The source of the influence is not a title in the organizational hierarchy. It is the position in the flow, combined with the trust the person has earned through the ability to clearly articulate the meaning for the work itself.

That is exactly the seat a project or program manager occupies, even with no one formally reporting to you.  Being in the role of Project or Program Manager is a great opportunity of leading without formal organizational authority. You get to choose which shared picture or vivid imagery of the work to keep placing in front of people, and to build one conversation at a time. You are not merely passing along KPI results or project performance facts. Whether you intend it or not, you are shaping how your team makes sense of its own work.

It is easy to hear the word metaphor and think of a poetry class rather than a tool for a Monday morning project status meeting or stand up. So let me be plain about why it matters, and let me lean on the researchers who make the case better than I can.

Scholar Edgar Schein described culture as living on three levels, and the deepest is the layer of basic assumptions a group of people takes for granted about its own work and related assignments. He argued that the one thing of real importance leaders do is create and manage culture at that level. Scholar Karl Weick showed how people in organizations are always, quietly, telling themselves a story about what their situation means, and that the raw material for that story is not the dashboard. It is the metaphors and images we reach for. Researchers Gareth Morgan and Linda Smircich went further and called this reality construction. Teams cohere around shared understanding and fracture around competing ones, and the effective leader who emerges is the one who frames experience in a way that gives people a viable basis for purposeful action.

If you have ever watched a team argue in circles for an hour and then watched one person say a single sentence that suddenly aligned everyone?  If so, you have seen this happen in real time. That sentence was not new data. It was a shared picture that cemented a shared meaning for everyone in the room. When Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus studied ninety chief executive in their book Leaders, they found that driving meaning through communication was one of only four skills these leaders used to turn a vision into reality, and they gave the leader a name I have always liked. The social architect. The architect does not force the building into being. The architect designs the space and then lets people fill it. That type of design work is available to you on every project, regardless of what your title says by intentionally designing metaphors and metaphorical phrases into your communication with the project team and stakeholders. 

There is an honest risk in all of this, because meaning making is a real form of influential power, and every form of power can be fumbled. Metaphors are memorable, which is their strength, but people can and will read meanings into them that you never intended. A mental picture you offer casually can travel further than you meant it to go with the stakeholders for the project or group of projects.

The discipline is not to stop using metaphors in your ongoing communication. The discipline is to express your intended meaning constantly and consistently, so the shared understanding you are building is the one you want to be cemented in the meanings that are shared by the project teams. Rick Cagen described issuing an order from what he jokingly called his kingdom, only to have it arrive at the far end of the organization as something entirely different from what he said. His answer to that problem was not to give fewer communication messages. His answer was three words. Communicate, communicate, and communicate. Shared meaning that is built once does not stay built over the project timeline. It must be renewed in the language you use every working day in your communication as a power broker.

Paul Jackson, a human resources director I interviewed in 1996, gave me a picture of communication that I have never forgotten. He was talking about leading people through change and transformation in an organization.

If you are marching a parade down Main Street and you plan to turn up Fourth South, you cannot wait until you reach Fourth South to let people know you are turning. You have to tell them all the way back where the parade begins. People must know where the curves in the road are before they reach them.

Sit with that as a project leader. So much of the confusion on our projects comes from telling people about the turn at the moment of the turn, when the stress and pressure are already high, rather than long before we reach it. Creating meaning is not something you declare once at kickoff. It is something you place in front of people early, and keep in front of them, so no one is surprised by a curve you saw coming.

I do not want you to just read this and move on to your next newsletter or email. I want you to try it over the next two weeks. Here are three deliberate steps you can run on your current real project or group of projects, starting now.

1.   Write one metaphor that captures what your custom project is really about. Set the project plan and the scope statement aside for a moment and finish this sentence in plain words using a metaphor or metaphorical phrase. This project is really about ___. Reach for a vivid image, the way Rick Cagen framed leadership as leading the loading dock into its future. Write several versions and keep the one that feels the truest to you. You are looking for the single picture that tells a project new team member, in one breath, what the work is for and why it matters.

2.   Test that metaphor with two people and listen for what they heard. Meaning is not something you get to declare and assume has landed. Say your phrase out loud to two people whose judgment you trust, then listen carefully to what they heard rather than to what you meant. If they carried the picture somewhere you did not intend, that is not a failure. It is exactly the information you needed to refine it until the shared meaning is genuinely shared and aligned with your vision for the project objectives and future outcome.

3.   Map your information flow and choose one message to broker deliberately. Sketch, even roughly, how information moves through you, from the project sponsors and the leads and the team and the end user, and back out again. Then pick the single message your project most needs everyone to hold in common, and commit to repeating it in every status meeting or stand up and every hallway conversation until it becomes part of how the team sees the work. You are not repeating yourself out of a lack of imagination. You are cementing a shared reality one deliberate sentence at a time.

The leaders who learn to make shared meaning on purpose are the ones whose teams stay aligned long after the kickoff energy has worn off. This is a real skill, not a gift reserved for a charismatic few, and like every skill worth having it grows with deliberate practice over the long term. As you begin to choose your words the way an architect chooses a load bearing beam, you will find that a team which once needed you for every decision starts to make good calls on its own, because its members finally share your picture of where the work is going. You are actually developing future leaders.  You can do this!

Now I would like to hear from you. Reply to this issue and finish the sentence for your current project. This project is really about ___. Send me your one line. I read every reply, and the best ones may show up in a future Voice from the Field so we can learn from each other.

One more thing. This issue grew out of a chapter I am writing for my book on servant leadership for project managers, on the art of language and meaning making. If you would like to follow the book project as it comes together, or help when the launch begins, send me a DM and I will bring you in.

Serve well, lead well, and grow the leaders around you.

Mark

 On Becoming a Servant Leader is a bi-weekly newsletter on servant leadership and emotional intelligence for project managers who want to deliver valued outcomes for their teams and the people they serve.