Mr. Devins was a storyteller. I discovered this when I landed in his office on my first day of employment at the hospital he administered in the sleepy farming community of Waconia, Minn. It was 1977, and the little hospital had just acquired the dying local volunteer ambulance service. Paul Erickson and I had been hired to help staff the ambulance when the volunteers were not available.
Things had not gone well that first day. Moments after arriving, with no orientation, Paul and I were sent on a call with a drive-like-hell volunteer who did not believe in blood pressures, jump bags or treating his young new crew members with any modicum of respect. By lunchtime I was humiliated, angry and ready to quit. When the director of nursing saw me fuming, she quickly ushered me into Mr. Devin’s office, where I began to list my complaints.
Mr. Devins brusquely interrupted me. But instead of using facts and reason to convince me that things would improve, he told me a story. It was a story about the history of the hospital and the ambulance service, about his serving on the governor’s commission on EMS, and about how this ambulance service was going to develop into a state-of-the-art regional ALS service. His style was blunt, martial and confident, his sentences Hemingway short. His story appealed to my sense of being tough, of fighting for the underdog and of serving on the front end of something great.
Mr. Devins clearly understood what Henry Mintzberg had written about in his 1973 classic study and book The Nature of Managerial Work: that leadership is performance art and that more than 75 percent of what leaders and managers do with their time is talk. Leaders talk about current happenings, where they have been, where they are going, why people should care, and how resources will be organized to get there. The more recent work of Steve Denning has found that the most successful leaders shape their talking into effective stories.
Most of us arrive in leadership positions believing our job is to have answers supported with facts and rationale. But human motivation doesn’t work that way. We are endowed with an ability to remember the past and imagine the future, and we use both to find context for what is happening in the present by creating a story. If you announce that a committee is being formed to explore alternatives to 24-hour shifts, people will frame this information into a story. The story might be: Management is under financial pressure and out to reduce overtime by screwing us out of 24s; Bill’s accident on the night shift is causing us to lose our 24s; or some employees are their children’s primary caregivers and can’t work all 24s. The story will be influenced by emotions and experiences, but also by the stories our culture or leaders tell us.
I have been noticing that in organizations where no compelling story is being told by the leadership at the top, there is usually a dramatic, vivid and dark tale being told at the bottom.
During the 18 years I worked for Mr. Devins, he never stopped telling stories. In every meeting and at every possible occasion, he framed his talking into a story. Some we heard over and over. His tiny community hospital grew into a flourishing regional medical center, and the volunteer ambulance service is now a respected regional ALS service with eight base stations and more than 100 employees.
In my book, that’s a pretty good story.
