Abstract
The constructivist framework of career development provides the theoretical foundation for narrative approaches to career counselling practices. Within the constructivist paradigm, a crucial role is played by the thematic stories created by individuals to learn, make meaning of their experiences, life, and career, as well as to construct their own identity. This article describes a ‘thought experiment’, which explores the perception of leadership as the creation of one’s own story. This idea implies the consideration of issues such as concept, storyline, purpose, receivers, credibility, fidelity, preparation for performance, and leadership ending. Deliberations on these issues take the form of questions for reflection, which are posed for leaders generally for their individual reflection as well as for those involved in career counselling or coaching practice. The proposed narrative conceptualization offers insight and strategies for developing one’s own leadership identity.
Keywords
This article has a conceptual and descriptive character – it offers reflection on leadership from the perspective of a constructivist approach to career development. The paper starts by providing the theoretical foundations for the narrative approach to career and highlighting the central role of stories. The paper then characterizes leadership as a widespread phenomenon within career paths and the story-telling tool as one of the core competencies of leadership. The main part of the article is intended to inform readers about the benefits of viewing leadership itself as a narrative, as the process of one’s own story creation. A deep reflection on the leadership concept, storyline, action, purpose, credibility, fidelity, and end, as well as a consideration of the important role of receivers, is offered as a vehicle for generating meaning in one’s own life and attaining self-understanding, promising benefits for career counselling practice. A number of questions are posed in the article, and these can be used to stimulate interaction and reflection in career counselling practice, coaching practice, and leader’s own reflective practice. This ‘thought experiment’ is viewed as a way that might be used to strengthen the perspective on leadership career development in the context of education, training leaders, and career interventions.
A constructivist approach to career development
The constructivist approach to career development is relatively new to the profession of psychology, compared to the person–environment fit perspective, and requires development to be applied to the practice of counselling, but its value seems clear in the postmodern era (McIlveen & Patton, 2007; Patton & McMahon, 2006; Savickas, 2005). The two meta-theoretical frameworks that can subsume constructivism and provide theoretical foundations for the narrative approach to career counselling practices are the Systems Theory Framework (STF) of career development and Career Construction Theory (CCT).
The STF of career development (McMahon & Patton, 2017; Patton & McMahon, 2014, 2006) offers a broad view of career and the position of the individual. Considering a person’s unique characteristics, STF emphasizes overlapping systems of potential interpersonal, social, and environmental influences upon one’s career. STF is an operationalization of constructivism because of its emphasis upon the individual’s own interpretation of the meaning of her or his world in an active way through language and story-telling. At the same time, it emphasizes the proximal and distal influences crucial to the construction of the social and psychological worlds in which an individual lives (social constructionism). The construction of the meaning of the world, and of career, by an individual, takes place in the multiplicity and dynamics of nonlinear, casual, mutual, and multidirectional influences across past, present, and future. Because the potencies of influences change over time, and in interaction with other influences in the whole system, ongoing change is an inherent characteristic of personal life and career. The unpredictability of influences within the systems and events is captured by the use of chance by the individual.
The CCT (Savickas, 2013, 2005) is another operationalization of constructivism with its three components: vocational personality, career adaptability, and life themes. Individuals are viewed as taking a unique, subjective, private, and idiographic perspective for comprehending careers; one distinct from the understanding of oneself in the shared social terms of traits, abilities, types, etc. ‘Distinct from’ does not mean opposite to – the construction of one’s own career occurs in the context of social expectations, hence the individual’s adaptability is the natural process through which self and society are synthesized in vocational life. The uniqueness of an individual – according to Savickas – is expressed in life stories, which indicate why possessed abilities, interests, etc. are important or matter to the person. In that perspective, counselling is about facilitating client’s development of their own stories and subjective career, because narratives are the means by which individuals construct their identities (Savickas, 2011).
Simply stated, from the constructivist perspective, a person is an open system, constantly interacting with the environment, and seeking stability through ongoing change. A derivative of systems theory thinking is that ‘story’ represents a recursiveness (ongoing interaction) between life experiences and the individual’s attempts to make sense of those experiences and is understood as the key to constructivist approaches (McMahon, Watson, & Bimrose, 2010). Indeed, each life is multi-storied, because no story is capable of encompassing an individual’s whole life, which is complex and multifaceted. Experiences are interpreted by individuals and their meaning is agreed upon in relation to dominant and alternative stories (McMahon, 2017). In practical terms, we need stories as meaningful interpretation tools, because so much of the world we live in is obscure. This refers particularly to the case of understanding human actions, including one’s own actions.
The strength of stories, related to their ability to convey complex and multilayered ideas in a simple and memorable form, is commonly used in narrative career counselling. A convincing exemplar of such usage is Savickas’s life-design paradigm and methodology of counselling (Savickas, 2015; Savickas et al., 2009). The author explains this as ‘… a discourse in which concepts are used to enhance understanding about how practitioners might proceed’ (Savickas, 2015, p. 7). Life-design counselling itself is more improvisation within a map of action than a model or theory that would replace vocational guidance. Clients and counsellors move down the path of a life-designing intervention as they form relationships to collaboratively resolve work role and career problems during career transition processes. The path begins by defining career as a story that the person tells about her or his working life. ‘Because we live in language, that story imposes meaning on vocational choice and work behaviour’ (Savickas, 2015, p. 8). ‘Holding’ this story in relationship helps clients to reflect on their lives. This happens through deconstructing and reconstructing narratives bearing the client’s own meanings, ideas, beliefs, and intentions. In practical terms, after eliciting the transition narrative, the counsellor conducts a Career Construction Interview and then retells the client’s story to unify the life portrait. Finally, client and counsellor co-construct an action plan that extends the client’s self-identity through active experimentation in the real world in pursuit of a life that is desired.
In each client story, the counsellor can hear the three narrative threads of the actor, author, and agent (Savickas, 2012). The actor perspective refers to a person’s behaviour, acting and already role-playing. The author perspective reflects self-consciousness and self-definition of the narrator, which results in a unique and personal meaning to the story. The agent thread refers to regulating the client’s own vocational behaviour through personal goals, motives, values, and projects for the future. This triple perspective in narrative aptly illustrates the general concept of the individual in the constructivist approach to career development, where the person is understood as the author, the agent, and the actor of their career and life.
To summarize, narrative career counselling is a constructivist approach, rooted in the constructivist epistemology, emphasizing language, discourse, and theme development. However, this does not mean that narrative career counselling is limited to spoken and written forms. On the contrary, there are several significant visual and spatial techniques contributing to the narrative approach, which are based on the client’s manual and spatial activity and the use of props to activate reflection and deepen self-understanding (McIlveen & Patton, 2007; McMahon, 2017). Regardless of the technique used, narrative career counselling is always personal, holistic, directed towards self-understanding and meaning-making, anchored in the environment. The ‘narratibility’ characterizing the career intervention is not a goal in itself but leads to adaptability and activity in the client’s life. Such an approach to career counselling is implemented in relationships whose quality becomes the key to success (Savickas, 2015).
Leadership and stories
A widespread experience in the course of an individual career is leadership – being the leader is a highly probable phase in one’s career: being a manager in an organization or an entrepreneur, project leader, or a leader in a virtual environment for any group of people like hobbyists (Godin, 2008). To state that in today’s world the question of leadership resides within each of us 1 is not an exaggeration. The popularity of the personal leadership idea is support for this statement (Farcht, 2007; Jay, 2008; Thomas, 2009). Also, the process of employee career planning in organizations often includes promotions to leadership positions, although careers are not perceived as strictly vertical movements, but are now more flexible and unique.
There is no way to specify one valid definition of leadership, as the functioning ones describe only certain styles of leadership in practice. Definitely, a leader is characterized by self-agency – this is a person without whom the group/organization does not attain to the same extent as with the leader’s participation (Mrowka, 2010).
According to STF and CCT, the stories developed by leaders are the means by which they, as individuals, construct their identities (e.g. as they build their personal brands), learn and make meaning of their everyday experience and more generally – of their life and career. At the same time, leaders are operating in an organizational system, constructing the social and psychological worlds in which other people function. Story-telling is recognized as one of the core competences of leadership and a central component of management itself (Denning, 2010). Through effective telling of stories, a leader motivates others to action and to implement new ideas, builds trust, transmits personal and corporate values and norms, stimulates others to work collaboratively, shares knowledge and vision, and transmits confidence and practices to develop the organization (Denning, 2010; Pink, 2005; Sole & Wilson, 2002). Well-designed and well-told stories can convey information and emotion, explicit and tacit, as well as the core and context (Snowden, 2000).
Because of these benefits, the importance of story-telling as a leadership tool has become generally accepted in organizations. However, beyond appreciation of the effective use of narrative techniques by leaders, we can also view leadership itself as a narrative, as the process of one’s own story creation.
Leadership as the construction of one’s own story
The constructivist approach to career development allows a view of leadership as creating and presenting one’s own narrative, without denying the importance of individual predispositions, capabilities, competencies, or external influences. A kind of thought experiment could be performed to formulate some tips for career counselling practice, focusing ‘more on stories than scores’ (Savickas, 1993).
A thought experiment, in general, means the intentional consideration of some hypothesis, theory, or principle in order to speculate about potential consequences and/or antecedents of some phenomenon. In this case, the intellectual deliberation regards the use of widespread knowledge about story-telling for profound reflection on the nature of leadership. Leaders being taught how to take interpersonal and organizational advantages from creating and performing good narratives are encouraged to use the well-known structure and rules of story-telling to consider the assumption that ‘my leadership equals my own narrative’. Such a juxtaposition allows one to extract the following pointers for career counselling practice and leader self-reflection, in order to promote proactive performance in harmony with oneself.
Concept, storyline, and action
Leadership is always developed around a concept, regardless of whether the leader is aware of it or not. If we agree that an individual constructs and performs as a leader, one needs conscious reflection on this. The constructing of leadership means creating and – to a large extent – discovering one’s own concept of it. Disciplines such as psychology, sociology, political science, and management offer a vast array of leadership concepts and theories of leadership, in general as well as in teams, groups, and organizations (Kelloway & Gilbert, 2017; Meuser et al., 2016; Mrowka, 2010; Northouse, 2016). From an individual perspective, they are inspirations for the leader to develop a unique self-concept based on personal abilities, capacities, and skills. Going forward, it can be noted that the individual concept of leadership is based on a conception of the human being – the anthropological model of humans. In practice, it means finding answers to questions such as: Who is a human? What are the mechanisms of human behaviour? What is the role of a human in work and economic processes? (Krupa, 2006).
The story of the individual concept of leadership includes action plans. Each particular action retains a relationship with other actions and with the overall personal concept of leadership. Through actions, leadership is expressed in everyday life. The actions that make up the storyline drive the fate of the story’s heroes. The role of co-actors in the storyline of a leader will be developed in the next part of the article.
In practical terms, the following questions might help one reflect on the concept and storyline of one’s own leadership:
What kind of story is your leadership? What kind of message does your leadership give to others? What topic do you execute in your leadership? How could you name/title your leadership? By which chain of actions do you implement your own concept of leadership in everyday life? Who are the heroes in your story?
Purpose
The exercise of control is a dominant part of the leader role in organizations (Alvesson & Karreman, 2004; Mintzberg, 1989; Tangbald, 2006). Management control is based on the exercise of influence to secure sufficient resources and to mobilize and orchestrate individual and collective action towards given ends (Alvesson & Karreman, 2004; Langfield-Smith, 1997). However, this does not mean that control is the purpose of leadership; on the contrary – control has a subordinate function towards the achievement of common goals. The main issue are the goals of the leadership process.
Similarly, each narrative has a purpose and is performed for an audience (i.e. to teach, explain, build trust, entertain, sleep, disclose, inspire, to give hope). Leadership is performed to achieve leader purposes, which might include improving effectiveness, bringing a vision to fruition, creating a trusting and respectful work environment, developing more leaders, etc. Similarly, as in the case of concept and storyline, leaders need to be aware of their own aims and be able to articulate and communicate them to others. The sense and consciousness of one’s purpose provides the leader with clarity of direction, evokes commitment, and allows obstacles to be dealt with (Latham, 2017). The communication of purpose to others leads to unifying people to operate beyond their business objectives. This motivational aspect of purpose-setting depends on the characteristics of the goal, as Goal Setting Theory proposes (Locke & Latham, 2013): clear, measurable, realistic, and challenging goals with appropriate feedback direct behaviour and foster higher performance. However, in the context of leadership as the construction of one’s own story, the main challenge is gaining awareness of the purpose of individual leadership. Even if it has the form of a dream (not sufficiently clear, particular, or measurable), it still has the potential to trigger and direct motivational energy.
So ask yourself as the leader:
What are you the leader for? How do you articulate the purpose/s that you want to realize through your leadership? What do you want to convince others to do through your leadership? How do you describe the measures of your goal/s achievements?
A network of actors rather than receivers
Being a narrator means that the role of receiver is important, as individuals in these roles judge how good a story is, and have a real impact on the story-telling process through their feedback. Narrative is a relational action in its nature. Similarly, leadership can be viewed as interaction with ‘an audience’. Indeed, it is a rather common creation – a collaborative process between partners. Nowadays, the increasing level of employees’ knowledge and skills is reducing differences between supervisors and subordinates. Thus, employees are much more independent and are interested in finding partners for cooperation (Sikorski, 2004). This shapes the focus of leadership towards a network of actors (Western, 2013). In that framework, interaction changes into a relationship with each partner separately – leadership as a story is created in a different way in relationship with the given individual. Leadership is not perceived as the leader’s property or style – rather, the common creation of leadership with each work partner creates many different ‘leaderships’ at the same time.
Leadership as a collaborative process between partners means, in practice, story-listening as well as story-telling. It is possible to tell one’s own story only if one has the skills to listen to the stories of others. Listening ‘below the surface’ of the complaints, challenges, successes, and general anecdotes of others can reveal guiding principles and vital clues to the leader about employee attitudes and feelings. Sharpening one’s story-listening skills can generate a more accurate map of the collective understandings and commitments of organizational players (Sole & Wilson, 2002, p. 10).
The importance of listening is well clarified in the Chinese proverb affirming that ‘God gave us one tongue and two ears’, which is a gentle hint to prefer listening to speaking.
Practical questions for a leader:
Which actors do you want to create your own leadership with? Which actors do you have the opportunity to create your own leadership with? How do your partners at work, as individuals, influence your leadership? What do your partners at work communicate to you through their stories?
Credibility and fidelity
If a story is to have influence, it must be credible to listeners. Credibility is achieved through coherence. Coherent stories are internally consistent, with sufficient detail, reliable characters, and free of major surprises and result in a story that makes sense to receivers. Narrative fidelity is the degree to which a story fits a listener’s prior understanding (Fisher, 1984). The same rules apply to leadership when viewed as a narrative. Credibility is achieved through coherence between the leader’s actions and words and consistency in action. Fidelity means congruence between values embedded in the leadership and what receivers regard as truthful and humane. In practice, these characteristics mean, first of all, open and honest communication with partners at work. Telling the truth as you see it (Denning, 2010). However, the word communication, with its prefix co, indicates a two-sided process, so telling and listening to partners are inseparable activities.
Credibility and fidelity are easier to achieve with a plain style of leadership. Just as a story should be kept simple and accessible (Denning, 2010; Sole & Wilson, 2002), leadership needs to be simple and clear to be perceived as credible by co-workers. In that context effective leadership is not a game, not a tactic, but straightforward contact with another person to encourage a particular action.
The plain style of leadership does not imply mediocrity. Like in story-telling, careful preparation for performance is obligatory (Denning, 2010); this rule also applies to leadership performance, even though that preparation has a more social character. Credibility and fidelity of leadership can be strengthened by appropriate props (i.e. office, open space, car, bicycle, suit, T-shirt), the selection of which is an example of careful preparation for performance. In practical terms, the credibility and fidelity of leadership are evaluated by co-workers: their trust, loyalty, understanding of tasks, motivation, creativity, commitment, engagement, initiative, performance, or lack thereof. However, the answers for the following practical questions can help a leader appraise their own credibility and fidelity:
To what extent do your values match those held by your co-workers? Which of your behaviours or actions at work is not congruent with the personal values embedded in your leadership? How could you express the purpose/s that you want to realize through your leadership more simply? Do your co-workers know what your opinion is of their performance, engagement, efficiency, etc.? How does your workspace reflect your values? Does it give you the opportunity to achieve what you really care about? Can you interact with co-workers in a way you desire in that workspace?
The ending
Leadership is an ongoing narrative with its own storyline, characters, beginning, middle, and end. Leadership – like a story – is time bound. Even though from the constructivist perspective a career is viewed as an open-ended story, a particular episode of leadership has an end, no matter how many episodes occur in a career. Thus, ‘begin with the end in mind’, as Covey (2004) advises people who wish to be highly effective in their lives. In his best-seller, to ‘begin with the end in mind’ means to begin each day, task, project with a clear vision of the desired direction and destination, purpose; but also to begin with the end of one’s life in mind. From the perspective of our mortality, it is clearly visible how multi-storied life is, and that leadership is only an episode, an episode that must end. Observations of organizational reality often demonstrate how difficult it is for leaders to give up their leadership role (Cascio, 2011). Decisions about retirement, succession, or returning to regular work are challenges for leaders because of the losses: financial, power, significance, and identity. There will be an end to a leadership period, and it would be profitable to prepare for it. As in a good story, leadership can also finish with an accurate punchline or with an opening to a new chapter of the next author.
In practical terms, each leader should ask at the beginning of the leadership process:
How much time do you need to realize the concept and achieve the purpose of your leadership? What is your idea of how your leadership will finish? How can you facilitate the succession for your successors?
The thought experiment presented above proposes leadership as a goal-oriented story that is time limited and one that makes sense to you and to others. Today, when the qualities required to be a successful leader are known (Kelloway & Gilbert, 2017), the issues of the leader’s reason and purpose are still open. A possible answer is to share something personally important with others.
A few remarks for narrative career counselling
As mentioned above, leadership is a likely phase in a career. Many people base their careers on leadership, choosing management as their field of study. They might benefit most from narrative career counselling, as in the formal educational process there is an imbalance in the roles of actor, agent, and author. Leadership training develops sets of skills and knowledge necessary for performing the role of leader (behaviour as an actor). At the same time, future leaders are taught how to regulate their own behaviour through their personal goals, motives, values, and envisioned projects (striving as an agent). However, there is little stress on self-reflection focusing on self-understanding as an author of career and life. From the constructivist paradigm perspective, leadership should be viewed as one’s career project – contextually dependent in nature – rather than one’s particular job. This implies individual authorship and sense-making. Thus, the perception of leadership as the construction of one’s own story could be used in the training of future and current leaders to provide a perspective of authorship for the leadership experience.
Savickas et al. (2009) stated that ‘The intervention process involves having clients tell their stories and then reflect upon those narratives as a way of making meaning, forming new intentions, and planning exploratory activities’ (p. 249). The benefits of thinking about leadership as the construction of personal narrative are the same: meaningful interpretation of personal actions, forming new intentions, and planning exploratory activities, all of which leads to adaptation by the individual to the social environment and to self-construction in life.
The thought experiment examined in this paper implements narrative career counselling. It is worth repeating that the actor, agent, and author are perceived as possible perspectives of meaning-making and self-understanding at the level of the individual. In parallel, they reflect three different perspectives: ‘…modernity’s vocational guidance for the actor, high modernity’s career education for the agent, and post-modernity’s life designing for the author’ (Savickas, 2012, p. 649). Each of these three perspectives proposes a distinct discourse, rhetoric, and methods and influences the client in a different way. The reflective questions for leaders, resulting from the perception of leadership as the construction of one’s own story, reflect mostly the author’s perspective drawn from the life-design approach and based on narrativity and self-construction.
In the end, it must be underlined that the theoretical framework of story-telling applied here is not a recipe for ethical leadership; it does not deal with the moral aspect of leadership. An individual might implement leadership actions that can be harmful to individuals or counter to the legitimate interests of the organization (Krasikova, Green, & LeBreton, 2013). Thus, an individual’s leadership can be destructive, and the story-telling approach is no guarantee against this occurring. The idea of perceiving leadership as a personal narrative refers to making sense rather than to making it right.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.