Leadership Metaphor Explorer Facilitator's Guide. David Horth M.
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emerge shared direction, alignment, and commitment
• leadership outcomes at the levels of society, organization, group, and individual
• the types of leadership culture as revealed in CCL’s extensive work with organizations, groups, and individual leaders: dependent, independent, and interdependent (also seen as developmental stages for transforming organizations)
• how to generate more open and honest conversation about leadership in their organizations or communities
Using Leadership Metaphor Explorer
Leadership Metaphor Explorer can be used in any number of ways and with all kinds of people. Although it’s most commonly applied in small groups of leaders who use it to talk about their work and their future development, there are few limits to its use.
Later in this guide we present a number of applications and examples at societal, organizational, group, and individual levels. Before we go there, let’s review some of the possibilities when you consider the size of the group, the audience of which it’s composed, and the global reach of today’s working groups.
Group size. Leadership Metaphor Explorer can be used with a group of any size. It’s useful for individual self-reflection, for looking at one’s own leadership approach, or for trying to understand someone else’s perspective. As a one-on-one coaching tool, Leadership Metaphor Explorer can work as a conversation starter and help people open up with their intuitions and emotions. Leadership Metaphor Explorer can be used as a dialogue tool for small groups, in intact teams, in breakout groups at a conference, and in classroom groups. Leadership Metaphor Explorer can also be used with large groups at presentations, in auditoriums, and at conferences.
Audience. Leadership Metaphor Explorer is adaptable to almost any type of audience. The tool can be used in schools, programs, camps, and retreats to help young people thinking about the different ways that people work together and relate to others. The frame for using the cards doesn’t have to be explicitly about leadership. For a younger group, you might frame the session as People I Like to Be Around and then move into topics of responsibility, authority, trust, collaboration, and so on.
We’ve used Leadership Metaphor Explorer as a research tool in microfinance and small-business banking programs in India and Africa to understand the organizational cultures they want to create.
—Lyndon Rego, director, Leadership Beyond Boundaries, CCL
Designer’s Tip
Try these exercises if you use Leadership Metaphor Explorer with a large group.
1. For a Leadership Metaphor Explorer session at a conference, give each person an envelope with three random cards. Ask attendees to share cards with each other and respond to the session’s framing question. Follow up the responses by dividing attendees into pairs and asking them to talk to one another about their responses.
2. Randomly assign a card to each person in the session, and ask him or her to relate it to a question chosen from a list of general questions that you have prepared beforehand (for example, How does the card relate to your vision? When are you most creative? When are you at your best? When are you at your worst?). As an alternative to questions, you can ask the people in the session to respond to a simple statement or give them directions for making a response (for example, Use your assigned card to tell a story about leadership where you work).
3. Break the session group into small groups, and then gather the favorite images and themes of each small group into an overall profile. It often happens that different groups consistently choose the same cards in response to the framing question.
With a more traditional audience, Leadership Metaphor Explorer proves quite effective in helping people address issues of leadership culture and leadership talent in relation to business strategy, and we have used it in business contexts ranging from executive boardrooms to MBA classrooms to work teams. Leadership Metaphor Explorer has also been useful in exploring and crossing boundaries in organizations, including the boundaries between different leadership subcultures that one finds in different functions and geographical regions. Likewise, Leadership Metaphor Explorer has been successfully used in government and military leadership contexts (Hughes, Palus, Ernst, Houston, & McGuire, 2011).
We are often asked whether the cards are serious enough for serious people. Do the drawings, the card format, or the metaphors detract from their appeal? Our experience says no. Senior executives and military commanders tell us that they find the cards appealing or at least acceptable. After a serious and frank conversation gets under way and the cards are working, senior business and military leaders like them even more.
Figure 1. Leadership Metaphor Explorer was used in Iraq to help U.S. State Department and Defense Department leaders and staff to reach across the boundaries that define their missions and their work.
Global reach. Leadership Metaphor Explorer has been used successfully all around the world. The metaphors represent a range of global contexts, even though they are inescapably tilted toward American and English language origins and the metaphors those languages make available. It’s always a good idea for a manager who plans to use the Leadership Metaphor Explorer cards to scan the deck and remove (or be prepared to explain) any cards that might be confusing or controversial for a non-American audience. (See What Do the Metaphors Mean? on pages 79–85 for a brief description of each metaphor.) Managers should encourage participants to locate the discussion of the cards and metaphors in their own cultures. Participants should feel free to apply their own interpretations to the cards or even to make up their own metaphors by writing or drawing on a separate piece of paper.
Designer’s Tip
Many of the cards have been deliberately created to have a negative connotation. In some environments or cultures, they might get in the way of a productive conversation. Even those not deliberately created this way may feel negative to you. Feel free to remove cards from the deck.
Because the cards are labeled in English, managers may find it more challenging to use Leadership Metaphor Explorer with non- or limited-English speakers. One solution is to ask those participants to ignore the labels and simply respond to the drawings.
How Does Leadership Metaphor Explorer Work?
Leadership Metaphor Explorer is beginner-friendly, and it’s usually not necessary to understand all of the theory and research behind it. In fact, the facilitator often needs to stay out of the way and let people engage with the tool and with each other. Leadership Metaphor Explorer works by putting something tangible—the cards—into the middle of what might otherwise be an abstract conversation (Palus & Drath, 2001). Simply asking people to talk using the cards as visual props helps the dynamics of the conversation. Using the cards reduces stress and increases engagement. The tone of these mediated conversations tends to be insightful and respectful rather than confrontational. Everyone gets to share his or her cards and comment on the other cards, leveling the power relations and relaxing the participants.
A CORE OF SELF-AWARENESS
Sarah Miller, a CCL colleague, used Leadership Metaphor Explorer in a conversation with Buddhist monks in Thailand.
The first time we talked, M. told us that monks are supposed to be leaders in the community and that he, particularly, was interested in social justice. During our second conversation, we brought out the Leadership Metaphor Explorer cards. M. chose two cards: one to answer the question of how a monk should be a leader in the community and one to answer the question of how he wished to be a leader. The two intersected