It was, I’ll admit, a happy accident that my study of persuasive communication happened to fall on the week that we honored the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., and inaugurated a new president of the United States.
Dr. King articulated a dream and inspired a nation. Kennedy challenged us to ask what we could do for our country. Wednesday, Joe Biden told a divided America to “end this uncivil war.”
Leaders step forward — to the microphone, the front of the room, the Zoom screen — to lay out a vision, to inspire others to join them on a journey. This is especially true of public leaders, the women and men who choose to tackle some of our world’s most pressing challenges.
Some of the most memorable speeches and letters — Martin Luther King’s epistle from the Birmingham jail, President Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress about healthcare reform, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s speech calling for the removal of Confederate monuments — are full of grandeur. They align with the framework developed by Harvard Kennedy School professor Marshall Ganz, who has written extensively about “public narrative” and the ways leaders should deploy storytelling to inspire others to act.
“Leadership,” Ganz writes, “is taking responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose under conditions of uncertainty.” His framework focuses on people (a constituency), power (story and strategy), and change (real outcomes). Importantly, the path to results requires a story that will enable stakeholders to act. “Narrative is how we learn to access the moral resources — the courage — to make the choices that shape our identities — as individuals, as communities, as nations,” he says.
During his healthcare speech, Obama leaned on narrative to push lawmakers to act on what became his signature achievement. (His invocation of Ted Kennedy at the end of that address is masterful.) In doing so, he illustrated Ganz’s idea that “public narrative combines a story of self, a story of us, and a story of now.”
In his words:
A “story of now” communicates an urgent challenge you are calling on your community to join you in acting on now. A “story of us” communicates shared values that anchor your community, values that may be at risk, and may also be sources of hope. A “story of self” communicates the values that called you to lead in this way, in this place, at this time.
Effective storytelling, we know, requires emotion. The audience needs to feel something and be compelled to act. (This is why University of Florida communications professors Ann Christiano and Annie Neimand used an article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review to implore leaders to “stop raising awareness already” and “use messaging and concrete calls to action that get people to change how they feel, think, or act.”) My faculty advisor for this independent study, Dr. Holly Brower, was part of a group of researchers who analyzed presidential speeches for a 2001 article in Administrative Science Quarterly. They found a correlation between presidents who deployed “image-based rhetoric” and the public’s perception of their charisma and greatness. The scholars wrote, “The successful articulation and enactment of a leader’s vision may rest on his or her ability to paint followers a verbal picture of what can be accomplished with their help.”
Although painting this verbal picture is essential, leaders do not always have to rely on soaring rhetoric to inspire others. In an analysis of Biden’s inaugural address, New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush noted the speech was “a sober summons to service largely stripped of the rhetorical filigree often associated with inaugural addresses.”
It was a call to action — still inspirational — but in work boots.
