Metaphors and storytelling - the secret vocabulary of extraordinary leaders

Conflict. Emotion. Triumph. Failure. Put these four abstract states in a wok, season with a few well chosen metaphors and deliver a compelling story. When you cut out all the chaff of academic postulations, this is what great leadership is about - using metaphors and telling a compelling story, employing these twin tools of human persuasion in inspiring teams to elevate performance to heights uncontemplated.   

When Head Coach Phil Jackson began his stint with the Chicago Bulls in the early 1990s, he didn’t start with basketball drills, but with Zen philosophy and parables of balance and flow. He told each player that he was a musical note, and together they had to craft a symphony. 

His biggest challenge, however, was his best player (now how often have we as leaders seen that story playing out?). Michael Jordan was a loner, a warrior used to domination. The narrative had to shift for things to change. So Jackson decided to help elevate Jordan’s image in his own mind from a fighter to a veteran commander. He told his star player: ‘You must learn to pass the ball as if you were passing wisdom.’ 

That metaphor changed the team’s chemistry. From this point on, Jackson wasn’t just coaching plays, he was orchestrating harmony from the sidelines, while Jordan conducted the symphony on the parquet floor. That idea eventually delivered six NBA championships and made Jordan not just a legend, but a leader of men.

On the other side of the United States, Satya Nadella did something similar when he inherited a weary Microsoft in 2014. Nadella would later describe the company’s challenge in terms of ‘turning a cruise liner mid-ocean’. It was a metaphor that signified the need for patience, discipline, and precision. To change his ship’s direction, Nadella, a huge sports fan, used the experience from cricket fields of his youth in India, and borrowed ideas from sports psychology, bringing in Dr. Michael Gervais to train his senior leaders in high-performance mindset, empathy, and adaptability. 

What Jackson had done in a locker room environment, Nadella replicated in his boardroom. The result was Microsoft’s huge pivot away from the iceberg of destruction to its most defining transformation since the founding of the company. 

Why Metaphors Matter more than ever in a Gen Z World

Cognitive scientists note that much of human understanding is metaphorical. We grasp new ideas by mapping them onto familiar experiences. When a leader compares a team to an orchestra, a beehive, or a long-distance race, it instantly triggers shared meaning. Metaphors translate abstraction into experience and provide emotional energy to a factual framework. Metaphors move people away from the perceived negativity of compliance and encourage engagement.

Often when experienced and older leaders work with young players and professionals, communication of the message becomes the critical difference between success and failure. One of the top 3 challenges I am tasked to deal with in my work today as a leadership consultant, is how to motivate and get Gen Z to buy into the leader’s vision. Elite sport has always been a young persons’ domain, so leaning on examples of metaphors used and stories told by successful sports coaches and leaders who have long managed this challenge successfully, is in my view, a no-brainer. 

John Wooden was a humble philosopher who became the most successful coach in NCAA basketball history. With the UCLA Bruins he won 10 national championships in 12-years, his team setting a record of winning 88 consecutive NCAA games and having four ‘perfect seasons’ in each of which they maintained a 30-0 record. These are records that are almost as unlikely to be broken as Don Bradman’s batting average of 99.94 in Test cricket.  

Wooden used multiple coaching pivots based on the age and experience of his players. At a broader level his coaching was centred around meticulous preparation, attention to detail, an emphasis on fundamental skill, with ethics, integrity and team spirit being at the centre of everything they did, on the court or outside it. But with the youngest players, his style was often instructional, for he realised that the way to counter the lack of experience was to drill the players in the skills they would need to succeed at this level. And since a lack of patience and a penchant for instant gratification (much as we believe these to be a modern phenomenon) is and has always been a hallmark of youth, with them he often used farming metaphors. ‘You can’t hurry the harvest’, he told his players, ‘plant the seeds, water them, and be patient’. In those words lay the foundation of his success - delayed gratification built on daily discipline. His players didn’t just learn basketball, they learned life. 

In Asia, as we lead teams that are rapidly growing younger, it is imperative that we take the Gen Z in our teams along on high performance journeys, and indeed get them to lead the way. And to do this, we need to find relatable metaphors and stories that appeal in India, China, Singapore, Dubai or anywhere else that our business teams operate, just as the farming metaphor worked for Wooden in 1960’s and 1970’s America. 

The Leader's Narrative - telling it differently

It is not enough, however, for leaders to just use metaphors or tell stories. It is about understanding your people, and the narrative that will hit the right notes, so that the storytelling drives change.

Cricket, with the mushrooming of T20 leagues, is increasingly a sport for the very young. Paddy Upton tells me about his initial experience of re-joining the Indian team as a Mental Conditioning coach in 2022 after being away for a decade. 

‘It was like this was a different side in the same colours’, he said. ‘There was a huge difference in the way I was addressed by the seniors like Virat, Ashwin and Rohit, and the juniors I had run into occasionally in the IPL but never been in a dressing room with. The former were respectful, the latter, irreverent, from the first greeting. It was not disrespect, just their way of showing familiarity and bringing me into the fold. I embraced the difference and went with the flow. I changed the stories and the metaphors I used with them so that they were relatable. In a few days there were players opening up to me as they never had before to a coach.’   

Former Indian captain M.S. Dhoni is a huge advocate of process-led inclusive leadership. He often referred to his men as ‘the wolf pack’.  He wasn’t just motivating them. At one level he was reframing and turning around pressure by helping them imagine being in pursuit, and at another, suggesting that, just as in a pack of wolves, Dhoni their leader, literally ‘had their back’. Either way, the metaphor was incredibly powerful, appropriate, and relatable.

When Alan Mulally resurrected Ford during the financial crisis, he spoke to his people about ‘getting an airplane off the runway’. Every one of his engineers could visualize thrust, drag, and lift. Every Ford worker understood they had a role in takeoff. It wasn’t anymore a story about putting their cars on the roads, the boss was talking about elevating what they did, so the company could soar. 

Good leadership storytelling very often works because it bypasses logic and appeals to the  imagination. Indeed it is also often about the words we use more than what we actually say. Satya Nadella didn’t tell his engineers to ‘increase cross-functional collaboration’.He asked them to ‘rediscover your inner curiosity.’ Steve Jobs didn’t describe Apple’s mission in tech goblygook. In a message loaded with visualization, he told the world, ‘We’re building bicycles for the mind’. 

Crafting your Legacy

Leaders and Corporations that understand the power of narrative often outperform those that rely solely on process. Nadella’s Microsoft made the deliberate move from ‘know-it-all’ to ‘learn-it-all’. Howard Schultz in his narrative, placed Starbucks metaphorically as ‘the third place’. To his customers, Starbucks soon became the safe place, the sanctuary between home and work. Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull described creativity as ‘wandering in the dark until a new light flickers’. 

In each case, the metaphor provided meaning, emotional anchorage, and strategic clarity. And raised the company to a new place in the eyes of employees and customers alike.

I invite you now to ask yourself this: What is the metaphor you will be using with your team at the next meeting? How will your story begin, and end? 

The narrative you weave, and the outcomes it drives, may just determine the legacy that you leave behind as a leader.