Mary Kay Ash

Cinderella Stories of Women Leaders: Connecting Leadership Contexts and Competencies

February 26, 2004

"For hundreds of years, stories and fairy tales have played an important role in Western and Eastern cultures. Stories are harbingers of challenges and crises that call for our attention. They are conveyors of problems that beg solutions; they are vehicles for gaining insights into relationships, making decisions, implementing policies, and overcoming problems of morale and injustice. Stories and fairy tales provide a moral compass for what is right and wrong and serve as a barometer of change.

Most of us are familiar with the Cinderella fairy tale. While the Brothers Grimm's version is the most popular one, the fairy tale is told around the world, focusing on the unbearable family situation produced by the father's remarriage and persecution of the heroine by an evil stepmother.

There has been a growing interest in the leadership, management and organizational behavior literature in storytelling, both as a qualitative methodology and a vehicle for organizational change and transformation. Storytelling is a powerful tool that gives us access to the living part of an organization. Stories can be used to rally leaders and followers around a specific social, political or cultural issue or cause. They can be placed in the service of change efforts that will initially be seen as difficult, even impossible, upsetting and strange.

Denning (2001) coined the term springboard story to narratives that enable a leap in understanding by the audience so as to grasp how an event, organization, community or complex system may change. A springboard story has an impact not so much through transferring large amounts of information but by catalyzing information into action congruent with the personal experience of members of the audience.

Organizational stories are a medium for communicating an organization's central myths to outsiders and infuse them into everyday...