Why do leaders of color need a personal narrative?
By Jared R. Francis | @jaredrfrancis
In celebration of Black History month we'll be publishing a series of blog posts and podcasts exploring exploring the Leadership in Color framework. Each week we'll focus on a different aspect of the framework through writing and conversations with other leaders of color. This second article explores the the first part of the leadership in color framework and makes the case for the importance of developing your perosnal narrative.
No matter where you go, you are who you are playa
Before we begin to lead others, we must have a solid understanding of how the moments, places, and people that we have encountered along the way impact us today. In thinking about our past as a story—or collection of core stories—we can construct our personal narrative.
Through investing in uncovering our personal narrative, we can start to unpack how key moments or decisions have revealed something profound and lasting about ourselves and the world around us. It is through this process that we find the values which animate our leadership and ultimately influence the organizational culture we drive.
For leaders of color, this is of particular importance. At times, we are called to lead in environments where the salience of our racial identity may lead us or others to question our worth or competence. A firm grounding in your personal narrative can be critical for developing both internal and external confidence in your leadership. In the end, personal narratives are assets to leaders and their organizations.
You can try to change but that's just the top layer
Reflecting on how my personal narrative connects to my leadership practice, I often return to my educational experiences. First, through grounding myself in my own experiences, I gain an appreciation for my past and insights on how those experiences may aid or limit my current thinking and perspective.
A few examples that have been top of mind recently: the experiences of being one of the few black and brown boys to graduate from my predominantly white high school and secondly my decision to attend an HBCU. The first impacts the way I think about equity at my school. I often wonder, would my friends who did not graduate have thrived at the institution I lead? This question is usually a gut-check moment for me as I make decisions and evaluate our outcomes. In asking myself and my team these questions, I can center and communicate with others a core value that I hold: justice. Similarly, as I enter conversations about my school’s strategy for supporting students through the college application process, I return to my college selection process. Knowing that it resulted in me selecting a college that turned out to have not been the best fit for me, I am pushing our school to execute a robust system for matching students with colleges.
I have returned to both of these core stories as central tenets of my personal narrative at various points in my personal and professional lives. Whether in job interviews, graduate school applications, or in chatting with my nieces about their futures, these core stories and my personal narrative influence what I bring to the world. Interestingly, while the core stories of my personal narrative have remained mostly consistent over time, my reflections and takeaways about their meaning are always evolving, as I encounter new contexts and experiences. Our personal narratives are ever in the making, but the values which they reveal are the bedrock of our leadership practice.
The power of values based leadership
Grounding in our core stories and personal narrative doesn't just help us gain clarity on our values; it prepares leaders to share and invest others in those values and, by extension, their leadership. Because leaders drive culture, our values inform how we make decisions, and most critically, the extent to which those we lead invest in our choices.
As our organizations become increasingly complex, the decisions facing leaders exist on a continuum of risk and impact. The “right” choice is often hard to determine, forcing leaders to make decisions with the best available data and, ultimately, their values. Professor Harry Kraemer writes:
Becoming the best kind of leader isn't about emulating a role model or a historic figure. Rather, your leadership must be rooted in who you are and what matters most to you. When you truly know yourself and what you stand for, it is much easier to know what to do in any situation. It always comes down to doing the right thing and doing the best you can.
While the long term costs of a poor decision may vary, if members of an organization lack investment in their leaders and/or their choices, the results are always the same: disconnection and discord within the team, which manifests as poor culture, and ultimately a negative impact on the bottom line. Leaders are bound to make the wrong call some of time. What allows your team to stick with you through the fallout are people's ability to connect and resonate with the values that led you and the organization down its path, as it will be those same values that move the organization forward. Given the stakes, how can our grounding in our personal narratives contribute to positive organizational culture and strong results?
In sharing our values we give our teammates an opportunity to know us on a deeper level, while providing the motivation and inspiration that can propel a team to achieve at high levels. Here I think the work of David Hutchens is of particular use to leaders. Hutchens’ videos and books are helpful guides to develop the skills to craft the core stories of your personal narrative and/or the core stories of your organization into tools that communicate values in ways that resonate with your team and nourish culture.
You was, who you was, before you got here
I believe the above to be true and necessary for all leaders to be successful, but why are personal narratives critical for leaders of color? Why is knowledge of self the first component of the leadership in color framework?
Let me return to the two core stories I shared earlier from my personal narrative. Both of those stories originate from the decision my family made to send me to schools outside of my home community of East Harlem. Given the quality of educational opportunities in our community, my family thought this was their best option. My mother, like all parents knew that education was critical to my long term success. Unlike many other parents of color, my mother had the opportunity to ensure that I attend an academically strong elementary school downtown. The experience of attending a school in a predominantly white community has forever impacted the way I view race, education, and equity as a young person and now an educator.
While I might be able to discern how these experiences and my core stories influence my values as a leader, that really wouldn’t go far enough. I have to situate my personal narrative within larger historical and structural contexts. How do the legacies of school segregation and redlining impact the NYC public school system? How did multiple iterations of education reform influence my mother’s understanding of what a “good” school was? How does my story connect to the financial challenges that HBCUs face today?
To lose sight of how larger structural factors influence our personal narratives is a mistake. The erasure of larger narratives from our personal narrative can lead to some leaders of color taking on racist postures. For example, some leaders of color adopt the mindset of "I made it out the hood, why can't they do it too" and engage in scolding their brothers and sisters for making “poor choices." Leaders of color must acknowledge that we owe our success as much to our ancestors, individual decisions, and talents as much we do to good fortune. Our success happens in spite of systemic oppression and state implemented and/or assisted actions designed to undercut and disrupt the progress of people of color.
Honing our personal narratives leads us to our values, which first provides us with necessary grounding as we encounter environments not primed to recognize our worth. Secondly, personal narratives enable leaders to communicate our values, which creates authentic connections, feeds culture, and invests people in our leadership and goals. Finally, leadership in color calls for our impact to be in service of equity—therefore, we must continue to interrogate the historical narratives which outlined our journey and continue to shape our paths forward.
