Stephen Denning's The Secret Language Of Leadership

The Secret Language of Leadership

Stephen Denning is a gifted business communications guru that views things in ways others don’t and has the ability to explain them so that we all can understand. The Secret Language of Leadership is not just a book about how to become a better manager, it’s about how the use of language can inspire managers into becoming inspirational leaders that bring about a lasting transformation to any company or organization. Anyone with a vision, commitment, and set of basic skills can become a transformational leader. The key to a successful transformational leader is the commitment to communicate to the people they aspire to lead. Today’s employees need to be inspired to want to do, rather than be told what to do. They need to be led rather than micro-managed. Denning places a great deal of significance on conversation, which he defines as, “a two –way street, not a one-way alley”.

The Secret Language of Leadership is, “A passionate explanation of how good leadership is different from transformational leadership”. This explanation is what he calls narrative communication. Narrative communication is an untraditional approach of persuading people to change their minds through language. It gives people abstract reasons, indirect cues

as to why they should change, it involves people directly in a story, and finally it encourages people themselves to generate a new story. Narrative communication will not work unless the stories told come from truthful experiences. It is essential for a good leader, a transformational leader to be honest. Truthfulness is the currency to a leader of this nature.
The objective of this book is to help leaders understand the story telling concept by incorporating three key steps which are; getting the people’s attention, stimulating a desire, and reinforcing with reason.

These steps can also provide a flexible structure that can be populated with leadership concepts too. Denning idea of the story telling and story listening was designed to help leaders continue to accelerate enthusiastic implementation and expand their relationships with their followers while at the same time they are able to discuss and address any emerging threats or opportunities occurring in the work environment. If we put reason in the form of stories people will remember

them.
The language of leadership is no more than common sense using simple principles and patterns in a way and order of how we say things. We are entering an era where the growing need for leadership is prevalent because of the forces of economic and social change in the global economy. The ability to get results in the faces of these challenges is dependent effective leadership. In order to accomplish set forth goals in a company or organization, quality leadership is essential. This book offers a guide to great leadership through language communication. The implication of language of leadership is, providing patterns of simple narratives that, under the right enabling conditions, will make a worthwhile change idea difficult to resist. The leadership task is the ability to capture the idea. There is nothing special or technical or mysterious about the language of leadership; it is merely the way the word is used in everyday speech.