122 Strategic Leadership
of leadership are to know, to tell, to enact, and to embody the organization’s
story. This perspective allows us to penetrate into the dynamics of leadership
as an engaging reciprocal process. Leaders show exceptional sensitivity to nar-
ratives of identity because they reveal the central beliefs, needs, desires, and
values of their followers. As they learn the story of the group they represent,
leaders come to understand what matters, what motivates, and what triggers
action (cf. Denning 2005). They know the way the story of their group shows
human experience unfolding through commitments to that which has decisive
importance in the lives of its members and in the life of the leader.
National Identity: Lincoln at Gettysburg
To see narrative at work in leadership, we can do no better than to examine a
familiar story of national identity. When Abraham Lincoln speaks at Gettysburg
on November 19, 1863, in the middle of a terrible civil war, he evokes America’s
past, but he does not give a neutral historical account of its founding. Rather,
he makes his comments in the framework of a narrative of identity. A histo-
rian examining the same events might highlight the political circumstances in
which independence was achieved, emphasizing the economic interests of the
founders and France’s desire to aid a fledgling nation to foil its ancient enemy,
Great Britain. In a philosophical account, the Declaration of Independence might
be characterized as a derivative document, one that lifts ideas from a variety
of Enlightenment thinkers and makes exalted but dubious claims about human
equality that contradict common experience. We can call these external or outer
histories. Yet as Lincoln steps to the podium on Cemetery Hill, he speaks as an
agent in a historical drama to other participants in it by offering an inner his-
tory, which takes the form of a narrative (Niebuhr 1941). Thus, he can say to his
countrymen that “our forefathers brought forth on this continent a new nation
conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created
equal.” He evokes the shared memories and collective commitments of a national
community by using metaphoric images of birth and telling a story about truths on
which the founders, “our forefathers,” staked their lives and their reputations. He
goes on to say that the devotion to human freedom has been communicated most
powerfully not by words but through the acts and deeds of “those who gave the last
full measure of their devotion” to preserve it. In closing, Lincoln repeatedly calls
on the “high resolve” of his countrymen. They must act to ensure that those who
have fallen in battle will not have died in vain. All of Lincoln’s central themes at
Gettysburg and in other speeches involve active forms of sense making and sense
giving and require engagement from his listeners. In his second inaugural, he calls
on the nation to attend to the ravages of war and to “bind up wounds,” “to care
for” the widow and the orphan, and “to achieve and cherish a just and lasting
peace” (quoted in Goethals 2005). Lincoln’s narration of events is a summons to
responsibility and a call to action for those who claim the American story as their
own. Stories matter.