Three Reasons to Make Metaphor a Leadership Habit

In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera wrote, "Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with." It's a wonderful sentence to sit with. But I'd like to take the opposite view: metaphor isn't a danger for leaders to avoid, it's a habit worth building. Once you start noticing the metaphors your team already reaches for, you have a shortcut into how they're really thinking, and a warm, natural way to lead them somewhere new.

Remind Me What a Metaphor Is

If it's been a while since your last English class, here's the definition to keep handy: a metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, refers to one thing by naming another. It clarifies, and it can surface hidden similarities between two ideas. A few favorites:

• "Chaos is a friend of mine." (Bob Dylan)
• "Conscience is a man's compass." (Vincent Van Gogh)
• "All religions, arts, and sciences are branches of the same tree." (Albert Einstein)

Dylan makes friends with chaos. Van Gogh is guided by his conscience. Einstein roots religion, art, and science in the same trunk. None of these needed an explanation to land, because metaphor does something an explanation cannot: it doesn't just describe, it helps us to understand.

Why Metaphor Works on a Leadership Team

We tend to think of ourselves as having right-brain and left-brain qualities, methodical analysis on one side, imagery and imagination on the other. Metaphor slips past the analytical gatekeeper and speaks directly to what a person or team only half-knows they're feeling. That's exactly why it belongs in a leader's toolkit, for three reasons.

Metaphor improves communication because it makes complex realities decodable at a glance. As James Geary puts it, "Metaphorical thinking...shapes our view of the world and is essential to how we communicate, learn, discover and invent" (Geary, 2011). When a leader says the organization is "rebuilding the plane while flying it," everyone in the room grasps the stakes instantly, no slide deck required.

Metaphor also provides insight into how people are actually experiencing change. Geary also writes, "Metaphor is a way of thought long before it is a way with words." The metaphor a team reaches for under pressure, a sinking ship, a marathon, a minefield, tells a leader more about morale and readiness than a status report ever will.

Metaphor builds the creativity leaders need to navigate what hasn't been solved before. As Maya Angelou wrote, "You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have." I have yet to meet a leadership team that wanted less creative capacity, and metaphor is one of the most reliable ways to unlock it.

And if you're worried you're not "creative enough" to use metaphor well, take heart: children reach for metaphor almost as soon as they have language. You already have the instinct. Leadership just asks you to use it on purpose.

Metaphor and Adaptive Leadership

Ronald Heifetz, who developed the theory of adaptive leadership at Harvard Kennedy School, leans on metaphor to make his own framework legible. He distinguishes technical problems, which have a known fix and existing expertise to apply it, from adaptive challenges, where the problem is ambiguous and people themselves have to learn, shift values, or let go of old loyalties. His diagnosis of where leaders go wrong is itself memorable because it's blunt: "The most common failure...is this diagnostic failure of people in high positions of authority who have failed to lead because they've ended up treating adaptive challenges as if they were technical. They throw technical fixes at the problem" (Heifetz and Linsky, 2002).

To help leaders tell the difference, Heifetz and Linsky offer a metaphor of their own: get off the dance floor and go to the balcony. When you're dancing, you're fully in the action, and you can only see the people right around you. From the balcony, you can see the whole pattern, who's dancing with whom, where the energy is gathering, where people have quietly left the floor. Heifetz compares this to how athletes like Magic Johnson play: fully engaged in the moment while also holding the whole game in view. That single image does more to teach adaptive leadership than a whole page of instructions could, which is rather the point of this entire post.

Clean Language: Listening to Metaphor Without Adding Your Own

Once you're listening for a team's metaphors, the next question is how to explore them without steering the conversation toward your own imagery instead. This is where Clean Language earns its place in a leader's practice. Developed by psychotherapist David Grove and later codified by Penny Tompkins and James Lawley, Clean Language is a small set of questions designed to introduce as few of the facilitator's own assumptions and metaphors as possible, so the other person's thinking stays theirs.

The two workhorse questions are simple enough to use in your very next one-on-one meeting:

• "And what kind of [X] is that [X]?"
• "And is there anything else about that?"

If someone tells you the project feels like "climbing a mountain in the dark," a clean question is "And what kind of mountain is that mountain?" You'll often be surprised by what surfaces: is it steep, is it cold, is someone roped in beside them, or are they climbing alone? The answer is diagnostic in exactly the way Heifetz would recognize because it tells you whether you're dealing with a technical problem or an adaptive one, straight from the person living it.

Bringing This Into Your Leadership

You don't need a special occasion to start. Be curious about the metaphors already in the room, and resist the urge to swap in a better one of your own. If your team is talking about climbing, climb with them: ask what the trail looks like, what it feels like to breathe at altitude, what kind of boots the moment calls for. Listen to what is happening in the room. Most of all, use metaphors to move toward action, letting the shared image build the momentum that a bullet-point plan rarely can.

Metaphor also has a quiet way of sharpening the questions leaders already ask. Notice how each one gains weight from the image just before it:

• If change is a generative act, what are we trying to create? (I'm paraphrasing the Dalai Lama and poet Tracy K. Smith here, both of whom have described change this way, and they're likely not the only ones.)
• Mary Oliver asked, "Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?" A leader might carry that forward with, "Where does this team need to breathe more life into how we work?"
• And from James Gleick's The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood: "With words, we begin to leave traces behind us like breadcrumbs: memories in symbols for others to follow." What do we want the people who follow us to find?

That's the heart of it. Metaphor won't replace the hard work of leading through ambiguity, but it will help you see it more clearly, and help the people you lead feel understood while you do.

Sources

• Geary, J. (2011) I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World. New York: Harper.
• Heifetz, R. and Linsky, M. (2002) Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.