Good afternoon, the clouds have returned to the west coast and while the flowers are still blooming, the first of the leaves are turning colour. Fall, as it always does, is returning.
We saw Bill Cain’s play Equivocation last week, http://www.bardonthebeach.org/2014/equivocation . My friend Tim Elliott, http://www.timelliott.ca/biography.html who as it turned out was at the same show, said that he had two experiences of theatre; one was he enjoyed a show and went home. The second was that he wasn’t really sure what to think and the show kept coming back into his mind, challenging his thinking. He said that Equivocation was the latter kind of show. And I agree. For me, the final lines of the show, spoken by Judith, William Shakespeare’s daughter as she leaves the stage having washed her father’s body, struck deeply. “I didn’t even know I had a story until he wrote it.”
At some level, she was describing Shakespeare’s radical inclusion of our humanity, the sense that we all could imagine ourselves a Hamlet or Ophelia, a MacBeth or a Juliet. The characters he wrote about were real human beings, not cartoon characters or god like heroes or villains. They are us and we are them. Each of us is royal and each of us a peasant. Each of us is as brave as Romeo, as dastardly as Richard III and as funny as Puck . And so, Shakespeare gave us, in some way, an insight into the power of our own stories.
And, there is something I see in Judith’s line about our own legacy and authority as leaders. I see leadership as about creating space not only for our own voice, but for the voices of those with whom we work. At the most engaging workplaces, we are not creating our story, we are creating a story, a common story, with all of our individual strands weaving their way in and out of the common story. As leaders we may find ourselves speaking on behalf of our team, or describing our common story, but our work is really about listening to the individual voices and stories to find the common ground. And when people begin to realize that they themselves have a story, a compelling, interesting and powerful story, they cannot be stopped. And they never forget the leaders who first gave their voices room.
So may this week we give room to the voices and stories that surround us.