Cinderella Stories of Women Leaders: Connecting Leadership Contexts and Competencies

Journal of Leadership and Organization Studies, 2002, Vol. 9, No. 2 Cinderella Stories Of Women Leaders: Connecting Leadership Contexts And Competencies Karin Klenke, Ph.D. Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA with black pitch and Cinderella, in her nightly This paper illustrates central themes of the flight, loses one of her slippers, which the prince Cinderella fairy tale in the leadership of three uses to locate his mystery bride. Despite radical contemporary women leaders, Ruth Simmons, measures such as cutting off toes and heels Mary Kay, and Oprah Winfrey, who exercise attempted by the stepsisters to prove that the lost their leadership in three different contexts, slipper belonged to one of them, they could not academia, business and the media, respectively. pass the test. The prince found his beloved and It then describes the leadership of these women they lived heavily thereafter. in terms of specific competencies, which the While the Brothers Grimm's version is the three contemporary women leaders share and most popular one, the fairy tale is told aroimd that are their defining leadership attributes. the world, focusing on the unbearable family Cinderella themes, context and leadership situation produced by the father's remarriage competencies are linked in a conceptual model and persecution of the heroine by an evil that treats these as antecedents of leadership stepmother. Cinderella stories from many effectiveness. cultures identify these themes and often re-write the fairy tale to reflect culture specific values. For hundreds of years, stories and fairy Sometimes, Cinderella is kind and tales have played an important role in Western compassionate as in the Brothers Grimm's and Eastern cultures. Stories are harbingers of version; at other times, she is cruel and challenges and crises that call for our attention. vindictive as in some cross-cultural renditions of They are conveyors of problems that beg the fairy tale. For example, an Indonesian solutions; they are vehicles for gaining insights Cinderella forces her stepsister into a cauldron into relationships, making decisions, of boiling water, then has her body cut up, implementing policies, and overcoming pickled and sent to the girl's mother as "salt problems of morale and injustice. Stories and meat" for the next meal. A Filipino variant fairy tales provide a moral compass for what is shows the stepmother and her daughters "pulled right and wrong and serve as a barometer for to pieces by wild horses". And a Japanese change. stepsister is dragged around in a basket, tiunbles Most of us are familiar with the Cinderella over the edge, and falls to her death (Philip, fairy tale. It is the story of a beautiful girl of 1989). Despite the elasticity of the Cinderella humble upbringing, a powerless father, wicked character within a given culture, the fairy tales' stepmother, her daughters and their anxious central themes focus on universal issues such jealousies who subject the heroine to one ordeal perseverance in the face of obstacles, dignity of domestic drudgery after another to prevent and self-determination her from going to a ball where the prince is looking for his bride. Each night, Cinderella An earlier version of this paper was presented at the dances the night away with the prince but flees Second-Biannual Storyteiling Conference of the Americas, Brock University, St, Catharines, Ontario, Canada, August before he could make her acquaintance. On the 30-September2, 2001, third night, the prince had the staircase coated Cinderella Stories Of Women Leaders Volume 9, No. 2, 2002 19 There has been a growing interest in the famous "waffle" sole was bom. It is a story leadership, management and organizational about innovation, courage and out-of-the-box behavior literature in storytelling, both as a thinking. It is part of the story of Nike's heritage qualitative methodology and a vehicle for and the first item on the agenda of the organizational change and transformation. company's orientation program for Elkins (Nike Storytelling is a powerful tool that gives us spelled backwards, meaning new hires). Like all access to the living part of an organization. great stories, Nike stories offer archet3q)es such Stories can be used to rally leaders and followers as commitment, trust and innovation. around a specific social, political or cultural Stories emphasize the non-linear, irrational issue or cause. They can be placed in the service aspects of organizational life, the part often not of change efforts that will initially be seen considered by scientists or organizational diflficult, even impossible, upsetting and strange. scholars. Management textbooks rar(;ly talk Storytelling allows the best of what we are to about organizations as complex, fuzzy, irregular, come together - reason and intuition, emotion asymmetrical, random systems, which are in and intellect, empathy and understanding. continuous disequilibriimi and chaos. In the Denning (2001) coined the term intellectual tradition of logical positivism, which springboard story to refer to narratives that dominates management and leadership theory enable a leap in understanding by the audience and research, these are all seen as bad things. so as to grasp how an event, organization, The good things in organizational life are clear, community or complex system may change. A simple, clean, orderly, and neat. Yet intuitively springboard story has an impact not so much we know that the world is not quite this way. through transferring large amounts of Our world is full of complex adaptive systems. information but by catalyzing information into Anywhere we look - people, organizations, action congruent with the personal experience of economies, politics - anything of value is a members of the audience. The teller of a complex adaptive system. springboard story tells her tale in such a way as The purpose of this paper is to apply the to allow some mental space for the central themes embedded in the Cinderella story listeners/readers to forge their own thoughts, to three contemporary women leaders who with the explicit objective of having them invent overcame adversity, poverty, and illness in the analogous stories of their own, in parallel to the pursuit of their visions and goals. Like storyteller's explicit story. Cinderella, the women leaders discussed here were mistreated in their youth by members of Organizational Stories and Corporate their families, ridiculed, exposed to scrutiny and Narratives painful experiences but live happily thereafter. Organizational stories are a medium for The paper treats the experiences of Ruth communicating an organization's central myths Simmons, Mary Kay, and Oprah Winfrey as to insiders and outsiders and infuse them into springboard stories, - inspiring, eye-opening, everyday decisions, policies and practices and gripping, and springboards to new (Bohnan & Deal, 1991). For example, Nike's possibilities - and invites the reader to tell their co-foimder. Coach Broverman, after deciding own stories of the three contemporary women that his team needed better running shoes, went leaders in the context of the conceptual to his workshop and poured rubber into the framework suggested in Figure 1. family's waffle iron and that is how Nike's 20 Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies Klenke Conceptual Model Linking Cinderella Themes to Leadership Outcomes Through Leadership Attributes CINDERELLA LEADERSHIP LEADERSHIP THEMES COMPETENCIES OUTCOMES SPRINGBOARD TRANS- FORMATIONAL/ EMOTIONAL CHARISMATIC INTELLIGENCE TRUST LEADERSHIP RUTH SIMMONS: A BEACON OF she also learned that whatever you do, "even if it HOPE is scrubbing floors in other people's houses, (as her mother did), do it well, and do it Ruth Simmons' Cinderella Story thoroughly." Simmons' mother influenced her Simmons was bom in rural Texas, the because she was a strong person who taught her youngest of 12 children of Isaac and Fannie to work hard at everything she tried. Her Stubblefield. She moved with her family to teachers were also very important; they helped Houston when she was seven. Her father was a her believe in herself. An extremely talkative tenant fanner who raised cotton. Later on, in child who was an independent thinker, Simmons Houston, he worked in a factory and as a pastor refused to abide her parents' warnings that, of Mount Hermon Missionary Baptist Church; outside of their home, she should be her mother worked as a domestic and took in "obsequious" and "stay in the background". As a ironing while tending to her children. Poverty in youngster, she realized only dimly, if at all, that extremis, the family barely eked out a living. in the segregated milieu in which she was raised, Simmons told People Magazine that while her most blacks and whites assumed that only white sisters and brothers were picking cotton all day people could ever hope to get a college she was too young to do so and kept her head in education, gain membership in the middle class, books. In such a large family, Simmons says, "I or even attend a theatrical performance. "The had to fight hard to be heard, so that's why I talk fact that there was definitely a really low ceiling so much and why I'm so assertive now. I was for me did not enter my mind," she told Massie quite an annoyance to everybody." Ritsch. Her parents' stories about "what mattered At Grapeland's all-black elementary in one's life," Simmons told Massie Ritsch for school, Simmons intelligence and natural the Daily Princetonian (April 5, 1995), taught interest in learning brought her to the attention her that "decency and concern for other people" of Ida Mae Henderson, her kindergarten teacher, were of paramount importance. From her mother who encouraged and nurtured her in the Cinderella Stories Of Women Leaders Volume 9, No. 2, 2002 21 conviction that with help, she would eventually Nancy Regan and Barbara Bush. Educators make a difference in the world.

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