We also offer a few prompts to help you kick off your own leadership transformation. In the examples below, you’ll see how some of our initial study subjects-and other executives-embraced the metaphors with great success. The feedback we’ve received suggests that they are a reliable catalyst for individual and organizational transformation. Since our initial CEO analysis, we have used the metaphors with more than 10,000 managers on four continents as a way of pushing them to ask tough questions and to make changes based on the answers. As the organizational theorist Karl Weick once wrote, “People see more things than they can describe in words.” And their familiarity means you can recall them easily-which is helpful when trying to change entrenched behavior-and talk about them effectively with a group. As familiar as these may sound, they contain useful insights about how leaders can become more effective. Ultimately we uncovered seven interdependent metaphors, four of which are outlined in this article: fire (representing ambition), snowball (accountability), mask (authenticity), and movie (self-reflection). In ensuing conversations with these chief executives, we discovered that one of the best ways to elicit deep and broad discussion of those key themes-and to describe the CEOs’ mastery of what they had learned-was through metaphor. We captured their stories through a series of lengthy interviews, conducted a rigorous linguistic analysis, and discovered that several themes were common to all seven in the challenges they faced and the strategies they used.

They had all seen radical improvement in 360-degree feedback on their personal effectiveness, along with significant gains for their units or organizations in financial performance, customer approval, and employee engagement. We began with an in-depth study of seven CEOs whose success in transforming themselves, their leadership teams, and their organizations was well documented. That was our ambition five years ago, when we embarked on a doctoral research project.

Movie the mask