Leadership Analogies
Leadership Analogies uses a chosen image - firefighter, gardener, conductor - to make an abstract leadership challenge concrete enough to think about, because people reason more sharply through metaphor than through abstraction.
Five boxes carry the work from offering analogies through choosing one that fits, unpacking what it reveals, deepening the coaching, and generating new ones if the first runs out of road.
Reach for this when…
- A leader can describe symptoms but not the pattern of their own leadership.
- Coaching conversation has gone abstract and needs a concrete handle.
- Someone needs to reframe a stuck situation without more advice.
How to run it
- Present a range of leadership analogies.
- Have the person choose the one that best fits their current challenge or aspiration.
- Ask them to explain the analogy and what it reveals about their situation.
- Deepen the coaching inside the analogy: in that image, what would the next move be.
- Generate new analogies together if the first one has run out of road.
A worked example
Situation. Litia Waqa ran operations for a mining services company in Suva, Fiji, and described her week as constant emergencies with no time to plan.
Applied. Asked to pick an analogy, she chose 'firefighter' without hesitation. Her coach asked: in that image, what would the fire station look like if it were run well.
Result. She named it herself: fire stations do prevention drills, not just respond. She restructured her Monday to include one hour of prevention work, not just triage.
The catch
An analogy can illuminate a pattern or flatter it - 'firefighter' can excuse constant reactivity as much as expose it, depending on where the conversation goes next. The tool depends entirely on the coach pushing past the first comfortable image rather than accepting it as the final word.
If the analogy makes someone feel good and nothing else, it was the wrong analogy or you stopped one question too soon.
Origin: Dale Williams