Leadership Metaphor
Leadership Metaphor uses a spread of picture cards to get at how someone actually experiences their leadership, when a direct question would only get you their rehearsed answer.
Six boxes carry the work from laying out the image cards through choosing a current image, sharing its story, surfacing what it reveals, choosing a future image, and committing to one shift.
Reach for this when…
- A leader talks fluently about strategy but goes blank when asked how they actually feel in the role.
- The same rehearsed answer keeps coming back whenever you ask about their leadership style directly.
- You're opening a coaching relationship and want something other than a formal assessment to start with.
How to run it
- Lay out a spread of diverse images.
- Ask each person to choose the one that shows how their leadership feels right now.
- Have them tell the story behind the choice, not just describe the image.
- Ask what the metaphor reveals about what's working and what isn't.
- Have them choose a second image for the leader they want to become.
- Close with one concrete shift they will commit to.
A worked example
Situation. Amara Okafor founded Ile Aso, a small textile workshop in Lagos, Nigeria, and had started describing her own week as 'just firefighting'.
Applied. In a coaching session she picked a tangled fishing net for her leadership now and told the story of pulling every thread herself. Her second card was a lighthouse; she said what she wanted was to be seen from a distance, not standing in the middle of the net.
Result. The commitment she left with was small and specific: hand fabric purchasing to her production lead. Within a month she'd stopped being the person every supplier called first.
The catch
The insight lives in the story the person tells about the image, not the image itself - a facilitator who rushes past the story reduces this to a party trick. It also works badly on people who intellectualise fast, since they'll explain the metaphor away before it can surface anything.
If you can't turn the story back into a coaching question, don't run the cards - just ask them plainly how their leadership feels right now.
Origin: Narrative coaching tradition (no single originator)