A Resident’s Dilemma
The call came on a weeknight in my second year of residency.
It was a teenage girl. She had been crying, and she was still crying while she talked. Her voice kept sliding off the words.
“Our family was in an accident,” she said. “On a road trip. Everyone except me is hurt. They’re transferring everyone to a hospital near home tomorrow. But they’re going to discharge me. I don’t know what to do.”
Then she said, “Can you come?”
I need to tell you who her mother was to me.
When I came from India for my residency in Chicago, I didn’t know anyone there. A distant relative — a woman I barely knew, who lived three hours away by car — opened her home to me. I stayed there during interview season. She fed me, gave me a spare room, and let me use her home as a base for my interviews. When I finally got a residency and needed an apartment, I didn’t have the money for the first month’s rent. She loaned it to me. She also loaned me money for the things you need when you arrive somewhere with just two suitcases.
I owed her more than money.
Now her daughter was calling me from a hospital in another state, asking me to come.
I didn’t know what to do.
I was scheduled for clinical rotations. If you’ve never worked in a teaching hospital, here’s something easy to miss: residents keep the place running. We were the cheap labor that kept everything going. If one of us didn’t show up, the work didn’t go away. It just landed on everyone else. And that made people angry.
If I asked for time off to go help my siblings or my parents, I knew those who had to cover for me would be frustrated with the extra load, but they would understand.
But for a distant relative?
I really didn’t know what to do.
So I went to see the residency training director.
The Man Behind the Desk
We had a new one that year — Dr. Henry Dove. He was a tall, broad-shouldered African American man, physically imposing in a way you noticed before he said anything. He also had one of the kindest faces I have ever seen on a person in authority.
I didn’t have an appointment. I asked to see him about something urgent. He waved me in.
I told him about the call. I explained about my relative, the interviews, the spare room, and the money she loaned me. I said I felt I owed her, but I also felt I owed the program.
Henry didn’t ask me a single clarifying question.
He said, “What are you waiting for? Go!”
I said, “But I have rotations. How would I even manage that?”
He said, “You let me worry about that. I’ll tell everyone who needs to be told. You just go.”
I had walked in braced for a negotiation. I got more than permission. I got direction — to just go.
I went. I was there four or five days. I helped where I could help, which mostly meant being there for a teenager until at least one of her parents was discharged from the hospital and other, less distant, relatives arrived.
I have thought about my conversation with Henry for thirty years.
Before that day, I believed a leader’s job was to make sure everyone worked efficiently so that the organization ran well. If people have to adjust their schedules, they need to be responsible and find coverage. But because of Henry, I came to believe that a leader’s job includes taking on some of the burdens of someone’s life so they can go live it.
I let the people I lead know through words and actions that work comes second. I tell them that if something in their life needs their work to bend, I will work with them on how to make it so.
And when they say, as some almost always do, “But I have so much on my plate. What happens to all of it?”
I say, “You let me worry about that.” Or, some version of that.
Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.
— Robert McKee
Let’s Look at That Narrative
I told you that story for two reasons. The second one is the reason you’re reading a leadership blog.
We’ve all heard that leaders should be good public speakers and that good public speakers tell stories. I found this vague until a teacher in a storytelling class helped me see three things that look alike and aren’t.
An anecdote is something that happened to someone.
A story is something that happened to someone and changed them.
A speech may contain either a story or an anecdote. What makes it a speech is a call to action—spoken aloud or left in the air for you to pick up.
I find that taxonomy more useful than most of what gets written about storytelling for public speaking. (I wrote earlier about why every speech must reveal something about you. This taxonomy is the tool that helped me understand why.)
Test it on what you just read. A man let a resident leave for five days. That’s an anecdote. Nothing has moved. Add the part where I walked in believing one thing about leadership and left believing something else, and it becomes a story.
The change is the load-bearing wall in the story. Pull it out, and the thing collapses into a nice memory about a decent boss. No transformation, no story. Just something that happened.
Physicians, Leaders, Storytellers — The Challenge
Here’s the part I find interesting about our profession.
Medicine trains you in the anecdote. The case presentation is an anecdote executed at a very high level. A protagonist, a complication, rising tension, a resolution. Fifty-eight-year-old woman, three days of shortness of breath, here’s the workup, here’s the diagnosis. You have given hundreds of them. You are good at it.
Medicine also trains you in the speech. Morbidity and mortality conference is a speech. Something happened, and here is what we will do differently.
What medicine trains out of you is the middle one — the story.
Because you are just the narrator, not the protagonist, the case presentation is built to remove the human transformation. Nobody wants the intern’s (or the patient’s) feelings in the differential. Over years of training, you grow as a professional. But you present each case without commenting on how it changed you.
Then you become a leader. You stand in front of a room and present your reorganization plan the way you’d present a case. Clear, properly sequenced, and presented as objectively and dispassionately as possible. And nothing happens.
You’re not bad at storytelling. You learned not to talk about the transformation.
The Uncomfortable Part
Follow the definitions, and you land somewhere inconvenient.
A story has no call to action. The listener takes what they want.
But a leader almost always wants something. The budget approved. The behavior changed. The room aligned.
Which means that most of what we call “leadership storytelling” isn’t storytelling. It’s speech-making by people who are fluent in story. And the whole craft comes down to one decision: do you say the ask out loud, or do you trust the room to arrive at it?
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
— Hannah Arendt
The implicit version is more powerful. I could have ended this post at “You let me worry about that” and let the silence do the asking. Some of you would have thought about someone on your team you’ve been too busy to ask about. I wouldn’t have had to say a word.
That power is exactly why it needs this rule:
If you’re hiding your request inside a story because you couldn’t win the argument through logic, that’s manipulation. If you’d be willing to state the request clearly, and the story is there to improve understanding, that’s leadership.
Most of your coworkers can smell a manufactured emotional appeal from across a conference room. We are trained to distrust the vivid single case. Somewhere in our training, all of us have heard it: the plural of anecdote is not data. Much of evidence-based medicine exists to keep us from being moved by a single vivid case.
So I’m not telling you to trade rigor for feeling.
Data and story do different jobs. Data tells people what is true. Story moves people to act. Your nurse staffing dashboard may show the CFO a gap. But the story of the night nurse who caught the deteriorating patient at 3 a.m. completely by chance is what makes him move the money for staffing.
Being right and being ignored is a position many physician leaders know well.
Fluency in storytelling is often the difference between being ignored and being heard.
Two Small Things I Did Here on Purpose
Since this post is about the craft of storytelling, I’ll show some of my work.
I described Henry as imposing with a kind face. It is the truth. Yet his appearance doesn’t matter to the plot. But readers remember people through contradiction. A man who is exactly what he looks like is part of the setting or background, and not a real character in the story. When you tell a story about someone, find the thing about them that doesn’t fit, and put it early.
I used the same six words twice. Henry said, “You let me worry about that.” Years later, I say, “You let me worry about that.”
Drop that line into a leadership talk cold, and it’s a slogan. Nothing. Put four hundred words of a crying teenager and a resident’s clinical obligations in front of it, and it means something. Lines don’t land because they’re good. They land because the story set up the callback.
One more thing worth saying: Henry didn’t do my work for me indefinitely. He cleared an obstacle for five days so I could meet an obligation that mattered more than a rotation. Removing a barrier is not the same as carrying someone. Leaders who confuse those two burn out fast.
The One Practice
Write down the moment someone changed you.
Not a story about a time you won. A moment when what you believed about leadership, or work, or people, flipped — because of something another person did.
Then write two sentences. Only two.
Before this, I believed ______.
After this, I believed ______.
If you can’t fill in both blanks, you don’t have a story yet. You have an anecdote, and anecdotes don’t move anyone. Find a different moment.
If you can fill in both blanks, you have something better than a slide deck. File it somewhere. You’ll need it in a room someday, and the worst time to go looking for a story is the moment you need one.
Most of us are carrying three or four of these and have never said them out loud.
Mine happened in a residency office thirty years ago, when a man I barely knew told me to go.
