Developing Talent for Organizational Results (eBook)

Chapter 1

Communicate with Stories

THE ARIEL GROUP

In This Chapter

• How to identify effective stories.
• How to communicate using stories.
• How to integrate a story into a conversation or presentation.
• Tips for telling a good story.

Storytelling is a powerful communication tool.

An engineer I know makes a compelling case for telling stories in business. Now, of course, we don’t often connect engineers, those whose livelihood depends on facts, empirical data, mathematical formulae, and structural accuracy, with the softer, creative, and somewhat vague notion of storytelling. But this particular engineer was the grandson of Choctaw Indians from Northwestern Oklahoma. As a young boy he’d listened to the history, tradition, and knowledge of his tribe passed down to the younger generations by the elders through stories told around the coffee shop on a Saturday evening. He remembered these stories because they made an emotional connection as well as an intellectual one. He retained the information in his brain because of a connection that was made with his heart. Of course, still being an engineer, he had reduced this concept to a formula that looks like this:

DATA + STORY = KNOWLEDGE

As Peter Guber, the well-known producer, once said, “Although the mind may be part of your target, the heart is the bull’s-eye.” Data, while the lifeblood of an engineer, does not amount to knowledge unless combined with the story of its application. The engineer knew that his calculations had to be exact if the bridge he was building was to bear the appropriate load without collapsing, and he appreciated the elegance of the technical designs he created. But he also knew that the stories about who would be crossing the bridge—the families that may be united, the businesses that would thrive, the relationships that could develop, the cultures that could collaborate, the goods and services that would be delivered, and the city that could grow—were what would ultimately get that bridge built.

As with the engineer, stories are an effective way for a leader to communicate information to an audience while also building a relationship with them. When you tell stories, especially personal stories, it helps people relate to your message and allows you to show your strengths, challenges, and vulnerability. Stories can be used to communicate your values, help to develop trust, inspire your employees, and move your audience to take action. Presidents from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, both brilliant storytellers, brought their legislative initiatives to light by telling the stories of real individuals during important speeches.

Here are some of the most effective ways to use stories to communicate.

• Share Yourself: Share moments that made you who you are or that clarified your values so that others understand your leadership perspective.
• Share Your Organization: Share values of your organization. What makes up the DNA of your organization?
• Teach a Lesson: How you learned something through failure or success, how you mastered an organizational capability, how you overcame resistance to change.
• Provoke Change: Create dissatisfaction with present, share dangerous mistakes in business, establish the case for change, create a vision for future state.
• Change Perspective: Allow your audience to see a problem through a different lens, change the emotional climate.
• Build a Relationship: Sharing personal or personal business stories with direct reports or clients can highlight the common ground between you.

With all of this evidence supporting the effectiveness of storytelling, why do we use them so infrequently to communicate? Why do so many of us leap into our PowerPoint presentations replete with data, research, facts, and figures and then watch the faces glaze over as this presentation blends with three others the audience sat through that day?

Many people have told us, “I’m just not good at telling stories” or “I just don’t have any good stories to tell.” Nonsense. Every human life is full of interesting stuff. As many of you read this, several interesting things have already happened on the drive to work, in a conversation with your partner, as you walked to the office. From the knock, knock joke your five-year-old told you over breakfast to the inspiring and life-changing efforts of your team to develop an entirely new and exciting product, stories from your everyday life can contain universal themes relevant to your organization’s or clients’ key issues. Why not leverage the archetypal nature of stories by creating a catalog of some of the significant moments in your personal and business life as a resource to draw on when planning any meeting, conversation, or presentation?

What follows is a process we use to coach our clients on how to identify, refine, and tell a good story in the context of business. We hope that by following these steps you’ll discover stories from your life that you can use to further your business or organizational goals. At a minimum we hope that just taking the time to reflect on life will prove to be an enlightening exercise and prove that you’ve got some darned interesting stories to tell.

I’ll start by sharing a story I’ve told in a business setting a number of times. Then we’ll tackle the issue of how to identify and remember stories that can be valuable in a business context. Once you’ve started to collect your stories, we will share some ideas about how to categorize them into types of stories that make specific points. A minister we know, for instance, has a filing cabinet with a range of topics for future sermons. He will often drop a scrap of paper with a simple topic like “Leaving your turn signal on” into a folder for future sermons, which are always illustrated with wonderful stories.

Of course, just remembering stories and cataloging them isn’t enough. Learning how to integrate a story into a business context can be tricky. Luckily, we have a simple framework that will help get you started. Finally, we come to the telling—the performance of your story that brings it to life for the listener. Drawing on our experience from theater, we encourage you to rehearse your story (and any presentation or critical conversation) so that you can add the appropriate emphasis, emotion, timing, and body language to have maximum impact. We don’t expect you to become Shakespearian actors overnight, but you’ll be surprised by the increased impact you will have by employing some theatrical tips.

Let’s Start with a Story

Running a small company (that teaches leadership) and attending various conferences and meetings, I’m called upon to speak to groups large and small. Here is a story I told at a trade association meeting. It is drawn from personal experience many of us can relate to—when stress from work and family clash and how that can undermine our most precious relationships:

It has been a stressful eighteen months. The recession has hit business hard and I’m about to send a second child off to college. I’m working long days and I’m managing tight budgets at the office and at home.

One dark evening in mid-January, I’m standing in my kitchen transferring three days of dishes from the sink into the dishwasher. The children have used every cup and bowl we own, including a decorative Bavarian beer stein that is now encrusted with fossilized cereal! I’m muttering bad language under my breath.

“Hey pops, whassup? How was your day?”

Clare, my seventeen-year-old daughter enters. I tense, expecting this to be an expensive conversation.

“Sooooo, I wanted to ask you something. Julie’s family is going to Vegas and then Miami for winter break and they’ve invited ME! Can I go?”

I explode.

“We’ve had this conversation! We have a lot of expenses right now and you still owe me money from last summer. You are supposed to be saving for college. I can’t believe you’re even asking!”

She explodes back.

“I can’t believe you are yelling at me! You’re not even listening to me. Julie’s dad has free tickets. I just picked up more hours at the restaurant. Ugh! You never listen. And you’re never around and you’re always preoccupied and we never have any time alone together. You’re just mean and grumpy all the time!”

She pauses, picks up a piece of paper, and throws it at me.

“Oh and by the way, here’s my report card. I made honor roll. Again!”

She runs to her room in tears.

What did my daughter teach me here? Well, I learned that under stress I have much less patience, I don’t listen, and I jump to conclusions. And that this behavior can cause a breach in a precious relationship.

The lesson for me is to be sure to take my own emotional temperature at home and at work, particularly in times of stress or extreme busyness. I also learned that it is important to stop, be fully present, and truly listen to what others are telling you before answering. This is hard to do when stressed out and in a hurry, but not doing these things can cause great damage to relationships and, ultimately, to...