Here's How to Get Your Team's Storytelling Capabilities Up to Speed Quickly
I’ve always been a geek for outstanding leadership. I find the best leaders fascinating — how they approach rallying the troops. Their amazing speeches. The fact that they can get people to follow them (incidentally, that's what defines someone as a leader: they have followers!).
In the two decades I spent in the hallowed halls of two big, original tech giants (Intel and Microsoft), I was enamored by the great leaders and wanted to be just like them one day. Somewhere along my journey, I discovered that great leaders are not only smart but have something called emotional intelligence (EQ) — in a word, empathy.
I like to think of empathy as the gateway-emotion for utilizing emotions in business communication. It starts at the very top. Leaders start the "empathy chain" by building a culture of empathy within their team and organization. This, in turn, spreads out to an organization's customers and partners. Ultimately, focusing on empathy means creating the right conditions for your team to connect with your customers and communicate with them more effectively.
When empathy is appropriately applied to business communications, it manifests as compelling storytelling. Consider the "leadership greats" like Maya Angelou, Winston Churchill, Andy Grove, Jack Welch, Steve Jobs, and Martin Luther King Jr.: What do they have in common? They were all excellent storytellers. They were successful at boiling down a story into its distilled form: quotable, repeatable statements.
Because they are such good storytellers, leaders often assume everyone else has the same capability. When this happens in organizations, it can get in the way of effective leadership.
That's why truly great leaders work hard to ensure that those around them invest in building learnable story skills. In so doing, they ignite leadership like wildfire throughout their organization (see Jack Welch).
One simple and effective way to quickly build your organization's storytelling capabilities is by outsourcing it. Just like you’d hire a personal trainer for help getting started and staying on course with a weight training regimen, a storytelling expert can help you build your team’s story muscle by taking an outside-in approach and delivering a thorough analysis of your ideal customer and their buyer journey, as well as coaching on how to use storytelling frameworks that your entire team can leverage to better connect with your audience (aka, customers).
Building empathy (and better storytelling) starts with your 'why'
If you're a business leader, you're probably familiar with Simon Sinek's book, Start with Why. Even if you haven't read it (though I highly recommend you do), you likely know the basic premise: You can't get someone to buy into something — a product, an idea, a campaign, a movement — until they understand the "why" behind it. Why should they take action? Why does it matter to them? Why should they care? As the leader/storyteller, it's up to you to communicate that "why" clearly and effectively.
Like many of us who have read Simon's work, a dentist named Gary Sanchez fell in love with the concept of finding your why and sought to uncover his own. He reached out to Simon to find out the process. Over the course of several conversations, they began to extract Gary's personal why.
Now, Gary wanted to understand everyone's why. He started coaching around "why" to help people discover it for themselves. Each session would take 2-3 hours. For ten years, Gary conducted 2-3 hour sessions with 40K+ people. He then analyzed the results, which led to the WHY discovery assessment, available through The WHY Institute. Amazingly, Gary got the process of finding your why down to 5 minutes in an online tool (and if you want to learn more about it, feel free to reach out—I'm a WHY® Institute Certified Coach).
At its core, "why" is about setting goals. As humans, we are big on goal-setting and purpose, despite the knowledge that one day everyone we know and love will die, including us. So, we fill our lives with invented purpose. Our "why" gives us that purpose and meaning.
It is, as you might have guessed, why we do everything we do. How we approach it and what we deliver all come from why.
When leaders know their why, they can have more empathy for their team. If they take their team on the why journey with them, this gets even better. Starting with "why" opens up the fertile ground for finding, making, and sharing stories. You'll create an environment where collaboration thrives and ultimately build an "empathy flywheel"—the more each person contributes to empathy in the team, the more people will reciprocate. In other words, your people will follow you to the ends of the earth because they deeply connect with "why" they should.
Creating a culture of storytelling in 3 simple steps
Every human being is a "natural-born" storyteller. It's in our nature; it's how we evolved and passed crucial survival knowledge down, all the way back from our prehistoric ancestors.
The problem is, not everyone is a confident storyteller (if everyone could intentionally harness their innate storytelling powers at will, we’d all be bestselling authors!). If leadership fails to recognize this, they miss an opportunity to align their team with a sense of common shared purpose.
That's why leaders should seek to invest in their people's storytelling skills with a few simple, practical steps. Doing these things will not only help you craft a culture of storytelling but will also make every organization you touch more effective.
1. Tell the stories of your team members.
Storytelling isn't just for communicating with customers. Every team and department across your organization can leverage it.
Each time a story is told about an internal team member, you include them in your organization's overarching narrative. You're taking them on the "why" journey. You are making them a part of the company culture.
This can be especially effective if you need to communicate with people, teams, and leaders outside your department: When you position them as the hero and yourself as the guide, you can easily communicate "what's in it for them" and encourage them to follow your lead on marketing and other business initiatives.
2. Recognize that everyone can get better, including yourself.
Everybody loves a good underdog story. We can’t empathize with a glorious, shiny-haired, perfect teeth, "win, win, win" winner. In fact, we tend to hate them!
It's far more effective to talk about challenges and failures. Those triumphs over adversity and lessons learned are the meat of great stories. No one starts as a hero; a hero is made because of what they overcome. THAT is when people get engaged.
To that end, leaders must learn to admit failure and weakness. I know—it's not an appealing thought. But if a leader can’t admit failure, they can't expect their team to.
You can role-model this for your people by being honest and open about your struggles and challenges. Talk about how you got there and how you overcame the roadblocks of your career. Show your team it’s OK to fail.
You and your team also need to understand that “necessity is the mother of invention." Every new company or new product solves a problem — ergo, problems (and challenges, failures, struggles, etc.) are simply a part of the story.
3. Invest in storytelling training for yourself and your team.
Practice makes perfect. If you have a presentation coming up, be it at a big conference or an important pitch with a client, invest in integrating stories and quotes. Build your content with a beginning, middle, and end.
An external storytelling consultant can help you understand how and why to do this and present you with tools like our 3D StorytellingTM (Desire, Difficulty, Denouement) and TRIPS StorytellingTM (Transformational, Reasons, Innovative, Problems, Stories) frameworks.
We recently coached a client on the importance of TRIPS and introduced them to our Go Narrative storyboard process. We helped them find a clear, culturally relevant narrative metaphor that ultimately shaped their new 2021 sales pitch.
Unfortunately, we can’t share that story for confidentiality reasons. So, let's take a look at how this might work for a hypothetical laundry product company. In a session with Go Narrative, we might work with the leadership team to determine that their narrative metaphor is, “Variety is the spice of life.” We might then explore how that applies to their product:
Variety: New. Different. A departure from the everyday.
Spice: Interesting. Exotic. Kicked up a notch.
Life: The fundamentals of our everyday routines.
So, in our fictional example here, we have a laundry product that regularly brings something different, hence the variety. That makes things interesting and different every day. And we need that during lockdown!
During our virtual workshopping process, we use a mix of brainwriting and breakout sessions to harness the team's power. We get all the insights on the table to empower collaboration, transparency, and prioritization.
From there, we work with you to come up with actionable ideas and the "seeds" to go grow all the stories you need! This practical, tool-based approach is what separates us from so many other storytelling experts.
Once you have those tools, you need to keep practicing and "sharpening the saw blade" to keep your skills fresh. That's why we provide executive support after our workshop concludes. Leaders who get this help from us can keep storytelling on their team's agenda. We'll provide ideas, stories, and metaphors to help leaders with their weekly meetings and keep the story top of mind for themselves and their teams.
Story-doing, story-making, storytelling: How story shapes your entire organization
In his book Lead with a Story, Paul Smith writes a whole chapter on utilizing stories to define culture. In his story about flexible work arrangements, he demonstrates how capturing and telling stories communicates management's intent. Stories captured and shared in emails, websites, and around the water cooler are far more potent than rules in a rulebook. Watercooler gossip is where stories infect the minds of people in your company.
Why does this happen? Because our brains use stories to make sense of the data from our senses. By understanding how story ticks, you understand how your team ticks. When you invest in your team to be better storytellers, they will have a level playing field for collaboration AND understanding your customer, enabling them to serve them better.
When you fully embrace storytelling as a leader, you can also utilize it as a tool. You can use it for "story doing" — the act of using story structures in internal communications (do you want your employees to read your emails?), problem-solving, and teamwork. Our storytelling frameworks can quite literally be used as an organizational problem-solving tool. They help you organize your thoughts around specific issues and sort out all the elements you need to solve them, including the people and the necessary changes involved.
You can use your skills for "story-making," too, where you create memorable experiences with your team or your customer in mind. When you create experiences like this, your audience will tell other people about them.
When storytelling is done right, you are putting all the pieces in place for your team members and, in turn, your customers to become your storytellers.
With storytelling, begin with the end in mind
When it comes to internal and external organizational storytelling, leaders must "begin with the end in mind," as Dr. Stephen Covey says. What information can we communicate — and how — to get our audience to want to tell our stories for us? How can we weave our stories into their narratives?
Remember, we are all living inside our own narratives. What we experience shapes that. The people and places we meet. The challenges we come across. How we react and interact with those challenges and the world. Those challenges and changes we endure — the facts of our lives — become the facts of the stories we tell.
Whether you are a good leader, a great leader, or on your way to becoming one, your effectiveness depends on your ability to build and maintain a following with the right stories. You can do this by deeply empathizing with your team and investing in their (and your) storytelling abilities.
At Go Narrative, we do workshops, original research, and more to come up with a go-to-market playbook that will get your organization's storytelling skills up to speed, fast. It’s time to leverage the power of story and take your whole organization to the next level.
Ready to sharpen and leverage your storytelling skills in 2021? Book a complimentary 30-minute consultation with us, and let's chat.
Go Narrative is a Seattle Based firm that helps business leaders challenge the status quo to find a better way to clarity through storytelling. Get attention. Be heard. Sell more.
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