Why Broken Trust Breaks Innovation and Keeps You from Getting to Market
In most companies, the VP of Product position bears the responsibility of empowering all employees to stand behind their company's mission for the new product. They're enlisted to provide resources to the engineering troops, work with marketing and sales to get customers' input and get all parties to understand what this new product does — all to rally support across the company.
All of these relationships and conversations require trust — storytelling is the best way to build trust.
Being trustworthy is a desirable trait that is earned through action over time. We value trustworthy people; conversely, it can be one of the worst offenses when someone breaks that sacred trust. That's because when we trust someone, we set expectations for that person's behavior — be it a friend, a client, or a coworker. Broken trust breaks those expectations, which can be a jarring experience that leaves us questioning our sense of reality and our choices.
In any company, it's essential to demonstrate your trustworthiness to employees — and one way to do so is through storytelling. However, using storytelling to prove a company's trustworthiness is a difficult task that requires more than just plainly listing off the reasons why employees should believe in your message. Instead, trust is earned by demonstrating what your company believes in through actions over time.
Why does trust matter in business relationships?
Our experiences shape our understanding and perspective of the world — or the stage on which our stories play out. We build trusting relationships based on the behavior, actions, and experiences of others. When our words (such as the morals we hold) and our actions align, that demonstrates integrity — and integrity is vital to trust. This is no different for brands.
Gaining the trust of your team is instrumental to strengthening their connection to your organization. When you effectively communicate trust, employees develop a connection with and appreciation for your company and commit to it. There becomes a sense of action as employees believe in the organization and what it stands for. They can visualize the message you're trying to represent and embody it themselves to pass it along to customers; this contributes to a company's integrity internally and externally toward customers.
Similar to our personal relationships, we lose trust in brands that we believe lack integrity. For example, you'd likely lose trust in a company if they were to promote themselves as being eco-friendly, just to find out they didn't participate in any kind of recycling program. However, when a brand does have integrity and sticks to its word, employees and customers alike are more inclined to have favorable and trusting opinions of them and engage in a long-lasting, loyal relationship with them.
Building trust through the power of story
Generally, most people provide a certain degree of tolerance, or leeway, early in a relationship — at least enough to allow the other party to show who they are. As Maya Angelou said,
"Believe people when they show you who they are the first time."
Let's imagine for a moment that a brand is someone we've just met — we'll call them Bob. Assume we haven't spent much time with Bob; therefore, he hasn't had an opportunity to demonstrate that he's trustworthy.
A mutual friend has just introduced you and Bob and you have 15 minutes to get to know each other.
Now, imagine the conversation looks something like this:
"Hi, Bob. Nice to meet you. Tell me a bit about yourself," you say.
Bob responds by listing a bunch of facts about himself.
"Hi, I'm Bob. I was born in France and learned to speak French and English. My father taught me how to become a mechanic. When I was ten years old, my father died in an accident. We won the U.S. Green Card lottery system and moved to Georgia. As a teenager, I got a job as a mechanic at a local shop. I tried to get a mechanical gig at an aviation company, but my high school diploma wasn't enough. I went back to school and became an engineer."
While the substance is there, how Bob presents the facts of his life is pretty dull, right? If you're like me, you're probably wondering what details fill all the gaps.
Turning data into stories
Bob's story is instantly recognizable as overcoming obstacles and remaining determined, but it left something to be desired. Taking that perspective, let's try it again by turning facts into relatable and memorable stories.
Despite losing his father at a young age and moving to a new country, Bob could pick himself up and continue pursuing his dreams. One of those dreams was working with cars. He learned how to be a mechanic from his father and took that skill to the next level in school. He eventually got a job at a BMW dealership, where he learned more about cars and engines. However, it wasn't until he saw an Air Force display of fighter jets that he realized he wanted to work on aircraft instead. This was a challenging goal, as he only had a high school diploma. But Bob didn't let that stop him. He returned to university, got an engineering degree, and finally landed a job at an aviation company.
Through the art of storytelling, Bob's story is now inspiring about persevering in the face of adversity. In just one short paragraph. In contrast to the first example, this new story is authentic, impactful, and shows his character. It helps us believe in Bob and develop trust in him.
The second example works because it demonstrates how storytelling can stimulate the brain's experiential centers. As listeners, we put ourselves into the story and share the teller's experiences by proxy. Through Bob's story, we get to know his relationship with his father.
Now, let's look at this from the other side by imagining Bob is a brand called ACME. We've just been introduced to ACME and don't know anything about it — or whether it's trustworthy. However, as a consumer, if all ACME does in its communication is list out a series of facts, we'll never have a chance to understand its story, let alone trust it.
ACME can revise its approach by telling its story in a myriad of ways — digitally and in person — through its website, marketing campaigns, and sales teams. But, to develop trust and establish integrity, the story must be consistent in how all those people and properties present it.
This is why every business needs its "big story."
Identifying your brand's 'big story'
It's not enough to build a fantastic product and kick that over the fence to your sales and marketing teams. It would be best if you had a compelling narrative — or big story — to make a connection with everyone who comes into contact with your brand, whether internal or external.
There are a few critical questions you can ask yourself to identify your big story:
Why did you create this product?
What was the passion that fueled it?
How does it improve someone's life?
Was it the customer need that willed it into existence?
What's going on in the world that made this product necessary?
Maintaining a cohesive big story becomes increasingly difficult as you move from the startup phase into the growth phase, as it's easy to lose control of your story when adding new products and people.
All departments — including product development, engineering, product marketing, marketing, and communications — need a unified story easy for the sales team, partners, and investors to understand. The product and marketing teams are most important here, as they're the bridge between those who engineer the product and those who take it to market.
Successful companies don't have engineering running off creating products that nobody wants, nor do they have marketing communications developing irrelevant campaigns that have nothing to do with the product. Instead, there's a synergy, a symphony. They have the market research muscle that determines the customer's wants and needs; those marketers then collaborate with engineers to build products that solve those needs.
However, you aren't limited to only creating what customers say they want. With innovation, you often create new desires and markets, but only by understanding the lives and purchasing power of the consumers in your market. By learning what's happening in the world and how the inevitable change imposes on your target market, you can invent products that add value to people's lives. That is why positive relationships between your team and the rest of the organization are so powerful.
We've identified the need for trust, discussed how it's built, and demonstrated how stories are the best vehicle to build it. Now, it's time to take a look inward.
What's your big story? Have you figured it out?
In conclusion…
As an engineering leader, such as Vice President of Engineering, you have an opportunity to lead your organization in developing a shared big story that's informed by the market and inspired by your brilliant engineers. By harnessing the power of your people — including their imagination, creativity, experience, education, and passion — your story can be a vehicle for building trust in your organization.
Ready to start leveraging storytelling tools and frameworks to deepen consumer and employee relationships? Book a complimentary consultation with Go Narrative to learn more about how we can help you craft stories that strengthen brand trust and drive results.