Category: Blog

I recall a great story when a little boy, sick from eating so much sugar beet, was taken by his mother in desperation to Mahatma Gandhi for guidance. She walked for days to get there, but was promptly sent home again by the great man and told to return in a month. The reason? Gandhi needed a month of sugar abstinence himself before telling the boy not to eat any more sugar.

Business leaders can take a leaf out of Gandhi’s book. Leaders – right down to team or line managers – need to realise that they are not just responsible for communicating strategy, vision and values to their teams. They need to adopt the actions and behaviours that will reinforce those messages and make a difference to their performance. It’s all very well driving the message of great teamwork, efficiency and customer service home, but since managers are the most trusted and influential people where their teams are concerned, they need to walk the talk, not just talk it. And this applies to every leader in the business – including the executive team.

HR professionals need to work closely with marketing and comms teams to ensure that these behavioural messages come across loud and clear. A spotlight on behaviours needs to form a critical part of the strategic journey – they are the guiding lights to how we deliver the strategy and ultimately our brand promise.

Articles like this one from Australia’s The Age are valuable endorsements for our approach. We agree wholeheartedly that storytelling is a critical and valuable component of change.

However, they give little insight as to how to actually go about storytelling in organisations. Experience tells us that there are many who yearn to develop a storytelling culture (because it makes total sense), but when you have an organisation of 50,000 people, perhaps dispersed all over the world, that yearning turns into a great big bear of an issue.

The answer is to make storytelling practical. Create tangibility around it, with a clear process, with creative tools that make it easy to implement and sustain. Everyone has a talent for storytelling, so you have a captive audience ready and waiting, but like any business you need a plan to make it work. You need a clear structure and process.

You may think I’m deviating here into a big ramble but what I’m about to say about structure is relevant. I don’t watch Big Brother (am I the only one in the country that loathes it?) but I found to my surprise that I was watching it with my 15 year old son the other evening. From yet another evening of drifting, nothing-to-do mindlessness in the House, one of the older ladies (Lesley?) took it upon herself to lead a meeting where they passed a banana round as a symbol to represent ‘my turn to speak’ and discussed the chores and gripes that each one had. Sudden structure. A meeting place (sofas) was agreed, Lesley the Leader facilitated the discussion, hands went up, the banana circulated. An agenda was formed. Actions were negotiated and agreed (even if they did go to pot later – I’ll never know and don’t really care). The discussion was opened up to include everyone – they all had a chance to make their voice heard.

So structure and tangibility (even if it is via a banana) can help make things easy. You’re on our website so if you can’t find another company that does storytelling in structured and tangible way, point your cursor to the top of the screen and have a look!

The leadership meetings we design for our clients usually involve several storytelling sessions, which is an excellent way of helping leaders personalise key corporate messages and priorities, make sense and take ownership of them. Some of the stories are very moving, told with passion and emotion. They are stories about people, how employees have helped or made a difference to other human beings’ lives through the course of their day-to-day work.

You can say ‘we need to make customer service our priority’ a thousand times without managing to really connect people emotionally. Tell a story from the heart about how somebody has helped a customer in difficulty with genuine feeling and care, and you will make an instant emotional connection, sparking the imagination, creating a sense of empathy, sympathy, admiration, inspiration and pride. Others will remember that story, and may well pass it on. Now imagine this technique of storytelling on a grand and sustainable scale within your organisation. Creating a culture of storytelling in your organisation can do amazing things for buy-in, pride and engagement.

Steve Adubato says some good words on the subject. And meanwhile, more and more organisations are turning to storytelling to help their people make sense of what they are doing and why they are doing it.

Ever heard of work-life balance? The New York Times refers to our addiction to Blackberry’s – or ‘Crackberry’s’:

‘One user admitted it was harder to quit than smoking, while another spoke of ‘phantom vibrations’ …. like twinges from a missing limb, even when he wasn’t carrying it.

As with passive smoking, attention is now being given to the innocent non-users, spouses, friends, loved ones whose evenings and weekends have been ruined by the buzz, the ring or the blinking light …….. and, as for business colleagues, they now find it nearly impossible to carry on a conversation or a meeting, without having to endure the distracted downward glances and covert typing that signals “My interest lies elsewhere”.

Both the usefulness and the persistence of the devices are now undeniable. Only the need to check them in the most churlish manner is now under debate.’

Maybe we should join Crackberrys Anonymous.

And by the way, those words aren’t mine, guv. But I am compelled to celebrate some new research that dubs PowerPoint presentations a disaster, doing more to switch off the brain and bore people rigid than to inform, inspire and motivate them.

There’s no doubt that PowerPoint is an incredibly useful tool, used in the right proportions and in the right way. But as a spokesperson from Microsoft says, ‘there is no substitute for being a good communicator’. Indeed, successful employee engagement depends on it.

And this is my point. Speaking at a seminar this week the question was asked if storytelling (and face-to-face communication generally) is becoming redundant with the advent of more electronic, time-saving communication – e-mail, blogs, intranet etc. Ironically, this electronic media is in fact a fertile ground for storytelling, but we still find that people are frustrated by the extent of ‘techie’ communication; the vast majority of internal communicators recognise the need to deliver more in person, and improve the quality of their leaders’ face-to-face communication skills in particular. In fact, we could argue that it’s actually because of electronic media that there is a demand for storytelling and improving communication skills.

Why? Nothing beats human contact. As emotionally-driven human beings, we are wired to respond to it. Think about how information is passed on by a person – the way facial traits, the pace of speech, humour, interaction, warmth and body language can boost its delivery and give it a particular spin. Take Gordon Brown, who has apparently undergone speech training in order to change the delivery of his speeches to make him more popular (I couldn’t possibly comment). And how many of us have received an e-mail, the brusque and blunt tone of which has created a negative interpretation of the message (and sender) which was probably completely unintended?

Time-saving and efficient as it is, electronic communication should balance and act as a supplement to face-to-face communication. It’s hard to engender trust, emotional bonding and respect via e-mail. And yet productivity and the flourishing of communities and social networks within which we live and work depend on this kind of human interaction. I recommend that you read The Machine Stops by E.M Forster – a hugely memorable, somewhat scary short novel written in 1909 – a chilling tale of the control of technology over our lives. Here’s an excerpt – it’s enough to make you switch off your computer for good!

“Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived her. There were buttons and switches everywhere – buttons to call for food for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature. and there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.”

Honestly, the stories these banks are coming up with. Are they doing it just to get some PR? First RBS insists that its employees bank with them, or else…. and then HSBC opens a branch in Canford Cliffs, (Dorset) which will only serve people with large wads of cash or substantial mortgages. If I was an HSBC employee in Canford Cliffs I’d be wondering in eager anticipation whether or not HSBC will follow RBS’s example and insist that I bank with my employer. Hmmm, now would that involve a hefty payrise? Maybe someone could suggest it as a new recruitment strategy….

OK. We all know it. Creating true employee engagement in large organisations is no mean feat. True engagement (which doesn’t just come from a nice looking newsletter as we all know) depends on the combination and balance of many factors – leadership skills, communication, reward, development, culture and environment, line of sight, sustainability and so on….the list is a long one. Yet if an organisation gets it right – or as near to right as it can, profitability increases. I’ll say that slightly louder. PROFITABILITY INCREASES. By up to 20 per cent according to the Corporate Leadership Council. Which, unless we’re just here for the ride, is the whole point of an organisation’s existence (at least, in the private sector).

So why then do so many organisations procrastinate when it comes to making that leap of faith? Why do so many of them still see employee engagement initiatives as a cost rather than an investment? Why do they invest so little in internal communications and often HR, compared to external marketing, when with half decent measurement the results speak for themselves? Time and time again research demonstrates the financial benefits of increasing levels of engagement. We’ve seen dramatic results from our own work. To be fair, one could argue that many engagement initiatives don’t work – or there are so many of them the eyes start to glaze over. But it’s time the big white chiefs started to wake up and smell the coffee. There’s no time to waste. Invest in your people, do it right, and the £££’s will look after themselves.

The 7th UK National Storytelling Week is set to run from Saturday 27 January – Saturday 3 February.  Building on the success of the 2006 week which saw 900 events nationwide, this year will see a diverse array of events in Museums, Libraries, Schools and Theatres amongst other places….why don’t we make 2007 they year the work place gets involved!  For a list of events taking place around the country, or for further information and guide to running your event please visit The National Storytelling Week website.

The CIPD has declared that management speak is a key factor in reducing the support and trust that staff have in their managers. We couldn’t agree more – and some of the latest phrases emerging from business, according to Office Angels, are laughable. Apparently cool new buzzwords include ‘thought grenade’ (explosive good ideas), ‘Let’s sunset that’ (let’s not ever mention that bad idea again) and ‘touchpoints’ (meetings).

How does trust relate to management speak? Quite simply because jargon creates barriers, preventing people from communicating effectively. We’ve said it once, and we’ll say it again – start talking like normal human beings and you’ll find that people not only understand you, but will relate far better to you and what you’re trying to communicate. Everyone will be better off – and so will the organisation.