Insight article
Moving an audience
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.