Leadership: The Untold Story
Quick, answer this question: When was the last time you heard a good story?
That question is much harder to answer today than it was thirty or forty years ago. Storytelling has been around for thousands of yearsits the way our ancestors passed on important life lessonsbut today, story telling is unfortunately a fading art form.
We are surrounded by distractionscell phones keep us connected, sometimes against our will; computers bring us up-to-the-minute news, weather reports, and email from around the world; and television and movies entertain us. In a world with so much competition for our attention, how do we keep the people we work with engaged, entertained, and committed?
Every Leader Tells a Story
It starts with the leaders of an organization and the environment they create for their employees or co-workers. Leaders do not always have an official title; anyone whom others willingly look to for inspiration or guidance is a leader, and such people can be found at all levels within a company, from CEO down to grounds keeper. These leaders, whether formally designated or not, have a tremendous impact on their companies, and to be sure theyre on boardengaged, committed, and even having funis a challenge that management today must face. These leaders must know themselves and their companies well enough to be able to share the companys soul with others.
I was working with a retail import furniture store whose business had just started picking up when a competing business moved in down the street, selling items of lesser quality at lower prices. After anonymously checking out this new competition, I understood what was missing in my own clients sales process: a story.
The owners had moved with their two children to the interior of Mexico, where they hired local tradesmen to custom-design the furniture and accessories they believed U.S. consumers wanted. Each piece of pottery, iron work, and wood furniture was unique and had a story attached to it about the men and women who had created it and the native craft methods used. Unfortunately, these stories had been ignored. By not turning this information into a sales tool, my clients had lost the opportunity to personalize their offerings and capture their customers interest.
We created place cards for this retail store to set beside each item, with a brief story about the artisan and a picture of the product being crafted. Then the sales staff traveled to Mexico themselves to meet these craftsmen and watch the products being made, thus giving them their own stories to tell. People started coming to the store not only to buy but to hear these interesting tales of another culture.
In todays world of passive vegging in front of televisions or staring at computer screens, recognizing stories and keeping them alive is not an easy task. If we are to successfully pass the reins to the next generation of leaders within our organizations, our own stories need to be toldnow.
Stories need to be told
You may remember the story of what happened when Bill Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, found the door to the supply room locked. He snapped it open with a bolt cutter and left a note reading, Dont ever lock this door again. It was a lesson about trust.
Or theres the time that Dave Packard was touring an HP factory when he saw a cheap, thin prototype for a new product and immediately twisted it into a mangled ball, declaring it a hunk-a junk. The employees learned a lesson in the importance of quality as well as cost. Such incidents are stories that can be used by leaders to promote the corporate culture and a feeling of common roots.
I was facilitating a group with one of my clients, Mrs. Fields Cookies, and, as the employees were talking about the need to cut costs, one of the vice-presidents related a story about the early years of the company. During a board meeting, Debbie Fields, the founder, said that even if the exorbitant price of butter was causing them to lose money, which it was, that they would not use a less expensive and lower quality alternative. This helped the employees understand how important it was to Debbie and her company to produce the highest quality product even if it meant lower profits.
Why stories need to be told
Humans are storytellers, said Peter Horton, who was a Hollywood script writer for fifteen years before joining IBMs management development division. He teaches about effective narrative. In his session he says, Every script writer knows the story elements that increase its chance of hooking an audience: a protagonist the audience can empathize with, something important at stake, mounting jeopardy, and a formidable antagonist.
Stories enhance attention, create anticipation, and increase retention. They provide a familiar set of hooks that allow us to process the information and hang on to the story.
In my classes on business presentation skills, some people find it difficult to understand how to put the hook into their talk. Every presentation that is given should sound like a well-crafted story. Presenters must get the audiences attention at the very beginning or they wont reach them. The punch line or the attention-getter must be put at the beginning.
For example, I was working with a group of engineers who were developing presentations on why maintenance needed to be done on the facility even though it would result in downtime and loss of immediate profits. If this maintenance wasnt done soon, the resulting loss of efficiency would far outweigh the cost of taking the facility off-line for three days. The presentations were technically and chronologically correct, but there was nothing in them to catch managements attention, and, without that attention, the engineers wouldnt be able to sell their point of view.
As we reworked the presentations, we decided to grab the audiences attention by beginning with the startling amount of revenue to be lost if the maintenance was not done. The engineers then followed with the story of an accident several years earlier that had resulted in the loss of a life, an accident that might have been prevented had maintenance been done sooner. In this instance, a story helped emphasize important information and gave the listeners something to remember.
Who is telling the stories?
CEOs have begun writing books about their companies, and, although some of these books may not be of great interest to outsiders, they do establish corporate memory by passing on to employees the history of their companies.
Pat Kelly, former president of Physician Sales & Service (PSS), now called PSS/World Medical Inc., wrote a book called Faster Company. He hoped to sell many copies, but his real purpose was to have something tangible to put into his employees hands that said, This is the way we treat each other. This is the way we treat our customers. If you understand this, youll make it here and well all be extraordinarily successful. This is our story.
Pat Kelly loved to tell stories about growing up in the Virginia Home for Boys or about fighting in Vietnam, but one of his favorite stories was about PSSs battles with a bank. In the companys early days, it was growing so fast that the bank kept refusing its loan applications and actually called one of the loans, leaving PSS to raise equity from its employees.
Several years later, the same local bank lured Kelly back to do business with them again, but, before long, it was treating them the same way, even reneging on a loan. At that point Kelly said he was going to bury the bank.
After ordering a casket and headstone, he took every loan and every gift the bank had ever given him and placed them inside the casket, then had a funeral party and buried the filled casket in his backyard. When one of his employees asked why he hadnt done the easy and fun thing and simply gone out on his boat to bury it at sea, he replied that he never knew when he might have to dig it up again and go crawling back to the bank.
PSS employees laugh when they hear that story, but they also learn that no matter how badly others might treat them, the answer is to find a way to laugh about it rather than burning their proverbial bridges.
In the book, Joy at Work, Dennis Bakke, the co-founder of AES Corporation, an energy company with 40,000 employees in thirty-one countries, describes the company culture as one of high values, its mission being to serve society in an economically sustainable manner with safe, clean, reliable electricity. Many times, to the chagrin of the board and share holders, he took the higher road and made decisions based on the values the company had been founded on rather than on immediate profit. By telling stories about these difficult decisions to the employees, he gave them a chance to absorb values that they themselves could use both on the job and in their own lives.
One of the stories he tells concerns a company AES bought in the Dominican Republic. This company had suffered 385 electricity-related accidental deaths in the previous year, but by 2000 the number of fatalities had dropped to twenty-nine. In this case, AESs way of doing business actually saved hundreds of lives.
Dennis believes that when people are part of something greater than themselves, work becomes fun. He describes fun work as rewarding, creative, exciting, and successful. He pushes decision making down to the employee level, engaging them in the corporate process, ensuring that they feel they are making a difference, and, in effect, making each one a leader.
How to tell your own stories
A primary goal of leadership is to train the next generation of leadersto take people where they are and help them develop into the leaders we need them to be. Helping them imagine themselves as leaders is a first step and an essential part of the transition.
Leaders are needed in all areas of an organization, for they are the people behind its success. These leaders take responsibility whether or not officially bestowed; they create an environment of trust where people can work together to get the job done; and they inspire team spirit that in turn encourages others to become the leaders necessary to an organizations continuity.
The stories that can help create strong leaders and that therefore need to be told in the workplace must include answers to these three questions:
Who am I?
Who are we?
Where are we going?
These may sound like easy question, but answering them honestly requires both time and careful thought, an effort that will repay you many times over. Only when company leaders know these answers can they tell the stories that lead to both fun and profitability.
That question is much harder to answer today than it was thirty or forty years ago. Storytelling has been around for thousands of yearsits the way our ancestors passed on important life lessonsbut today, story telling is unfortunately a fading art form.
We are surrounded by distractionscell phones keep us connected, sometimes against our will; computers bring us up-to-the-minute news, weather reports, and email from around the world; and television and movies entertain us. In a world with so much competition for our attention, how do we keep the people we work with engaged, entertained, and committed?
Every Leader Tells a Story
It starts with the leaders of an organization and the environment they create for their employees or co-workers. Leaders do not always have an official title; anyone whom others willingly look to for inspiration or guidance is a leader, and such people can be found at all levels within a company, from CEO down to grounds keeper. These leaders, whether formally designated or not, have a tremendous impact on their companies, and to be sure theyre on boardengaged, committed, and even having funis a challenge that management today must face. These leaders must know themselves and their companies well enough to be able to share the companys soul with others.
I was working with a retail import furniture store whose business had just started picking up when a competing business moved in down the street, selling items of lesser quality at lower prices. After anonymously checking out this new competition, I understood what was missing in my own clients sales process: a story.
The owners had moved with their two children to the interior of Mexico, where they hired local tradesmen to custom-design the furniture and accessories they believed U.S. consumers wanted. Each piece of pottery, iron work, and wood furniture was unique and had a story attached to it about the men and women who had created it and the native craft methods used. Unfortunately, these stories had been ignored. By not turning this information into a sales tool, my clients had lost the opportunity to personalize their offerings and capture their customers interest.
We created place cards for this retail store to set beside each item, with a brief story about the artisan and a picture of the product being crafted. Then the sales staff traveled to Mexico themselves to meet these craftsmen and watch the products being made, thus giving them their own stories to tell. People started coming to the store not only to buy but to hear these interesting tales of another culture.
In todays world of passive vegging in front of televisions or staring at computer screens, recognizing stories and keeping them alive is not an easy task. If we are to successfully pass the reins to the next generation of leaders within our organizations, our own stories need to be toldnow.
Stories need to be told
You may remember the story of what happened when Bill Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, found the door to the supply room locked. He snapped it open with a bolt cutter and left a note reading, Dont ever lock this door again. It was a lesson about trust.
Or theres the time that Dave Packard was touring an HP factory when he saw a cheap, thin prototype for a new product and immediately twisted it into a mangled ball, declaring it a hunk-a junk. The employees learned a lesson in the importance of quality as well as cost. Such incidents are stories that can be used by leaders to promote the corporate culture and a feeling of common roots.
I was facilitating a group with one of my clients, Mrs. Fields Cookies, and, as the employees were talking about the need to cut costs, one of the vice-presidents related a story about the early years of the company. During a board meeting, Debbie Fields, the founder, said that even if the exorbitant price of butter was causing them to lose money, which it was, that they would not use a less expensive and lower quality alternative. This helped the employees understand how important it was to Debbie and her company to produce the highest quality product even if it meant lower profits.
Why stories need to be told
Humans are storytellers, said Peter Horton, who was a Hollywood script writer for fifteen years before joining IBMs management development division. He teaches about effective narrative. In his session he says, Every script writer knows the story elements that increase its chance of hooking an audience: a protagonist the audience can empathize with, something important at stake, mounting jeopardy, and a formidable antagonist.
Stories enhance attention, create anticipation, and increase retention. They provide a familiar set of hooks that allow us to process the information and hang on to the story.
In my classes on business presentation skills, some people find it difficult to understand how to put the hook into their talk. Every presentation that is given should sound like a well-crafted story. Presenters must get the audiences attention at the very beginning or they wont reach them. The punch line or the attention-getter must be put at the beginning.
For example, I was working with a group of engineers who were developing presentations on why maintenance needed to be done on the facility even though it would result in downtime and loss of immediate profits. If this maintenance wasnt done soon, the resulting loss of efficiency would far outweigh the cost of taking the facility off-line for three days. The presentations were technically and chronologically correct, but there was nothing in them to catch managements attention, and, without that attention, the engineers wouldnt be able to sell their point of view.
As we reworked the presentations, we decided to grab the audiences attention by beginning with the startling amount of revenue to be lost if the maintenance was not done. The engineers then followed with the story of an accident several years earlier that had resulted in the loss of a life, an accident that might have been prevented had maintenance been done sooner. In this instance, a story helped emphasize important information and gave the listeners something to remember.
Who is telling the stories?
CEOs have begun writing books about their companies, and, although some of these books may not be of great interest to outsiders, they do establish corporate memory by passing on to employees the history of their companies.
Pat Kelly, former president of Physician Sales & Service (PSS), now called PSS/World Medical Inc., wrote a book called Faster Company. He hoped to sell many copies, but his real purpose was to have something tangible to put into his employees hands that said, This is the way we treat each other. This is the way we treat our customers. If you understand this, youll make it here and well all be extraordinarily successful. This is our story.
Pat Kelly loved to tell stories about growing up in the Virginia Home for Boys or about fighting in Vietnam, but one of his favorite stories was about PSSs battles with a bank. In the companys early days, it was growing so fast that the bank kept refusing its loan applications and actually called one of the loans, leaving PSS to raise equity from its employees.
Several years later, the same local bank lured Kelly back to do business with them again, but, before long, it was treating them the same way, even reneging on a loan. At that point Kelly said he was going to bury the bank.
After ordering a casket and headstone, he took every loan and every gift the bank had ever given him and placed them inside the casket, then had a funeral party and buried the filled casket in his backyard. When one of his employees asked why he hadnt done the easy and fun thing and simply gone out on his boat to bury it at sea, he replied that he never knew when he might have to dig it up again and go crawling back to the bank.
PSS employees laugh when they hear that story, but they also learn that no matter how badly others might treat them, the answer is to find a way to laugh about it rather than burning their proverbial bridges.
In the book, Joy at Work, Dennis Bakke, the co-founder of AES Corporation, an energy company with 40,000 employees in thirty-one countries, describes the company culture as one of high values, its mission being to serve society in an economically sustainable manner with safe, clean, reliable electricity. Many times, to the chagrin of the board and share holders, he took the higher road and made decisions based on the values the company had been founded on rather than on immediate profit. By telling stories about these difficult decisions to the employees, he gave them a chance to absorb values that they themselves could use both on the job and in their own lives.
One of the stories he tells concerns a company AES bought in the Dominican Republic. This company had suffered 385 electricity-related accidental deaths in the previous year, but by 2000 the number of fatalities had dropped to twenty-nine. In this case, AESs way of doing business actually saved hundreds of lives.
Dennis believes that when people are part of something greater than themselves, work becomes fun. He describes fun work as rewarding, creative, exciting, and successful. He pushes decision making down to the employee level, engaging them in the corporate process, ensuring that they feel they are making a difference, and, in effect, making each one a leader.
How to tell your own stories
A primary goal of leadership is to train the next generation of leadersto take people where they are and help them develop into the leaders we need them to be. Helping them imagine themselves as leaders is a first step and an essential part of the transition.
Leaders are needed in all areas of an organization, for they are the people behind its success. These leaders take responsibility whether or not officially bestowed; they create an environment of trust where people can work together to get the job done; and they inspire team spirit that in turn encourages others to become the leaders necessary to an organizations continuity.
The stories that can help create strong leaders and that therefore need to be told in the workplace must include answers to these three questions:
Who am I?
Who are we?
Where are we going?
These may sound like easy question, but answering them honestly requires both time and careful thought, an effort that will repay you many times over. Only when company leaders know these answers can they tell the stories that lead to both fun and profitability.
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