Why great leaders are often great storytellers

This week is National Storytelling Week in the UK. Its mission is to promote the oral tradition of storytelling.

I have always been fascinated by storytelling in corporate life. At the heart of most successful organisations is a very strong sense of purpose and direction. Great leaders typically know how to create a solid sense of purpose by delivering the organisation’s narrative effectively and with genuine commitment. These leaders understand the power of communication and influence to connect colleagues to strategy.

Storytelling helps us make sense of what’s really important about our organisations. As leaders we can use the human desire to make sense as a helpful way to increase our people’s engagement and resulting discretionary effort.  I have written in previous blog posts about the American organisational theorist Karl Weick’s belief that sensemaking is, at least in part, grounded in what has already happened. Weick describes^[i] sensemaking as how people seek to understand the organisation in which they work as a social process of storytelling, discussion and simplifying complexity. Through this process we can help people to develop a shared understanding of what’s important and why, as part of the transition to becoming more connected.

We have worked with Shop Direct over several years. They have moved from being a traditional, paper-based catalogue retailer into a leading digital retailer. When I spoke to HR director Jacqui Humphries for my Connected Leadership book, she said that, “Storytelling is one of the most important types of communication in an organisation and I don’t think most businesses do enough of it. Most organisations ‘tell’ people what to do. Storytelling is all about increasing understanding and creating an emotional connection. It’s all about explaining why things are important and using real life examples. Storytelling is crucial.”

Jacqui will join me as a special guest panellist following a Connected Leadership masterclass at Manchester Metropolitan University Business School which will be co-hosted by the Chartered Management Institute on the evening of Wednesday 16 March. I am very much looking forward to the event, and know Jacqui will add a great deal of insight. If you’re interested in coming along, please let me know.

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[i] Weick, K. The Social Psychology of Organising, 2nd edition, (McGraw-Hill, 1979).

Being specific: the power of a strong narrative

I love it when an organisation has a strong narrative - a story that helps people involved make sense of what’s really important about this business.

Key to that story is making it specific.  I remember a senior executive in one client who was always able to communicate with people at all levels of the organisation and with its customers with ease.  I realised that what he was doing in each case was telling a simple story, adapted for the people involved, which illustrated two or three key points in a natural flow that made whatever he was describing seem much simpler and easier to understand than before.  He always started with a specific event that encapsulated something special about what the organisation was seeking to achieve. Each story had a spine that gave it structure, and it placed the current situation in its context by using relevant examples so we could relate and therefore see how the future made sense. 

The storytelling executive was also good at making his stories stick.  He did this through repetition, ‘playing the broken record’ by telling and retelling his stories until we all had taken them to heart.  He’d often vary the example or change the emphasis a little, but the underlying narrative was consistent.  He knew his persistence paid dividends when he heard other people telling the same stories or using the same phrases.  His stories became part of the language of the company and spawned new versions from other people in their own words, as the ripples of engagement were felt across the business.  The stories were helping others to make sense of the purpose and direction, to believe, and to make these things their own.