NEWS

A telling way to make changes

Storytelling might seem an unlikely tool for organisation and personal development, however it is an increasingly common feature of management away-days and now a key technique used by managers, facilitators and consultants to use to engage people in creative and collaborative work.

Why storytelling?

As social animals, we express ourselves largely through the stories we tell about our past and present lives, and about the future we hope for. The tone and timbre of our stories reveal a great deal about our personalities and our mindsets, so when we go to work and assume our functional role, it is in fact counter-productive to leave storytelling at the door. We all have stories, we all tell stories, and it is through our stories that we make sense of our experiences. To quote Noel Tichy (The Leadership Engine): “Stories create real, human connections by allowing others to get inside our experience. They engage listeners on an emotional and intuitive level that is rarely touched by the purely rational argument.”

Stories and the conversations they generate are the lifeblood of relationships, and an organisation’s success is dependant on the quality of its relationships. Creating a space for people to share their stories about the organisation can therefore bring about a new and different climate, sparking conversations that wouldn’t normally happen and germinating new ideas.

The power of storytelling

At Sheppard Moscow, we are consequently using storytelling more and more in our work to develop and support individuals, teams and organisations - such as helping leaders explore and clarify their personal vision and values, enhancing their ability to lead authentically and inspire others; as the foundation of a great executive coaching relationship and for personal development work; and to help leadership teams articulate their organisational vision and values, and put these across as a story that organisation members can relate to.

The role of storytelling in expressing the organisation’s culture complements the more traditional diagnostic methods and engages people more fully in communicating the changes they would like for the future. Teams, for example, respond very well to using storytelling to relate their experiences of when they were at their best, and to craft a picture of how they will work together in the future.

Storytelling in practice

Two clients that have recently benefited from the technique’s hugely positive impact are a major Irish bank and a leading biotechnology company.

We were tasked with changing the culture in a division of the bank as part of their ambitious business plans for 2010. Instead of analysing the pitfalls of the current culture or creating idealised pictures of the future we turned to storytelling. At a meeting of 50 managers seated at tables of seven, we asked each person to remember a time in the recent past when, in their view, the organisation was at its best. Then with a few minutes preparation, each person told their story of that moment to colleagues, with some subsequently telling their story to the whole group. Some great storytelling emerged, such as sales people hopping over fences and through farmers fields to clinch deals, and teams of traditionally adversarial sales and credit people working together, with names, characters, dialogue, colour and laughter all present. During the session we lifted the repeated themes for them to hold as the chapter headings in the story of the new organisation, which led to definitions of the new culture.

We have also used storytelling to help newly recruited senior managers quickly understand the culture of a major biotechnology company and start living it on a day-to-day basis. Although our client’s business has grown in its twenty-five year existence to over ten thousand people working on four continents, it still operates in a very decentralised, entrepreneurial way. Its matrix structure, relationship bias and lack of centralised processes are therefore a real challenge to newcomers.
We worked with the company to design a two-day event for new senior managers, with a number of storytelling episodes told by vice presidents and directors at the core of the programme. The storytellers are given some guidance and are coached in the craft, but are mostly trusted to find the story that they believe will be most useful to the newcomers. We have discovered some gifted, natural storytellers, whose stories really capture the attention of the new managers. They bring depth, colour and vibrancy, and illustrate the essence and experience of the organisation’s culture in a way that no presentation could. As preparation for the event we also get the new managers to craft their own joining stories, which they tell to one another as part of the process of building their network of relationships. This has proven to be a great way for people to get to know one another, with the additional benefit of new managers discovering the power of storytelling for themselves.

To find out more about storytelling, please contact our Dublin office on +353 1 2937010

Back to News