Engaging people through the use of story
“There can be few talents more important to managerial success than knowing how to tell a good story” – Michael Hattersley, Harvard Management Updates
Enlarging the conversation
A bus driver taking a group of elderly citizens on an outing was amazed at how well they treated him. They regularly offered him peanuts to eat during the journey – his favourite. As he dropped them off after the outing, he said, “That was
uncommonly good treatment. Thank you.” “Oh, absolutely no trouble” a spokesperson replied, “You see,
most of us have false teeth. We can only suck the chocolate off our chocolate-coated peanuts, and then it’s such a pity just to throw them away.”
Keys are not big things, yet a small key can open a big lock. In the
same way a story that takes just a minute to tell can stimulate a big facilitated conversation. The stories we tell include ‘it happened’ (challenges, successes and failures in actual organisations) stories, and fictional tales. The peanut story has for example opened up discussion of questions amongst service providers in an organisation, covering questions such as:
• Are we satisfying our customers deeply or only on the surface? • Does our product have enough added value? • Is our work a means to an end and about the pay packet rather than about a passionate involvement in something truly worthwhile? • What are our true motives for providing customer service?
They concluded that they are each day presented with opportunity after opportunity to make a positive difference for someone else by serving their needs and giving the other a sense that they’re important and worthy of care – and that this is both a definition of meaning and a definition of customer service.
Stories: a growing movement
Story-telling and listening in business is a fast-growing movement. Tom Peters, Peter Senge and Ralph Windle, Noel Tichy - world famous business consultants, authors and conference speakers, say respectively:
“How do we let people know what’s important around here without constraining them? The best way, as I see it: stories.”
“Leaders need to be adept at story telling – integrating the organisations’ core values and purpose with its operating policies and structures.”
“So-called scientific management has proved amazingly durable
and resistant to the voices of ‘humanization’. In the Seventies and Eighties more flexible work and career patterns loosened the structures and made more transparent the need for individuality and creativity. The challenge now is to position work in the context of the inter- relationships between the right and left cortices of the brain.”
“The most effective leaders are in touch with their personal stories.” 12 Halo and Noose | May 2012 And recent research is showing clearly that story is a way to
communicate, to engage and mobilise the disengaged, that listeners suspend disbelief and counter-argument during the telling, that people prefer reaching their own insights, and that well told stories stick in the memory and stimulate action. People respond far better to stories than they do to facts, figures, statistics, bar charts, bullet point presentations, jargon and business-speak. Facts tell but stories sell. They are catalysts to learning and improved performance.
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