Change is constant; that’s nothing new. But if it seems like it’s exerting more intense pressure than ever lately on your work and your people, you’re in global company. “We’re faced with a Human Energy Crisis,” Microsoft’s Chief People Officer Kathleen Hogan recently quipped, declaring the state of the world’s workforce worse than just collective burnout. Gallup suggests the next global pandemic is already here, and it’s a mental health crisis — “stress, worry and sadness have been on the rise globally for the last decade — and all reached record highs in 2020.”
Here’s the good news: Human resilience is a tremendous force. Resilience is our ability to withstand and recover from difficulty. It’s that transcendent strength that arises from our shared experiences, the silver lining to our clouds. We show up, we face the challenge, we survive and learn and then we tell our stories.
And here’s the even better news: We can learn faster from those experiences— and increase our resiliency — when we share those stories and listen to those stories with more intention.
Here are three ways in which I’ve seen high-performing brands use storytelling to help their organizations overcome challenges and keep their employees resilient. For each example, I’ll include some tips on how you might apply story today as a force for good in your own organization.
Rally a team’s languishing spirit
Recently, I witnessed a global networking company face a difficult turning point in a years-long transformation effort. At the time, the team was exhausted and feeling daunted. They’d worked so hard and endured so much change, but so far for little visible gain. The CEO and board still believed the strategy was right and would pay off. There just were very few tangible results to show for all the effort, and spirits were low across the company.
HR had just executed its annual employee engagement survey, which asked employees to rank on a scale of one to 10, how strongly they believed in the company’s strategy and in the company’s ability to execute. Scores on those two questions were relatively low across the board. But what really sounded the alarm for the company’s optimistic and charming CEO was this: Senior leadership — more than 100 VPs and above — were the lowest scoring cohort, scoring both those questions only at about a six. Oof.
It’s one thing for an aligned team of leaders to earn the trust of the masses. It’s entirely another for a CEO to re-earn the trust of the leaders themselves. How did he do it? He turned, at least in part, to story.
First, he carefully crafted a state of the union presentation to deliver to his leadership team. He positioned the transformation effort itself as a story, framing the leaders themselves as part heroes, part customer-mentors, and part supporting cast in a sweeping technological epic. He was also careful to make his content empathetic to the concerns his leaders had shared, addressing both rational and emotional objections one by one.
But more importantly, when it came time to deliver that presentation, he paused before he opened the PowerPoint. “I have a deck,” he said, “but first, did you know that before I rose to CEO here, I almost quit?”
Most of them didn’t know: A few years prior to his promotion to the head office, he was losing faith in the company’s direction and his own role within it, and he’d walked into the then-CEO’s office with the intent to resign. The ensuing radically candid discussion had not only persuaded him to stay, but made a lasting impression on him about the kind of executive he wanted to be.
His presentation that day helped make the strategy clearer. The slides addressed the leaders’ objections head on. The content presented a rational case to believe. But the personal story? That ended up doing something more potent. It bonded the CEO and his leaders in a shared moment of empathy and feeling. It made his optimism more credible in the eyes of his worried team. It made their doubt and vulnerability feel safer, while subtly signaling to them an invitation to overcome those doubts and persist — or to self-select out.
Three months after this turning point, the company repeated the same engagement survey. On those two questions, belief in the strategy and in the company’s ability to execute, the senior leadership cohort’s score rose to an average of nearly nine-tenths, almost 30 percent higher. Was it the CEO’s story alone that made it happen? Of course not. But the CEO and his leadership team alike know that moment had a profound impact on the results.
How you could apply this:
- Consider an emotional challenge or conflict you or colleagues face. Reflect on the emotion at its core. What is it? Anxiety? Impatience? Frustration? Regret?
- Think about stories from your personal life, fiction or real life around you that caused that emotion. Keep it simple: a noun, a verb, then the emotion.
- Try fleshing one story out on paper using story structure. Sketch it or use words, whichever feels more natural. Give it a protagonist and identify what “inciting incident” happened to create the tension or conflict. Describe what happened next as the hero attempted to resolve the tension or conflict. Then explain how it ended and land on the lesson.
- In your next presentation, try weaving in one relevant story — something from your own experience or something that comes to mind from the world around you to emphasize an idea and connect to your audience on a more emotive level.
Build trust and share ideas across generations
It’s no secret that a workforce made up of 20-somethings, 40-somethings and 60-somethings will be full of diverse perspectives and working styles that can impact interpersonal relationships and productivity. What if it leads to a communication disconnect that threatens resilience?
In 2021, that was happening at a Fortune 500 financial services leader. In this company’s culture, persuasion and innovation happened using tightly worded executive briefs sent over email. This had served them quite well for decades. Headed into the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, this company’s stock was rising to unprecedented levels and it was a perennial name on Fortune’s “Most Admired Brands” list.
The company hired an influx of Generation Z workers, most of whom were working remote and had never met their older, more senior colleagues in-person. These Gen Z workers were showing up principled, assertive, smart and opinionated, but unindoctrinated in how to communicate within the company’s executive-brief culture.
“For that matter, our older leaders weren’t great at giving feedback to the younger workers either,” our learning and development contact shared. “We had a rising two-way trust problem, and we were headed toward a culture clash.” The generational divide was part of the problem, the remote work was another part. Together, it was a recipe for growing frustrations and innovation blockades.
The company’s leadership turned to storytelling. Specifically, they turned to storytelling structure. Starting with their younger new hires, they systematically taught team members how to organize their ideas and supporting data into a brief that had an intentional beginning, middle and end, using effective story shaping that would bring their senior-colleague audience along toward a compelling conclusion. Then, they taught the more senior workers — typically the recipients of briefs — to deliver feedback using the same kind of story structure.
Storytelling did its job here and got the business back on track quickly. “We were amazed at how much this shared story language led to trust in both directions,” the L&D leader told us. “It’s a culture shift, and it’s beautiful.”
How you could apply this:
- Read up on the easy basics of “story structure.”
- Review a recent or upcoming presentation, and consider how you might reorganize the flow of the information using story structure.
- Consider who makes up that story’s cast of characters. Who is the protagonist? (To quote presentation guru Nancy Duarte in her book Resonate, “You are not the hero who will save the audience; the audience is your hero.”) Who’s the mentor? What or who is the inciting incident or challenge that calls the protagonist to a journey of change? Knowing this, what might you do differently to organize your presentation?
Bonding your people for strength and connection
Change or no change, humans have a psychological need for interpersonal bonding, belonging and connection. On Maslow’s hierarchy of needs these rank just after food, water, air and safety.
When times are tough for teams, you can expect those interpersonal needs to intensify as people look for stability and strength in their relationships with the people around them. Here, storytelling can work absolute wonders.
At a major U.S. television network, the executive team was undergoing a business challenge and realized that in the midst of it, the bonds of trust among them were suffering. With shelves full of Emmys, they knew all too well the power of story. So they set aside a day to gather, took a break from business, and bonded over stories in answers to prompts, especially about the mentors they’d had throughout their lives.
Our own company does something similar. We often close our monthly virtual all-teams meetings with speed-story sessions, placing teams in small breakout rooms and giving them five minutes to answer easy prompts. This encourages casual bonds and serendipitous connections. It also builds storytelling muscle into our daily work.
At a recent in-person gathering of the whole company, we asked everyone to bring a physical artifact that symbolized their roots. Each person placed their artifact on a long table — close to 100 objects in a random collection that was beautiful to behold in aggregate. Then at one point in the agenda, we broke into small groups and told our individual stories. In my group, a designer shared a drum kit tuning key and spoke about the time he spent learning music and drumming with his musician father. He shared how he drew on the idea of tuning a drum kit as a metaphor in his life for fine tuning his professional craft and his own mental health. I see him in a new way now. Under the pressure of a deadline or in the trenches of change with him, I’ll feel different working side by side with him.
How you could apply this:
Try your own “speed stories” session at the end of a monthly team meeting:
- Write a series of basic speed-story prompts that would help your team members better connect and bond. These can be simple, like, “what’s something you did this summer that made you happy?” or “what is your favorite holiday and why?”
- Take the last 10 minutes of the meeting to conduct the session. Do one prompt per session.
- Keep the groups small, three to four people at most.
“Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?” wrote Henry David Thoreau.
When we hear a great story, we’re transported into another world where we can laugh, cry and escape the boredom or stress of our everyday lives. We love stories so much that we tell and retell them…at the coffee shop, around the dinner table, beside the campfire. But stories can do so much more than entertain us. They can enlighten us, teach us and unite us. And when the going is hard and when change is constant, they can give us the strength and unity we need to recover, rebound and rise.
