Tell Me a Story
How a company-inspired yarn can
motivate your employees
Everybody loves a good story and employees are no
exception. The age-old tradition of storytelling is experiencing a revival
and increasing number of companies are using it to increase morale, get
across mission statements, recruit new staff members and praise existing
ones. The roles storytelling play can be as varied as the tales told
throughout organizations that are using them.
Many companies are finding that stories can be the
glue that holds an organization together. In the past few years, Salt Lake
City-based Nightime Pediatrics Clinics has grown from one clinic to a
five-facility pediatric practice. Along the way it has experienced growing
pains: Every time a clinic was added, the core values of the company were
eroded. Employees didn't recognize that their actions had any impact on
patients.
Nightime's Chief Executive Officer, Teresa Lever-Pollary,
thought the core values of the company had their origins in events that
occurred within the original organization and that these "stories" might
help perpetuate the company's culture. So she hired Rick Stone, president of
the Orlando-based StoryWork Institute, a national company that has developed
training programs dealing with storytelling for teambuilding and leadership.
He helped Lever-Pollary identify stories that reflected the core values of
the company.
The result of their efforts was Nightime Stories, a
book of yarns told by the staff and patients of Nightime. The book was given
out to all employees on the company's 15th anniversary in the hopes that it
would pull the organization back together and give employees a better sense
of their contributions.
Did it work? "One employee went to Lever-Pollary in
tears and said, 'I have not recognized over the course of the years what
I've done here.' It really made an impact," says Sue Kiisel, a training and
development manager at Nightime. "Employees recognized their work made a
difference."
In most organizations the history of the company,
along with its mission and value statements, aren't in a book of stories but
a document that's handed to employees on the first day of the job. Most
employees don't make it through these dense manuals, let alone remember
what's in them. Like Nightime's book, stories in the form of a company
manual can get across company policies and values in a way that employees
will not only understand, but remember.
In lieu of a mission statement, David Armstrong, chief
operating officer of Armstrong International Inc., and author of Managing by
Storying Around, writes stories and disseminates them among employees.
"There was a problem getting people to read and remember what they read.
What good is a policy if employees can't use it when they need it? I decided
to write stories because they're memorable and people listen." His idea paid
off. "People told me that they knew more about how this company ran in one
month after reading those stories than they knew about their former company
where they worked for 10 to 12 years."
Since then, he's since written three books on managing
through stories and receives calls from Fortune 500 companies all over the
world for advice on how to implement storytelling in their organizations.
"They've been assigned by top level executives to improve their company
culture. They're downsizing, they're having problems and they don't know
what to do. They need to improve communications and storytelling is a fun,
friendly form of communication," says Armstrong.
And that's not all it does. According to Stone,
stories provide behavioral models on how employees should act in certain
situations. Noel Tichy's book, The Leadership Engine, advocates that the
best tool in the leaders arsenal is storytelling. He recalls a story about
the computer company Hewlett-Packard. Dave Packard walks into a room, sees a
lock on a cabinet and calls for a saw. He saws off the lock and says, "we
will not have a workplace where we have to lock things up."
"When employees hear this story they have a decision
to make," says Stone. "They must ask themselves, 'What is the message
Packard is sending?'"
Managers are also using stories for recruiting
purposes. Armstrong says it gives powerful insight when hiring. "I have
potential employees read some of my stories," he says. "If they like the
story and its morals, then we'll keep talking. If they say it's ridiculous,
we stop. I want the person to fit the values of my company. This is an
effective way to find out if they do."
Stories carry lessons and send messages internally and
externally about the morals of a company. Consider this example from a
recent article in Fortune magazine. At IBM a security guard forces CEO Tom
Watson to go back for his identification. Watson praises him for sticking to
company policy. At Revlon, Charles Revlon is stopped by a receptionist from
walking away with a sign in sheet. He fires her. The moral of the story for
one company becomes rules are obeyed, the other obeys rulers.
At its simplest, storytelling is the oldest form of
communication. It has the ability to touch human emotion and move people.
While it may seem an esoteric concept for business management, it works for
those untraditional enough to try it. As Armstrong says in his book, "All
cultures, all ages, all genders, all races, all disabilities, all levels of
experience, all levels of education and all businesses yesterday, today and
tomorrow believe and enjoy storytelling."
How can you argue with that?
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Tips for Doing Your Own Storytelling ……
● Identify heroic action in your company where people
made a difference. Have leaders share these stories whenever they can at
staff meetings, in planning situations, newsletters, etc.
● Think about your business from a story perspective.
Do you have good stories that illustrate your core values, mission and
policies?
● Find out who the storytellers in your organization
are. There's always someone around the water cooler telling tales. Get them
to help you.
● Expect resistance. Some employees may think it's a
strange concept, but once they've read a few stories they'll be hooked.
● Appoint story ambassadors to post stories on
bulletin boards throughout the company so everyone can read them.
● Keep stories short and to the point.
● Use employees' names. They enjoy recognition and are
motivated by it.
adapted from
http://www.businesscafeonline.com/businesscafe/website.nsf/AllIssues/12001?OpenDocument
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