Story Mastery

How leaders supercharge results with business storytelling

Yamini Naidu

• Publisher: Yamini Naidu Consulting
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780648598718
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Whatever it is you are trying to do in business, whether you are leading people, managing change, influencing the board or building your career — storytelling will help you... that’s a guarantee.

Discover stories from leaders like you, who have applied these simple steps and achieved career defining business results. Storytelling is not a natural gift, but a skill you can learn.

Today stories are as critical as data. Data on its own is no longer enough when you want toinfluence and inspire. ‘Show me the money’ reinvents itself as ‘Tell me the story’. Are you ready for the storytelling revolution? This book is your first step.

Yamini Naidu is the world’s only economist turned business storyteller. Rated among the top storytellers in the world, her work has transformed leaders all over the world. And now it’s your turn.

1. WHY STORYTELLING?

Research has found that leaders around the world consistently identify very similar challenges, even though they describe them differently. Heading the list are usually:

•leading a team

•guiding change

•inspiring others.

Is it all about engaging and connecting people? Yes. It’s about relationships and results.

If you were a leader in 16th century Italy, the answer to moving people into action was easy. You would do it through fear, as suggested by diplomat and political theorist, Niccolo Machiavelli. Successful, smart leaders in the 21st century know that hard power (fear, command and control, yell and tell) is not the way to create long-lasting, sustainable influence or change.

In the 1990s, political scientist Joseph Nye introduced us to the concept of soft power – creating change through connecting, consulting and collaborating. Most leaders know this is how we get people on board. Think of soft power as sowing seeds when planting a garden: it’s difficult for the impatient but worth it for the long-term results.

Yet research tells us that more than 70 per cent of change efforts in organisations fail. So whatever combination of these two tools (hard power and soft power) we adopt, many of our efforts will still be unsuccessful. Hard and soft power alone are often not enough.

The new currency of change is as old as time. It is storytelling. A purposeful, authentic story in business can influence, persuade and motivate people. Here’s an example from a client on what this looks like.

STORY TITLE: CRASH AND CURTSY

When I was 22, I became a travelling saleswoman. I’d won a big promotion to work in Australia. After spending the previous few weeks selling in Utah, you can imagine my desire for a fancy international business trip. Bright eyed and bushy tailed, I landed in gorgeous sunny Sydney.

I started at the University of New South Wales and pitched to class after class, slowly working my way up to the larger lecture halls. Finally, I was ready to hit the biggest 1000-seat hall on campus. I was so excited. I ran into the room, up the ramp, jumped across to the stage and BOOM! I promptly missed the stage and landed flat on my bum. Turns out there was a gap I’d missed. A thousand soon-to-be engineers burst out laughing. Now I had a choice to make: run, freeze or keep going. I climbed up onto that stage, curtsied to all (everyone clapped) and began my pitch. You may wonder why I’ve shared this story with you today? AMP Capital is changing, rapidly. And not all of those changes will land perfectly. But it’s the power to pick ourselves up, to keep going, that’s what matters.

STORYTELLER: MICHELLE SANIT, CHANGE MANAGER,
STRATEGY & INVESTMENT SERVICES, AMP CAPITAL

John Kotter, the foremost authority on change leadership, suggests change leaders communicate ‘in ways that are as emotionally engaging and compelling as possible. They rely on vivid stories that are told and retold. You don’t have to spend a million dollars and six months to prepare for a change effort. You do have to make sure that you touch people emotionally . . .’

Hard power informs, soft power invites and story power inspires #StoryMastery

Not for a moment am I suggesting that in sharing one story you will influence 100 per cent of your audience. No one story can do that, and no one deserves that level of influence, because one day you might have a bad idea. But time and again when working with clients I have seen how purposeful stories, crafted and shared with authenticity, inspire and have a seismic impact.

The currency of business itself has changed. Are you trading in this new currency?

WHY TODAY?

For nearly 80 years, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has been collecting data on the physical and mental health of hundreds of men and women and drawing lessons on how we might live longer and happier lives. Three words capture the findings: relationships, relationships, relationships!

This insight is the key to our success at work. No matter what you do, your success depends on your relationships (how you connect, engage and inspire people) and the results you deliver. This is what you are measured by, what gets you promoted and noticed. And the two are directly correlated, as my statistician lecturer was fond of shouting out at us:

Relationships + Results = Success

Engaging people and delivering results. Day in, day out. We engage our teams, our peers, our boards, our suppliers, our customers, our stakeholders, our communities. We cannot get the results we need without relationships.

Psychologist professor Robert Hogan identifies our primary concerns at work as getting along and getting ahead. ‘We want to get along with others by getting a good reputation and then we want to get ahead using that reputation.’ Again, relationships (getting along) and results (getting ahead).

So how can storytelling help us build relationships and deliver results? As leaders we know our results happen through other people – we drive them, motivate them, inspire them, give them direction, collaborate, consult . . . the list goes on.

Where does storytelling fit into this heady mix? The words of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry come to mind: ‘If you want to build a ship,’ he wrote, ‘don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.’ We have seen this time and time again: in JFK’s ‘man on the moon’ moment, Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech, Barack Obama’s (and Bob the Builder’s) ‘Yes We Can’ slogan. All such appeals have made us yearn for the sea.

How are you going with making people yearn for the sea? The following model from Aristotle helps us understand where we are failing. I’m not so vain as to assume you have read my previous best-selling (so glad I could weave that in) book Hooked: How leaders connect, engage and inspire using storytelling. Those of you who have may remember this model from there, but it is so important to our practice as leaders and professionals that it bears revisiting.

ARISTOTLE’S THREE MODES OF PERSUASION

Aristotle said you need three elements to influence or persuade, to make an impact:

•logos – logical reasoning

•ethos – personal credibility

•pathos – emotional connection.

Logos in business is the data, the facts and figures, the cost–benefit analysis – everything that sings to my economist’s heart! It appeals to our logical, linear left brain too. In business, logos is critical and we do it well. We always lead with data, PowerPoint, information, charts (who doesn’t love a good pie chart?), features and benefits, research – and more data.

Ethos is personal credibility. Read those words again. Not positional but personal. Positional credibility is your job title. But how believable are you? Do people trust you? Do you know (or sound like you know) what you are talking about? That’s your personal credibility.

Positional credibility opens doors, but personal credibility seals the deal #StoryMastery

Pathos is about creating an emotional connection. It means appealing to an audience’s emotions. When Apple CEO Tim Cook described sitting as ‘the new cancer’, he loaded the relatively innocuous act with negative emotion – the fear raised by the spectre of cancer.

FIGURE 1.1: ARISTOTLE’S MODEL OF INFLUENCE

Consider all the ways you communicate, persuade and influence, inside and outside your organisation. In which of these three buckets – logos, ethos and pathos – do you and your organisation invest most of your time, money and effort? If you are like most leaders and organisations all over the world, you’ll be putting a giant tick in the logos bucket.

Two and half thousand years ago Aristotle proposed that logos was numero uno in influencing people. But this is no cause for self-congratulation – unless you and your workplace have time travelled back to ancient Greece.

In today’s context, ethos – personal credibility – plays the most important role. Trust me before you trust my message. And ethos beats pathos by a hair’s breadth. Please, we need logos, ethos and pathos in business, but currently we are sitting on a one-legged stool called logos. And we get frustrated when our best efforts are failing. When the logos doesn’t work, what do we do? We do more logos. Drowning your audience in data hasn’t worked to persuade them, so let’s amp up the volume. More of the same. More of what’s not working. When has that ever worked?

It is important to understand how these three elements differ, and why logos just on its own isn’t enough. Logos informs people, but it doesn’t shift behaviour. If it did, no one would smoke (yet people do) or drive above the speed limit (yes, we have all been guilty), and we would all eat well and exercise every day (trying, but we are only human!). Logos on its own does not bring about change.

To shift behaviour, we have to look at ethos and pathos #StoryMastery

But it’s very hard for business people to ‘do’ ethos and pathos. You build up personal credibility (ethos) over time. People work with you, they find you deliver on your word, and that cements your credibility. Yet one misstep and that credibility can be destroyed overnight.

In a fast-paced, disrupted, time-poor business world, you rarely have the luxury of time. You might be a new leader in an organisation or have new people on your team. You might pitch to a room full of stakeholders, not all of whom know you, or you might meet a new client for the first time. In these contexts, the simplest yet most powerful way to fast-track ethos and create an emotional connection with your audience (pathos) is through a story.

I face this every day, wherever I am in the world, when I walk into a meeting cold. The people who engage me know my work, but the audience don’t. They might have Googled and got the ‘logos’ on me. In the first couple of minutes in front of an audience I have to establish ethos and create pathos around my message. I have learned to eat my o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Why Storytelling?
• 2. What Is Business Storytelling?
• 3. What Stops Us?
• 4. Finding Stories
• 5. The Power of Purpose
• 6. Start With Audience
• 7. Sizzling Starts (Beginnings)
• 8. The Magic of Middles
• 9. Power Endings
• 10. Putting It All Together
• 11. Delivery – How To Get Lucky
• 12. Mastery To Artistry
• Let’s Connect
• Appendix: 100 Story Ideas
• Index