How to use storytelling to motivate your startup staff

I read an interesting piece yesterday morning in The Los Angeles Times on the topic of how business leaders can use storytelling to inspire their employees and affect positive change in their organizations. Yes, storytelling.

It was a book review, actually (reprinted from the Financial Times), of the latest work by a writer named Stephen Denning, who formerly ran something called the “Knowledge Management” programs at the World Bank. I don’t really know what that means (and I’m not at all sure the World Bank has a monopoly on knowledge or managment), but Denning’s work is highly admired by management pontiffs at some very prestigious b-schools (including Harvard and Stanford) and by some pretty innovative entrepreneurs (e.g. Netflix Founder, Reed Hastings). Now, you might not guess this from Denning’s hoaky website), but the content in his latest book is more evidence for why people read Denning — and why we think Found|READers might benefit from doing so, too. <!--more-->

The Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders Inspire Action Through Narrative , endeavors to explain how telling “a good story” is key to succssful leadership, especially at companies in transition (like startups!). This latest book isn’t out yet, but the review got us interested so we took a look at Denning’s blog, and his past books, to pull together some highlights:

Get emotional, first:

“Don’t try to out-reason deeply skeptical employees…make a personal — and emotional — connection with them, first. Get people’s attention, ‘stimulate the desire for change’ and then wheel out the rationale.”

…”communicate who you are. Provide [a] drama that reveals some strength or vulnerability from your past.”

Then deliver your data and evidence (albeit sparingly):

…”facts may be the last thing employees want to hear right now. They will simply be discounted and rejected…there is still a need for reasoned arguments… but it is crucial to get the ‘sequencing’ of messages right.”

…”Evoke the future you want to create [but] avoid excessive details that will take the audience’s mind off its own challenge [or] excessive details that will only turn out to be wrong.”

Don’t deliver a speech. Initiate a dialogue:

“Leadership communications begin as monologue,” Denning says. But “if they are successful they turn into dialogue and then conversation.”

…”Movingling recoun[t] a situation that listeners have also experienced and that prompts them to share their own stories [or] experience.”

To illustrate his points, in his new book, Denning picks on former Vice President Al Gore, showcasing nearly a dozen ways in which Mr. Gore’s lousy 2000 presidential bid failed these tenants of “good storytelling.” We all know how it went: Gore’s campaign message was confusing, filled with data abstractions; it lacked emotional committment; Gore’s body language was ineffective; all in, Gore lacked “narrative intelligence” meaning he couldn’t figure out how to tell a story his audience wanted to hear, in addition to the story he wanted to tell them.

Attention founders!:
Your job is to figure out how to communicate the information you want your staff to possess, through “a story” your staff also wants to hear.

But better than anyone else, Mr. Gore also learned from his past communication pitfalls to become one of the most inspiring leaders in the world. The proof: “Millions of people have paid more than $40 million to watch a movie of Al Gore’s PowerPoint presentation,” says Denning.

For more tips, check out this chart, republished on Denning’s website from his 2004 Harvard Business Review article, “Telling Tales,” ($6.50 for download here). The chart breaks down Denning’s 7 Types of Stories, with examples of the precise language you’ll want to use when employing them to achieve your goals.

I must confess that the topic of inspiring leadership, and especially how to do it, snared my interest this week following another sad chapter in the management tale of Jerry Yang, the co-founder and now CEO of Yahoo!, who has been desperately trying to revive his troubled company in a very public countdown of 100 days. We all know it isn’t going well, but the revelation that Yang called a meeting of his 300 + Veeps for a morale-boosting strategy session, only to delegate his keynote address to the CEO of another company, is the best evidence so far for why it isn’t gong well. Sure, Yang chose his proxy well. Steve Jobs sure knows how to sping a moving yarn. But how can Yang expect to inspire Yahoo!’s revival, if he can’t even tell his own story?

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