4 Mistakes Leaders Make Telling Stories: Bigger Isn’t Always Better
Long story short. Many leaders make the mistake of telling broad, generalized stories instead of specific stories about specific events.
Recently, a communications team at a Silicon Valley tech company—I’ll call it SkyInc.—asked me to help them tell “their story” of adapting to COVID. I first told them that they didn’t have “a story” of adapting to COVID; they had many stories.
Then I asked the team leader, Sam, to tell me how she’d been narrating the story so far. Here’s essentially the story she told me: “We at SkyInc. had found our rhythm. We knew what we were offering, and we knew we were good at it. Then COVID hit, and the demands on technology skyrocketed. Our employees started working from home and were getting burned out. So we got creative and found innovative ways to support our teams so they would be able to weather the difficult days ahead.”
Stories like this are pretty common in organizations. Broad, generalized, institutional. In order to tell the organization’s story, we tend to go big—zoomed way out.
But these types of stories are rarely effective at doing anything other than stating some facts. They do not inspire empathy, emotional connection, or engagement. Why?
Because summary is not story. The story is in the specifics.
For Sam’s story truly to connect with her team, she needed to narrate the specifics. Take us behind the scenes. Tell us about specific people, actual conversations, observable events. Show us the evidence of the statements you’re making. That’s what the power of the story lies. For a story to stick, it should conjure up images in our minds and feelings in our bodies. Only the specifics will accomplish this.
“Summary is not story. The story is in the specifics. ”
In coaching Sam’s story, here are some of the questions I asked:
“We at SkyInc. had found our rhythm. We knew what we were offering, and we knew we were good at it.” How did you know you were good at it? Were profits soaring? Were you getting praise from clients? Was job satisfaction high among your team?
“Then COVID hit, and the demands on technology skyrocketed.” How so? If you want your team to connect to this, give specifics they will remember. Give numbers. Examples.
“Our employees started working from home and were getting burned out.” How did you know they were burned out? Was there a specific conversation you had? Did you survey them? Did the quality of work decline? Show us the evidence.
“So we got creative and found innovative ways to support our teams so they would be able to weather the difficult days ahead.” What did it look like to get creative? And who’s the ‘we’? How did you brainstorm together? Was there a moment when someone said, “What if we try this?” and what they said next was the key? How did your team respond? What specifically got better and how?
One of the questions I always have in my mind when I’m listening to a story that I need to coach is this: Can I see the story in my mind like a video? If your goal is for your story to impact the people listening—which is certainly true for leaders—then your story must produce concrete images, associations, and emotions. You have to paint a picture, set the scene, and give us a characters to relate to.
“But,” I sometimes hear in protest, “I’m trying to tell the organization’s story. So it needs to be about the organization right?”
Nope. Not if you are wanting people to care. We do not connect to institutions; we connect to people. I can’t empathize with SkyInc., a billion dollar tech firm. I can empathize with Sam, a 45 year-old leader trying to take care of her team during an unprecedented global crisis.
So, if you want your story to inspire, to make people care, to get them engaged, then stay away from generalities and institutionalized stories.
The real stories are in the specifics.
