6

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Mastering the Art of Storytelling for Personal and Professional Success

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DEMONSTRATING VISION FOR the future—or describing the future with a story—is inarguably a trait no senior leader can do without. Vision is almost synonymous with leadership. After all, where do you want people to follow you, if not to a more promising tomorrow? And yet in my coaching work, I come across plenty of leaders who emphasize the technical aspects of their job over the need to tell a compelling story that conveys meaning, moves people to action, and keeps them engaged through the tough times. Convinced that storytelling is something best done in a place that has a happy hour and among a few friends, they arm themselves with steely analysis, technical minutiae, and data-packed slide decks they’ll unleash in presentations that cause even the most left-brained engineers to scratch their heads—if they can stay awake long enough.

But it’s also true that from the shop floor to the boardroom and many places in between, strategic storytelling to achieve an organizational goal is continuing to wedge its way into mainstream business practices. Why? Because a story can go where analysis is denied admission: the imagination. Cold hard facts can’t inspire people to take part in a mission of change; straightforward analysis won’t get people excited about a goal unless you express it in a vision that fires the imagination and stirs the soul.

This is not new, of course; great leaders have always understood that the stories they tell are what spur people to launch themselves into battle for a greater cause and make the doldrums of daily life not just bearable, but an important part of the journey toward the vision.

Role models for this principle abound. One only has to watch video clips of IBM CEO Virginia Rometty or Cisco chief John Chambers in action—both leaders of technology companies who shun jargon and instead rally audiences with stories and down-to-earth substance and style.

Enticing followers with a more appealing future is only one of the many practical applications for storytelling, the utility of which can be traced back to the days when humans first started huddling together in small groups. As our fur- and leather-clad ancestors formed increasingly complex social orders and human bonds, they learned to track and make sense of interpersonal relationships by exchanging information with others through the narrative. Evolution thus has made storytelling part of our DNA. To support this point, consider an experiment in which Smith College psychologists F. Heider and M. Simmel demonstrated people’s tendency to make up characters and narratives from almost anything they see around them. Showing the participants an animation of two triangles and a circle moving around a square, Heider and Simmel asked the observers what they saw. “The circle is chasing the triangles,” people said, recounting the movements of the shapes as if they were part of a narrative with characters that had motives and intentions.

Subsequent research has confirmed the human tendency to think and make sense of the world in terms of stories.

A 2007 study by Jennifer Edson Escalas, a marketing researcher at Vanderbilt University, found that people had more positive reactions to advertisements that were presented in story form than to ads that were factually straightforward about the wares they were promoting.

The results of a different study, conducted a year earlier, can help astute managers frame information in such a way that it opens people’s minds rather than closes them shut. In that study, researchers found that when information is labeled as fact, it is subjected to critical analysis and the apparent human tendency to want to make it wrong; but when the information is labeled as fiction, or as a story, people accept it more easily. Organizational leaders who are always pitching one audience or another are therefore encouraged to position their audience in story-receiving mode—as in “Let me give you an example” or “Imagine the following scenario”—before presenting new ideas. This approach should help lift listeners out of an analysis frame of mind that just makes them itch to prove you wrong.

Putting It in Context

Marketing guru Seth Godin makes the point for storytelling when he writes in his book Meatball Sundae: “People just aren’t that good at remembering facts. When people do remember facts, it’s almost always in context.” And context is story. Context is about the people that are involved; it’s about the background information that provides meaning; it’s about the personal relevance we feel to the facts—whatever they may be. Often the more emotionally relevant the context, the better the recall. That’s why we often clearly remember where we were and what we were doing during events of historic significance, such as 9/11 or certain presidential elections.

Let’s say you want people to know that your organization prides itself on excellent customer service. Simply sharing this fact with the world would likely fall on deaf ears. That’s because just about everyone makes this claim, and people have become cynical. It’s probably one of the more brazen boasts companies make that often flies in the face of everyday reality. If you’ve ever been on hold with a company’s customer service department for what seemed like an eternity while listening to an obnoxiously repeating message that goes something like, “Your call is important to us,” then you know whereof I speak.

But even if a company in truth has great customer service, just stating that fact is not enough. Tony Hsieh, CEO of online retailer Zappos, says its customer service is great (which it is), but he also puts it in a context that stays with you. In one instance, speaking from a stage, Hsieh tells the story of a woman who’d ordered a pair of boots for her husband, only to contact Zappos shortly after, to arrange for the boots to be returned and to get a refund. Her husband, it turned out, had been killed in a car crash. As Hsieh tells it, after the refund was processed, the customer service rep sent a big bouquet to the woman and charged it to the company, without prior authorization. That’s because—and this is the point—she didn’t need one. Zappos’s culture is such that employees have the autonomy to do “what’s right” for the customer. While Zappos lost money on that transaction, the affection that rolled in from others who’d heard the story, including the widow’s friends, helped reinforce Zappos’s reputation as a company with a truly customer-oriented culture. What’s more, this story has been discussed everywhere, from online forums to business school auditoriums. Context provides meaning and background that engages people in a way that facts and transactional details rarely can.

You can harness the power of context yourself, by painting a relatable picture that creates real meaning around your bullet points, by providing background that changes someone’s perspective, and by making sure that there is an emotional element to it all.

People Love Drama

An important aspect of executive presence is the ability to command attention, to draw in an audience, and to avoid the predictable snooze-fest that people have come to expect from business presentations. Aaron Sorkin, the famous screenwriter and producer who’s behind such TV shows as The West Wing and such films as A Few Good Men, has a tip for his screenwriting students that I find applies just as much to storytelling executives. And that is to think about intention and obstacle as the driveshaft for a compelling story: “Somebody wants something; something’s standing in their way of getting it.” In Sorkin’s words: “They want the money; they want the girl; they want to get to Philadelphia. . . . It doesn’t matter.” That is, it doesn’t matter as long as they want it badly and the obstacle in their way is formidable.

Would you enjoy a movie where a few friends drive from New York to LA with the goal of making it there by Tuesday, and they do, with no trouble and with plenty of time to spare? Maybe that’s how we want our real vacations to unfold, but not the ones we watch as entertainment. What we want from such a flick is for all kinds of things to go terribly wrong—from getting flat tires, to becoming lost, to being kidnapped, to being chased by bad guys, to getting the sense of “There’s no way we’re gonna make it in time” for the wedding, the funeral, or whatever. In other words, we want formidable obstacles, as Sorkin put it. Also, for the story to work, making it there by Tuesday can’t be an option; it must be an imperative! Not making it by Tuesday—the intention—must have huge repercussions, or the obstacles on the way are just a laundry list of things to get through.

Robert McKee, a story consultant for television production companies, refers to this magic formula as the clash between a protagonist’s subjective expectations and an uncooperative objective reality. And this is not unlike what business leaders face in the daily battle with competitors and other market forces that stand in the way of accomplishing organizational goals. This fact means that CEOs should have plenty of raw material from which to fashion compelling stories.

Why do well-crafted stories engage us so much? The answer is in our brain chemistry. By measuring the brain activity of people watching a gripping movie, neuroeconomist Paul Zak discovered that the tension created during a narrative (via intention and obstacle) results in increased attention and focus, whereby adrenaline and dopamine are released into the bloodstream. This explains the increased heartbeat and sweaty palms we experience when Tom Cruise is dangling off the landing gear of a descending aircraft with one hand while frantically dialing a number on his mobile with the other. Zak’s lab has also found that character-driven narratives with a strong emotional element cause the brain to create oxytocin, the chemical responsible for feelings of trust and empathy. If you’ve ever walked out of the theater feeling you are James Bond, that is the oxytocin talking. From an experiential standpoint, a good story is really the next best thing to being there.

Matching Your Story to Business Purpose

The fact that people are wired to react so strongly to stories should motivate business leaders to develop their storytelling skills. But what business situations call for a story?

You might have guessed the answer—it depends. It depends on both the situation and what you’d like to accomplish in the situation. The situation might be a staff meeting where you’re introduced to the people on your new team, for example. As their new boss, your objective might be to get them to like and respect you and to start dismantling the barriers of mistrust and uncertainty. Another situation might be that members of your team have lost enthusiasm for their work, and your objective is to restore their engagement and give them purpose, so they understand the “why” of what they’re spending most of their waking hours doing. Or maybe valuable members of your team feel unappreciated or don’t get the credit they deserve. In that situation, your objective may be to reinforce or highlight certain norms and behaviors with your stories and to draw positive attention to them.

Below are three types of stories that every leader should master. My hope is that they inspire readers to dig deeper into this topic and to identify and cultivate potential stories that can help you accomplish important objectives.

1. Stories We Tell Ourselves

We constantly assemble bits and pieces of information of what we observe around us and automatically turn them into stories that tend to reinforce our long-developed beliefs. If those stories are positive ones—you admire a colleague and tend particularly to notice the admirable things she does, you pride yourself on your own punctuality and pat yourself on the back whenever you find yourself (again!) to be the first person to show up at a meeting—these perspectives are often uplifting and empowering.

The problem comes when we tell ourselves negative stories. For instance, if I feel that the people around me are lazy and incompetent, the stories I create will be based on morsels of data that “confirm” that belief. Or if I feel that I don’t measure up to others’ expectations, the stories I create will reinforce this self-assessment, prominently featuring my mistakes, my failures, and others’ expressions of disappointment in me. And so a vicious loop is created where negative perceptions—including of the self—determine the stories we tell ourselves, which in turn play out in full color to reinforce these perceptions.

Clearly these aren’t productive narratives, nor do they serve the people and organizations we lead. And while I’m aware that years of cognitive behavioral therapy may sometimes be the most effective solution to modify such beliefs-and-values–powered narratives, I’d like to suggest that we have the option to intervene any time we recognize (self-awareness!) the unproductive nature of the stories we tell ourselves.

One young client I had came from a highly ambitious family where academic achievement was highly valued. During his undergraduate years at an Ivy League university, grades lower than an A+ were typically subject to stern rebuke by both parents and other credentialed members of his extended family. “He didn’t apply himself enough” and “He’ll bring shame to the family” were the kind of accusations lobbed at him during those “tough love” sessions. Little surprise then that over time he developed impossibly high standards for himself, suffering blow after blow to his confidence whenever he fell short of his, not to mention others’, expectations. He felt like a loser who just didn’t measure up. When he got accepted to a top-rated MBA program, the story he told himself was not one of accomplishment and optimism. Instead, he worried himself sick about failing and letting everyone down. He became a client right around that time, and one of the first things we did was to restructure the negative narratives he told himself about his academic future. We replaced his micro-stories of “I’ll never be able to manage the workload” and “I’m going to fail” with more positive narratives like “This education will be a major asset for my future” and “I don’t have to get As to succeed.”

Remember the framestorming exercise in Chapter 3 on emotion-regulation strategies? That’s how we developed my client’s more productive narratives. In fact, we created 30 positive stories to replace the negative ones, and from those reframings I had him select the three stories that would motivate him the most. The challenge for him was keeping his focus on these aspirational stories; his old “wiring,” which had been strengthened over many years, was thick and strong. But as we know from neuroscience research, that to which we attend becomes stronger in our brain. So while it was natural for his long-acquired belief system to serve up the self-flagellating stories whenever he thought about school, his relentless focus on the more productive narratives eventually changed his brain’s neural network. Over time, this new circuitry, accentuating the positive, became the default option.

To get to that critical point, the moment the old negative stories started to play, my client knew to “change the channel” and tune in to one of the more productive ones. Eventually, these new stories increased his confidence to the point where he was able to build strong and rewarding relationships with his colleagues.

A different example illustrates how the stories we tell ourselves can impact an entire organization—especially when the storyteller is the boss. Responding to a question about his leadership style, Pedro Pizarro, CEO of utility giant Edison International, told the New York Times that he’s not the type of leader who sees himself as the hub of the metaphorical wheel, with employees as the spokes, waiting to receive information from him. Instead, he sees himself as the rim, not the center, of the wheel. He explained, “My job is to keep the spokes together, keep the team together and really help that team perform because they, collectively, are going to have a lot more insights than I will. It also means that when you have to go through mud, the rim goes in first. But that’s the way it should be.”

It’s clear that the stories we tell ourselves have an impact not just on our own behavior, but also on our engagement with others and in turn on their perceptions of us as leaders, colleagues, and partners. By carefully examining our dominant narratives and making sure they contribute positive value to our and others’ lives, we’re one step closer to wielding real influence with the power of storytelling.

2. Stories We Tell Others About Ourselves

Whether you are a leader joining a new team, or a job candidate in the first round of interviews, or someone meeting a potential new client for the first time, the stories you tell about yourself often set the tone for how the relationship will unfold, if it does, that is. Which are the right stories in such scenarios? It’s hard to go wrong with stories that illustrate your humility, good judgment, integrity, and expertise and experience. As for what to emphasize, putting yourself firmly into the shoes of your audience should provide clues. The needs and expectations of the people in your audience will, of course, vary, depending on the context of the meeting and their future goals as they involve you. In Chapter 1, I laid out my suggestions for making powerful first impressions by communicating warmth, strength, and value.

I would suggest you also focus on stories that illustrate the values you know are important to your audience.

For instance, if you are the new boss meeting the members of your team for the first time, you know they’ll wonder about your leadership style and how you’ll treat them. Acknowledge this and share a personal story or two that show you empathize—maybe from when you met your boss for the first time. Mention the lessons you’ve learned in managing others and make sure to highlight any mistakes from which you’ve grown. Share examples of how you’ve navigated new cultures in the past—organizational or regional—and what you’re hoping to learn in this next stage with their help. This shows humility, humanizes you, and reduces the power distance that can hamper the open and honest dialogue that builds trust.

If your audience—whether a group or an individual—is looking to engage you for your expertise, share stories that illustrate how you’ve delivered results or solved similar problems for others. Mention the challenges you encountered along the way and how you met them successfully—even if it took a few attempts to get it right. This is also an elegant way to share your strengths without bragging about your accomplishments.

When others want to get to know us, they aren’t just looking for the content on our LinkedIn profile. They want to know the real us to determine whether we’re trustworthy and whether associating with us will be of positive or negative value to them. That’s why recruiters and hiring managers no longer have qualms about digging into our social media profiles and online musings to evaluate our reputation and our judgment.

And judgment is key whenever we share personal information. Faulty judgment can result in some awkward moments if not lasting reputational harm.

One of the several executives I’ve coached at a global insurance firm had recently joined its headquarters. Over coffee, this executive, an HR leader, casually shared with me how he typically introduces himself to colleagues at the beginning of a new assignment. From years of travel to exotic places with his partner, he had assembled the mother of all PowerPoint presentations: In one slide the couple might be riding elephants in Bali, in another picnicking in the middle of the Moroccan desert, and in another lounging on top of a parked Land Rover as they surveyed the Kenyan wilderness with their binoculars. He’d present these slide decks after a quick introduction to the team, presumably with the idea that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” I saw one of these presentations myself, and what makes this a cautionary tale is three specific elements that struck me as reputational kryptonite:

1.   In each picture (there were hundreds), the couple wore matching tuxedos, sported aviator sunglasses, and always had fully filled champagne flutes in hand—even on the back of the elephants in Bali. Aside from hitting your colleagues over the head with how cool you are and all the amazing vacations you can afford, you’re also sending the message that you are way, way better than they are. Strike one!

2.   Also in the pictures, native guides and locals in their dusty everyday garb were positioned around the tux-wearing gents like extras in a movie—sans smiles, which gave the whole thing an awkward colonial feel. Especially in an egalitarian society like the United States, this blatant juxtaposition of Western privilege with local poverty is sure to elicit groans and eye rolls under the cover of a darkened conference room. Strike two!

3.   The show was 20 minutes long. I don’t think—no, I know—that I wouldn’t sit through anyone’s vacation slides for more than 5 minutes, let alone a relative stranger’s. Plus, a lengthy presentation devoted to your wealth, good taste, and all-around fabulousness is sure to irritate even the most congenial souls. Strike three!

So this storytelling strategy had all the makings of a reputational disaster. The HR manager hoped this glimpse into his life would present him as interesting and someone that people would enjoy being around, but it didn’t. When I asked him what reactions he’d typically get to these introductions, he shrugged and said, “Mixed, surprisingly. Some really seem to like it, while others seem to tune out.” I later learned that his introductions had led many of his colleagues to find him pompous, arrogant, out of touch, and quirky. Only after a sobering 360-degree multirater feedback assessment did he understand that his intentions were not at all what came across, which eventually allowed him to radically adjust his presentation.

Faulty judgment in personal stories isn’t always this glaring. But if you are unsure of how your stories might land, run them first by people you trust. In the end, with personal stories less is more and humility is better.

3. Stories We Tell Our Teams or Organizations

I opened this chapter by pointing out the type of storytelling that is intrinsic to successful leadership—the ability to tell compelling stories of the future, to articulate a vison, to both internal and external audiences. Leaders need to master another kind of story too—this kind is about organizational values.

Earlier, to illustrate the concept of context, I recounted Tony Hsieh’s story about Zappos’s outstanding customer service culture. This story is also an example of a multipurpose one—that is, a story that can furnish different takeaways to different audiences. Investors and potential customers, for instance, learn from this story who the company is, which may influence how they will engage with the company. But when told to employees, Hsieh’s story conveys what the expected norms of corporate behavior are, and it does so without having to explicitly spell them out in an employee manual or post them in random sequence on a cafeteria wall. The former would actually be a monumental task, as the authors of such a manual would have to predict all kinds of circumstances in order to prescribe the proper rules of conduct: “If a customer’s family member for whom a particular product was purchased passes away before being able to enjoy said product, it is permissible for a customer service agent to purchase and send flower arrangements to said customer in value up to USD 75.00 to be charged to the organization without the requirement of prior authorization from a manager.” This type of manual would make War and Peace seem like a pamphlet. Instead, all that the company’s leaders have to do is share the shoe-return story with their employees, who will know exactly what to do on a case-by-case basis: Do what’s right for the customer.

Whatever the management goal, there are storytelling strategies that can help further it. A former Facebook director of engineering, Bobby Johnson, once saw the need for a cultural shift in the company’s infrastructure team. Although many of his engineers were drawn to exciting new projects and innovations, Johnson knew that other Facebook engineers, the ones who worked behind the scenes to ensure that the existing systems ran faster and better than before, also did critical work. He wanted to highlight these “unsung heroes,” both to honor them and to get more engineers interested in their less glamorous but nonetheless essential work. To accomplish this, he would take every opportunity—in one-on-ones, in meetings, and in group e-mails—to share stories of important fixes that these day-to-day engineers made and to publicly praise them.

Similarly, if you want people to speak up more in meetings and challenge each other, share a story of how a lone dissenting voice was able to change your mind about a decision you’d made, and how this wouldn’t have happened if the person hadn’t felt comfortable in challenging you. Or if you want to increase collaboration among teams, share a story about two teams who decided to join forces and whose combined creativity and brainpower led to important breakthroughs for the organization. And if it’s courage and risk taking you want to promote, highlight stories of risk-taking colleagues—and include their failures, to make the point that learning from mistakes is just another way forward.

As you can see, the formula is simple. Decide which values you want to promote and which behaviors you want to encourage, and then make those traits the themes of your stories, and include characters who demonstrate the desired traits. Do these stories have to be true? It helps if they are, and it’s even better if your audience knows the protagonists. However, hypothetical scenarios can pack just as big a punch, as we’ve learned from neuroscience research and our own experiences from the myriad of stories that surround us.

Four Storytelling Techniques to Convey Complex Ideas Simply and Persuasively

Not everyone is a natural raconteur. And that’s fine, if you keep these three principles in mind: People need to feel something for your story to have an impact. The story must be easy to follow and stripped of unnecessary detail. And finally, because focus is a scarce resource in the brain and attention spans are dwindling, the quicker you get to the point the better.

Here are a few techniques to help you put these principles into practice.

Technique 1: Make It Personal

Trial lawyers are among the best storytellers, and the late Moe Levine of New York was one of the greatest. Levine was able to use emotion in the summation of a case to such devastating effect that the result was the award of one of the largest verdicts in the history of New York State. Levine represented a man who had lost both arms in an accident. When the trial was coming to a close, everyone present, from the defendants to the judge to the opposing counsel, anticipated a long speech from Levine about the travails of a life with no arms. However, he surprised everyone. His concluding argument lasted no longer than a minute or two. It wasn’t its brevity that won the day for his client. Its real power lay in his making personal what everyone knew yet no one had thought about. Here’s what he said, as reported by Texas trial lawyer Howard Nations:

Your Honor, eminent counsel for defense, ladies and gentlemen of the jury: as you know, about an hour ago we broke for lunch. And I saw the bailiff came and took you all as a group to have lunch in the jury-room. And then I saw the defense attorney, Mr. Horowitz, and his client decided to go to lunch together. And the judge and the court clerk went to lunch. So, I turned to my client, Harold, and said why don’t you and I go to lunch together, and we went across the street to that little restaurant and had lunch.

He then took a significant pause before resuming:

Ladies and gentlemen, I just had lunch with my client. He has no arms. He eats like a dog! Thank you very much.

And then he sat down. The lesson: Any time you want to emphasize a particularly strong point, simply make the human connection in an understated way. Avoid weakening the drama of your story with long-winded verbiage. As in Levine’s summation, let the audience’s imagination deliver the biggest punch.

Technique 2: Keep It Short

A story attributed to Ernest Hemingway (however, there’s no proof of a connection) goes something like this: Hemingway was sitting at lunch with a few fellow authors when he bet the group that he could write a story in as few as six words. “Impossible,” his friends said, accepting the bet. After everyone’s money was on the table, Hemingway scribbled six words on a napkin: “For Sale: Baby shoes; never worn.”

The others promptly pushed their coins in Hemingway’s direction.

For a story to work, it has to take you somewhere in your imagination. It has to make a clear point. But it doesn’t have to be long, as this anecdote shows. In fact, stories told for strategic purposes in business and the professions should be as brief as possible while still meeting their objective. TED Talks are a good example. These presentations, on just about any topic, are by design no longer than 20 minutes, with many of them less than 15. And they typically include several stories within the allotted time frame that serve as context for the speaker’s key message.

Here’s a fail-safe way to make sure your stories are short and sweet: Prepare versions of varying lengths. Write out the longest version first and see how much time it would take you to tell it. (People speak at about a rate of 150 to 180 words per minute, though this doesn’t include the beats necessary for dramatic pausing or speeding up.) Now start cutting detail from your story. Go from a 5-minute version to a 3-minute version and see what happens. Does the story still make sense? Ask others for their takeaway; does the leaner version work? Next, cut it down to 1 minute—then see if you can do a 30-second version of the story without sacrificing the overall message. You’ll be surprised how often even very short versions still accomplish the job. Condensing stories in this way will also wean you from adding too much detail to your stories that adds zero meaning and may also distract listeners from your primary point.

Technique 3: Pick a Theme

We’re all consumers of advertising, and effective advertisements communicate in themes. A clever theme frames a story in just the way you want it perceived. How about this successful theme from the Las Vegas Tourism Board? “What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas.” What type of stories come to mind when you hear this? That theme gives all of them an unmistakable meaning. How about this one: “The Truth Is Out There.” That was the theme for the ultra-successful TV series The X-Files, and it guided our understanding that each story in the series was about mysteries that needed to be solved.

Themes, in a sense, are simplifiers. Again, we can learn from the trial lawyers. In order to communicate a deluge of data as simply as possible to a jury—an audience of laypeople who are neither accustomed to legal jargon nor necessarily equal to the attorneys in their ability to grasp and process new information—trial lawyers often frame their case as one central theme. In so doing, these lawyers are simultaneously guiding the jury to think about the case in a certain way. “This case is clearly about corporate greed versus consumer safety” might be such a theme. Guess who the lawyer’s client is? Not the corporation obviously—and every bit of evidence the lawyer introduces and every story line the lawyer presents will tie back to the theme of “corporate greed,” making it the lens through which the jury will view all the evidence if the lawyer is successful.

A smart central theme transcends the story and gives it greater meaning. Think about what meaning you’d like your audience to take away from your stories—whether you’re running a business meeting or a political campaign—and pick a theme that crystallizes that point. Some examples of business and political themes are:

•   “David Versus Goliath”

•   “Phoenix Rising from the Ashes”

•   “The Customer Is King”

•   “Our Secret Weapon”

•   “The Turning Point”

•   “Thriving in Chaos”

•   “They Said It Couldn’t Be Done”

•   “From Underdog to Top Dog”

•   “Our Employees Are Family”

•   “Teamwork in Action”

•   “Breaking New Ground”

•   “Blazing the Trail”

•   “No Risk, No Reward”

•   “Better Together”

•   “It’s the Economy, Stupid” (James Carville’s famous line from Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign)

The options are endless. There are virtually no new themes for stories, just fresh interpretations of countless classic themes that have stood the test of time. If you struggle with your own theme, bestselling book titles can provide powerful inspiration for fitting your stories with a powerful frame that makes your message “sticky.”

Technique 4: Use Drama to Make It Stick

Whether you are still aspiring to leadership or you are already there, sharing knowledge with others is a key requirement at any level of responsibility. Stories are an effective tool to accomplish this sharing, but as we’ve learned by now, it takes the right kind of story to have the most impact.

Although it would make sense that a story highlighting how people made good decisions and solved problems can teach an audience how to do likewise, academic research says the opposite: In stories, we can increase the effectiveness of training and development by focusing on the errors and poor decision making. In one study, researchers found that firefighters who experienced mistake-riddled training scenarios not only paid more attention to the training and retained the information better, but vastly improved their judgment and displayed more adaptive thought processes than did those who got straight “how-to” training.

The key to success with such a story is not only to show how things went wrong but to discuss what actions could have been taken to avoid the negative consequences. In other words, a type of reverse engineering of how things unfolded with the pros and cons mulled over, analyzed, and advocated or rejected by your peers can have tremendous benefits.

In an article in the journal Occupational Hazards, Elaine Cullen, the chief of health communication at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s Spokane Research Laboratory, says this about storytelling in various blue-collar professions: “You learn by working with someone who knows how to do your job. You are an apprentice. You are mentored.” She goes on to say, “When an experienced miner sees a new hire doing something really stupid, he often steps in and says, ‘Let me tell you a story. I had a new hand do something like that before . . .’ and he goes on to detail some negative consequence ranging from injury to death.”

This type of cautionary storytelling to share knowledge and teach effective behaviors can easily be transferred from the coal mines and the fire station to Wall Street. There, freshly minted MBAs learn from case studies what caused financial juggernauts like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers to go down in flames and their officers to be immortalized in Wall Street history as reckless, inept, and hopelessly greedy.

How Language Creates Reality

In his durable article “The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation,” my longtime friend Towson University Distinguished Professor Richard Vatz explores the power of language and its ability to affect perception. This article was published in 1973 but is just as relevant and controversial today. Vatz wrote the article as a counterargument to another theoretician, Lloyd Bitzer, who argued that events and reality unambiguously dictate meaning, from which language and interpretations automatically follow. In other words, meaning is inherent in reality. Whatever is said about reality merely describes that meaning.

While this may seem obvious to many, Vatz argues that it’s not so straightforward. According to Vatz, meaning is not inherent in events. Language does not reflect an objective “reality” accurately. Instead, language creates reality. The world is complex, bewildering, and largely abstract. Language takes these abstractions and turns them into concrete concepts. In a very real way, language leads to reality, not the other way around.

As Vatz points out, although we encounter certain events through personal observation—such as hunger, cold, and rain—for the most part “we learn of facts and events through someone’s communicating them to us.” Thus, the people who describe the events not only shape how we perceive those events; they decide whether we perceive them at all. This is significant, because, as Vatz says, “The world is a scene of inexhaustible events which all compete to impinge on . . . our sliver of reality.” This is where spin comes into play.

Spin is the art of finding the context and the facts that support one’s version of the story. Vatz states that every “communicator is involved in this sifting and choosing, whether it be the newspaper editor choosing front-page stories versus comic-page stories or the speaker highlighting facts about a person in a eulogy.”

Consider a eulogy. We’ve all done good things as well as some things we’re not proud of. We’ve had shining moments, embarrassing moments, and regrettable moments. A kind eulogizer usually interprets this mass of information in a way that is favorable to the deceased. But imagine how a hostile eulogizer might interpret the same life. Most of us certainly have made enough mistakes in our lives to fill up a 15-minute speech. Vatz’s point is that the “reality” of a person is shaped by the words the speaker chooses.

In the next section you get to practice the art of spin yourself. You’ll gain even more clarity on how perceptions of reality are created with the careful selection of the language with which you tell your stories.

Practicing the Art of Spinning Stories

For this part of the chapter, I’d like you to try one of my favorite exercises in persuasive language, an assignment I learned about from Vatz, who has been assigning this project to his students for over 30 years.

First, choose an opinion article in the popular press, such as a book review, a movie review, a music review, a restaurant review, or something else along those lines. Then rewrite the article from a different perspective, reversing the essence of its position.

Here are the rules:

•   You may not change the facts of the article. You may only reverse the subjective opinions of the article. For example, if the original negative review says a long-running movie “seemed to drag on forever,” you cannot say that the movie was short. However, in your positive rewrite you can say, “Even at two and a half hours, the movie easily managed to hold my attention.”

•   The changes must be relevant to the material of the review. For example, in changing a positive restaurant review to a negative review, it would not be relevant to add that you were allergic to one of the dishes you tasted.

•   The changes must be plausible, reasonable, and substantial. Don’t just add the word “not” to make an affirmative sentence negative. The best revised articles will be the ones you easily can imagine picking up and reading, probably in the same place where you found the original article.

•   The viewpoint must be consistent. If a negative original concedes a positive point, in your rewrite the same point must be made even more positive. For example, if the original movie review says, “The only bright spot was a workmanlike performance on the part of so-and-so,” the revised review should take it up a notch with something like “One of the most inspiring parts of the film was so-and-so’s masterful performance.”

•   Quotations can be eliminated or truncated. But you may not subvert the intended meaning or change the words. That is, if you choose an article that already has a positive or negative quotation in it, you cannot change the words of the speaker. However, as we saw earlier in this chapter, trimming the quotation may alter the speaker’s intended meaning vastly. For example, if a speaker is quoted as saying that a particular restaurant “falls flat occasionally but overall offers an excellent dining experience,” it would be acceptable to trim this quote down to its negative part—“falls flat.”

Try this exercise on one or both of the two articles below, which were chosen by Vatz’s students. Their “answers” are given below, but no peeking! Instead, practice these new skills by following the directions above.

Example 1: Roberta Smith, “Tate Modern’s Rightness Versus MoMA’s Wrongs,” New York Times, November 1, 2006, p. E1.

But Tate Modern appears to have worked out many of its kinks. It is using its limitations to its advantage and evolving into a people’s palace that the art world can also love.

The lessons of Tate Modern challenge a lot of conventional wisdom, at least that expressed in many American museums these days. Most important, Tate Modern’s huge building proves that being big is not the same as being corporate: it is possible to have a large institution feel personal to its visitors.

Tate Modern is an enormously user-friendly place, physically comfortable and hospitable, with inexpensive places to eat and frequent opportunities to sit. Snack bars, restrooms, elevators, escalators and stairways are all conveniently grouped together in the core of the building.

Example 2: Bianca Sienra, “Catch the Wave,” Baltimore Magazine, October 2006, p. 219.

It was probably a bad idea to have filled up so quickly on breads and accompaniments. The endless tapas menu is full of items we really wanted to try. So we bravely forged on and ordered our second round. An excellent version of tortilla Espanola—that wonderful omelet of potatoes and onions universal in Spanish tapas bars—was velvety and fluffy and rich with butter. Stuffed piquillo peppers were bursting with goat cheese and duxelle, and lay in a tomato sauce that gave an acid boost to the sweet, savory peppers.

When you’ve done one or both rewrites, compare your results with the rewrites below that were done by Vatz’s students. Each of them received an A.

Example 1 Rewrite

But Tate Modern continues to be plagued by some of these kinks and has been forced to evolve into a largely pedestrian audience, with little support from the art community.

The failures of Tate Modern are ones that could have easily been avoided if the designers had investigated the conventions American museums hold dear. The titan feel of the building itself has eradicated all opportunity for a personal or intimate experience by museum-goers.

Tate Modern seems at times to have dumbed itself down for the rainy day museum visitors, emphasizing seating and inexpensive food over an awe-inspiring collection. Snack bars, elevators, and escalators are the main attractions, as they are prominently on display in the center of the facility.

Example 2 Rewrite

If one dares to go to this restaurant, it might be a good idea to fill up on the breads, because what comes after will quickly douse their appetite. While the tapas menu has a lot to offer, there were few items that seemed genuinely appealing. However, my guest and I bravely forged on and ordered the next course. The tortilla Espanola, a traditional omelet of potatoes and onions—a staple in Spanish tapas bars—was drowning in butter with such a creamy taste that it was hard to swallow. The stuffed piquillo peppers had way too much goat cheese and duxelle so that the tomato sauce it lay in tasted acidic, and the peppers gave way to a sweet taste that contradicted the theme of the platter.

If you want to flex your persuasive muscles a little more, try this exercise on a “hard news” article, rewriting it from a different perspective. This is a much more challenging task because these articles usually do not state an opinion; they’re supposed to be as objective as possible. However, after close examination of a few news articles on the same topic, I think you’ll begin to see how bias can operate even when no opinion is stated. Look for how the title is phrased, whose perspective the article seems to follow, which persons or entities are depicted as the subjects (conducting the major actions), and which persons or entities are depicted as the objects of those actions.

The power of storytelling has been with us since the dawn of time, and despite our reliance on all things digital—indeed, because of it—it will remain the heart and soul of an organization. Your executive presence is strengthened by the stories you tell, and your skill in strategic storytelling can help propel you and your organization to new heights, new markets, and new opportunities.

In Chapter 7 you’ll learn more strategies and techniques to influence people’s attitudes and behaviors so that you can create mutual success and gain the respect you need as a leader.