THE POWER OF STORIES

When you are soliciting feedback from your team, you're doing more listening than talking. However, when you want to relate to others so that they really get to know you, the opposite is true: you're the one doing the talking. By telling stories about yourself, such as by giving a glimpse of who you are outside of work, you allow people to relate to you in a very human way. That was my experience with a newsletter of sorts that I began writing as CFO and continued as CEO. It started as an attempt to bridge the many silos at Baxter, something I had seen back in my cubicle days. When I became part of the executive team, I felt I could do more to bring people together.

It began with an internal column I wrote—an update from the CFO. In those days, cash flow was particularly important, and I saw this as a way to connect with the top fifty or sixty people in the company to discuss our priorities. As my assistant typed up the first column, she told me that the newsletter helped her really understand the issues. “You should send this out to everybody,” she suggested.

After thinking about it, I decided she was right. Why not send it to all fifty thousand people in the company? That way everyone could understand the issues and work toward addressing them. As I was explaining the challenges we were facing at Baxter, I decided to lighten things up a bit by mentioning something humorous that one of my children had done. With five children in the family, I was never at a loss for material. I called this little section “On the Home Front.” What started as a brief anecdote became an important way to help people relate to me, whether they had children or nieces or nephews, or were thinking back on their own youth. To my complete surprise, “On the Home Front” was a hit.

When I traveled to various facilities, often the first question I was asked was about the family. Soon I began looking for parallels between the message I needed to deliver as CFO and something the children had done. Usually, I didn't have to search for very long—like the time I was writing about the importance of setting the right incentives. My son Andrew, at the age of four, had managed to stick a bead up his nose, and I had to take him to the emergency room to get it extracted. Before we went in, however, I told him that if he could blow that bead out of his nose, we'd get a pie just for the two of us to eat and then we'd go to the video store to buy—not rent—a video. Andrew blew that bead out of his nose so hard it almost broke my front windshield! The story caused a chuckle and helped illustrate my point about the power of incentives. Interestingly, one of the senior scientists in an R&D facility in Germany sent me his doctoral thesis in German on how to remove obstacles from the nasal cavity. I never did get it translated, but I appreciated the gesture.

To be honest, I loved writing “On the Home Front” because I knew people enjoyed the stories, and I got a kick out of sharing some of the adventures in the Kraemer household. On a broader level, my column illustrated the power of stories to connect with others on a human level, which is what matters the most. As you will discover in your leadership journey, stories can forge bonds stronger than any directive or assignment could ever establish.