Creating a Culture of Storytelling by streefland

Creating a Culture of Storytelling

Storytelling is the

most powerful way to put ideas in the world today. - Robert McKee

Building a common language of storytelling Today, the world’s most successful companies have discovered that the best way to spread ideas and drive business forward, both internally and externally, is through business storytelling. But to get entire teams, departments, and companies to efficiently, consistently transform all their facts, data, and insights into stories that spur action… coaching. is. critical. This is where you come in. Great managers are also great coaches. They can support and mentor their staff and help them grow in their roles. And they also do something else: reinforce the practice of coaching amongst their team. When managers encourage peer-to-peer coaching and a highly collaborate environment, research has shown it develops significantly better leaders and boosts employee retention. Bottom line - The more that peer and manager coaching is knitted into TPC’s story development process, the more it will seep into the larger culture. Protect your training investment with this workbook that provides coaching tips and best-practices for managers and peers to help instill TPC’s story development process with success and long-lasting results!

Creating a Culture of Storytelling Executive sponsorship The coaching process Tips for Managers Tips for Peers

Creating a culture of storytelling starts with leadership Culture is learned behavior, not a by-product of operations. It’s not an overlay or one-off exercise. We create our organizational culture by the actions we take; not the other way around. At TPC, we believe culture change begins when leaders start to model the behavior they want their teams to emulate. After working with Fortune 500 companies across multiple industries for the past two-decades, we’ve seen our storytelling training come to life in organizations when there is executive sponsorship and on-going management involvement from the beginning. It signals to the teams the importance of the training, the commitment from leadership in its people, and an expectation that what’s learned will be used in the dayto-day.

BUSINESS STOR

THE GREATEST

… and what’s learned and implemented will transform the culture. So how do can you go from “hey, storytelling sounds like something we should do” to actually making it an everyday team practice? It starts with building and reinforcing a culture of storytelling that will permeate your team, department, and eventually your entire organization.

IT’S INSTILLED IN

OF THE ORG

Amazingly, it’s not that complicated. In fact, getting everyone to speak “story” in your organization requires one main change in your everyday process:

Coaching That’s right. You need to have a regular practice of both manager and peer-to-peer coaching. And it needs to be spearheaded by managers.

A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.” - John Maxwell

Coaching and being coached leads to storytelling fluency and better team storytelling

Coaching, top-down and side-to-side You might be thinking: Great, but what does all this coaching have to do with storytelling? A whole lot. When manager or peer-to-peer coaching is regularly integrated into the story building process, storytelling skills skyrocket. Being coached helps people see how well they edited their ideas, insights, and data, and weaved them into a strong narrative that follows a clear, logical path. What’s more, coaches help their teammates determine if their story was well targeted toward the intended audience.

RYTELLING HAS EFFECT WHEN

N THE CULTURE

GANIZATION

Managers need to model the behavior they’re seeking In today’s always-on/never done business culture, the race to deliver everything quickly often encourages team members to close their doors and crank out a presentation on their own. But hasty delivery of our ideas is always short-sighted. People that receive regular story coaching find that it actually saves them time since their (coached) story will always result in a stronger and more succinct final product. AND, workers often feel uncomfortable sharing ideas that might not be fully thought through. They’re worried they’ll get it wrong, look foolish, or appear half-baked, etc. So, to truly foster a culture of great storytellers, managers must do everything they can to ease their team’s insecurities sharing works-in-progress. When managers regularly coach their staff, and reassure them that it’s okay to iterate and get it wrong, the team will begin to feel more comfortable coaching each other. And then an even great benefit emerges… a common language.

Five Ways Managers Can Reinforce Storytelling

IT’S A TEAM’S EVERYDAY COACHING OF ONE ANOTHER THAT WILL MAKE STORYTELLING SKILLS SOAR

Reinforce to your staff who their audience is

Remind your team: storytelling opportunities are everywhere

Even when a similar story is presented over and over – like a product pitch - audiences can shift dramatically. People might come from varying industries, serve different roles, and operate at different levels. One of the ways managers can best coach storytellers is to remind them to carefully consider who they will face and make sure they’ve shifted their narrative to best suit that specific audience.

Once a team has learned classic storytelling structure and how it applies to business stories, the opportunities to use it are infinite. Particularly when team members are fairly new to business storytelling, managers should encourage them to find ways to use the framework in all types of communications. This can include emails, marketing collateral, phone conversations, or elevator pitches.

Encourage on-going peer-to-peer coaching Managers should do everything they can to model and integrate peer-to-peer coaching into the story building process. The best way to get started? Make it official. Assign peer-coaching partnerships or let the team self-select partners. To reinforce this practice, have teams share the results of coaching sessions during staff meetings. Have them discuss: ü

What path did your coaching questions take?

How did the coaching sessions change the story from the beginning to end?

What was the ultimate outcome of the story?

Set high expectations… with the promise of real career advancement Managers should make sure this message is clear: while practicing storytelling is a great skill-building exercise, the ultimate goal is to measurably improve business outcomes. Make sure you set high expectations for your team’s work and challenge them to tell stories with clear, tangible results. Stories should always be built to deliver on a goal.

Consider formal storytelling training Managers who are really serious about encouraging a culture of widespread storytelling should bring in formal training. Training is an effective way to bring the team together and learn strategies, ask questions, and receive peer-to-peer and professional coaching. Best yet, good trainers will always provide heavy reinforcement tools to help people use their training long past the day of learning.

IN SHORT…

Stories will advance company and professional goals If you need more ways to encourage storytelling on your team, here’s a bonus: Remind staff that not only will these skills help the team and the company achieve their goals, they will also help them as individuals grow in their roles and advance in their careers. For managers, there’s simply nothing more gratifying to coach their teams, see them master their storytelling skills, and learn to confidently “own the room.”

TPC Story Building Tools All workshop participants are armed with practical guides to help build their stories step-by-step. They make great coaching tools for managers and peers to get everyone on the same page together.

StoryPlanner™ A simple-to-use interactive tool that helps team members develop their business stories BEFORE they create a presentation to save time, formulate their ideas, and get everyone on the same page quickly. ü Q&A format to help walk in your audience’s shoes. What are their challenges, opportunities, and possible roadblocks? ü An area to help develop your BIG Idea that anchors the story in the one thing you want people to remember. ü How do develop a Conflict (with a Resolution). ü Prompts to develop visual options for bringing the story to life.

StoryStarters™ Quickly jumpstart your team’s big presentation… or high-stakes email… or crucial pitch by leveraging the language prompts in our StoryStarters™ tool. Think of it as “Mad Libs” for creating influential business narratives that drive action.

Visual Story Checklist™ Before a presentation, business update, one-pager, or even an email go out, use our Visual Story Checklist™ to do a last-minute review to make sure your communication includes the storytelling signposts and BIG Idea designed to get ideas heard.

Be open in your coaching. Successful managers signal to their staff that it’s safe to share ideas even if, initially, they fail.

Manager Guidelines After attending our workshops, you can expect to see a significant increase in your team’s ability to communicate effectively by transforming their ideas into compelling, audience-centric stories. Whether they’re crafting a high-stakes presentation, email or 1-pager, use this guide to reinforce storytelling skills and behaviors on your team.

What you can expect Your team has learned how to turn their ideas into memorable narratives, but even more importantly they can now articulate the difference between “pretty slides” and a story strategy that connects with their audiences and drives action. A common language around storytelling The WHY, WHAT, and HOW of stories are connected through the four storytelling signposts—Setting, Character, Conflict, and Resolution.

A BIG Idea

Audience-centric stories

Story headlines that flow

Along with the four signposts of storytelling, your team has learned to identify the BIG Idea of their stories. They can articulate what they want their audiences to to know or do. Your team knows that it’s not about them. They’ve learned to put the audiences at the center of their stories. They have applied easy-to-remember techniques to get to know what matters most to their audiences. They’ve also learned to flex stories to address audience needs based on a sampling of high-stakes business scenarios. Developing stories is a 3-step process, and storytellers should never start in PowerPoint. Your team has learned to apply the tools provided to plan, storyboard, and then build a story with meaningful visuals. You should see conversational headlines (active slide titles) mapped to each signpost, that flow, capture attention, and advance the story. Your team will walk away with new skills and a storytelling toolkit:

New hands-on skills and toolkit

• Visual Story Planner™ -- A game changing framework that allows participants to focus on what their audience cares about • A reference guide that outlines all concepts learned in the class • A visual story checklist to ensure storytelling best practices are incorporated into future communications • Business story examples to inspire story-driven thinking

Peer coaching

During the workshop, your team applied the learnings, built their own stories and coached each other. They have been encouraged to extend this coaching practice within their teams in their day-to-day work.

How you can reinforce the learnings People are natural storytellers, and we know that we connect through stories. But somewhere along the way we stopped telling stories and started cramming Look for storytelling presentations with data and bullets. To continue developing their storytelling in all business muscle, encourage your team to use storytelling in any communications they want communications to influence or inspire change. This may include emails, meetings, internal conversations, and elevator pitches.

Encourage ongoing peer reviews

Assign peer-coaching partnerships, or let the team self-select partnerships. People learn more deeply when they coach others, and having regular check-ins is a great way to keep skills sharp. For extra reinforcement, invite teams to share their partnership learnings and success stories during staff meetings.

Deepen their learning

If your team has not yet taken Influencing with Visuals or Presenting Data Visually, consider adding a workshop to deepen storytelling skills with one of our data visualization or visual messaging workshops.

Set high expectations

Ultimately, while this is a development opportunity for your team, the key purpose of Crafting Strategic Visual Stories is to improve business outcomes through strategic storytelling. Don’t be afraid to set high expectations around using new skills and keep them accountable for delivering high-quality work.

Provide feedback

Manager feedback is particularly valuable to the learning process. You can reinforce positive changes by providing feedback on the stories you see. Try using the Storytelling Peer Coaching Guidelines as a starting point for your coaching, and build on it with your own coaching best practices.

Five Tips for Peer-to-Peer Story Coaching

THERE’S NOTHING LIKE A POORLY CONCEIVED STORY TO REMIND YOU WHAT A RELIEF A WELL-CONCEIVED ONE IS

The bedrock of storytelling culture is peer-to-peer coaching Peer coaching encourages storytelling in an organization in three important ways. First, it gives individual contributors an available sounding board to try out ideas. Too often, we work in isolation and don’t ask for feedback from others, or we’re reluctant to disturb our boss. In a peer coaching friendly environment, people shed their fear of “stealing” someone’s time because having a teammate review your story draft is simply part of the story development process. Second, teammates can really help keep each other on message. They’ll be able to quickly help strengthen the story and by identifying when oversharing information is detracting from the main points. And finally, peer coaches will help determine how well facts, data, and ideas map to story structure. This inquiry should include the four signposts, a BIG Idea, active headlines, and anything else that might strengthen the story.

c a o c , t e s , y d a Re

Does the story definitely address each of the four signposts?

Here’s where having an uber-simple storytelling framework really helps. Use it as a roadmap to make it very easy to “check the box” on how well your peer’s story maps to the classic story structure. For starters, examine if the story actually establishes a true setting: q

Does it reveal concrete knowledge of the audience’s world?

Does it spell out the dynamic in a market or company they care about?

Make sure it includes well-defined characters: q

Does it have meaningful characters that clearly represent the audience?

Are the characters contending with issues their audiences actually care about?

Check the story builds to a real conflict: q

Does the conflict demonstrate understanding of the audience’s problems?

Does it spell out consequences for the characters (i.e. the audience)?

Does the conflict include obvious tension language using words and phrases such as “however,“ ”but,” or “to make matters worse…”

And finally, ensure the story’s resolution actually addresses the conflict: q

Is the story’s resolution satisfying?

Does it go into enough detail… or too much detail?

Does the story prove that the resolution, when enacted, will achieve the glorious benefits of the BIG Idea?

Is there a concise, memorable BIG Idea? As a coach, helping your peers gets their BIG Idea spot on is perhaps the most important service you can provide. A solid BIG Idea is the lynchpin of the story framework and one of the earliest story elements to construct. Here’s how to help them “gut check” it: q

How well did your peer state what the BIG Idea is, and its specific benefits?

Does every other fact, piece of data, or idea included in the story directly support the BIG Idea?

Is there an obvious way to turn a longer BIG Idea into a conversational soundbite?

When a team is developing a story together, it’s best to agree upon the BIG Idea early (before anyone is tempted to pull in slides from an old deck or pile on data that might be relevant). Alignment on the BIG Idea helps avert the disastrous FRANKEDECK discussed in our workshops.

Does the resolution support the BIG Idea? The resolution is the concluding part of your peer’s story. It’s easy for a story to get derailed as the narrative dives into the nitty - gritty details. The resolution - perhaps features of a product, the timeline of an initiative, or interim milestones of a proposed software integration – is critical to edit properly in order to not bog down the story. Make sure your peer is not taking the wind out of the story sails by helping to moderate the amount of information that is offered in the resolution. q

Is there enough detail here to so that your audience can reasonably make a decision?

Do they have more details ready in case the audience asks for more?

Does every detail included in the resolution push the BIG Idea forward?

The biggest function you provide as a coach is editor. Ask your teammate: less detail is often more. (but always have more ready!)

Help them cut secondary details that will weigh down their narrative. But as you coach them – act as a proxy audience – question them further to make sure they are prepared to handle an aggressively inquisitive executive or key stakeholder. They may need to be prepared with hidden slides or perhaps a handout to offer anyone who wants to go deeper into the weeds.

Do the story headlines flow? Coaches, it’s ready time. As you go over the story, determine how well your peer used headlines from the beginning to the end of the narrative. q

Does every headline build on the one before?

Does every headline serve as a transition statement that moves the story forward?

Do headlines flow and sound conversational?

One of the best exercises to test how well the headlines flow is to simply read them out loud. They should make narrative sense on their own.

The StoryStarters™ tool is a great place to turn if you’re having difficulty formulating compelling headlines.

From good to great

What else can improve the story? The final peer coaching challenge might seem kind of extraneous. Your teammate has the story structure nailed, the BIG Idea looming large over everything else, and active story headlines that keep it all chugging along… so, what else could there be to do? A lot. It’s your role as a peer coach to help guide the extra push that’ll mean the difference between a good story and a GREAT one. q

Are there any ideas, data, or insights that could use more emphasis in order to take the audience on a more memorable journey?

Is there any part of the story that goes on too long? Did your peer belabor any point that, when cut, would make for a sharper story?

Is there any place where your peer is struggling to explain? If so, now is the time to make sure they have the story down pat.

It never fails, no matter how solid a story seems, there is always a way to take it to the next level. And in our hurry-up world, this final step is usually skipped. Our advice? Slow down. Observe the story holistically and help your peer identify where a few final tweaks will make the story become even better.

IN SHORT…

Peer-to-peer coaching drives a storytelling culture. Teamwork and collaboration help a storytelling culture flourish. Teammates keep each other on message, and help people recognize how well their chosen facts and data promote that message. Checking one another for the four signposts, a solid BIG Idea – supported by the resolution – and active story headlines truly improves communication for entire teams.

Personal Action Planner Ready to take storytelling to the next level? Use this form to commit to actions you’ll take over the next several weeks to build storytelling mastery. Don’t forget to log your reflections in the boxes on the far right. E X P E R IE N C E

Keep building your story acumen

Commit to crafting at least one new story a week using the concepts you’ve learned in this course.

LEARN

How many ways can you turn an everyday communication into a narrative? Storytellers get better with practice, so take advantage of every opportunity to hone your storytelling skills.

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E X P E R IE N C E

Use the Story Building Tools

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Use the simple-to-use Visual Story Planner to help develop your business stories BEFORE creating a presentation to save time, formulate your ideas, and get everyone on the same page quickly.

E X P E R IE N C E

Reference your book

Skim through chapters from your Everyday Business Storytelling book.

LEARN

Use our Visual Story Checklist™ to do a last-minute review to make sure your communication includes the storytelling signposts and BIG Idea designed to get your ideas heard.

LEARN

Refresh your knowledge and skills on how storytelling can be applied to all types of business communications.

M Y A C T IO N P LA N N O T E S

Each week identify an email, a conversation, a presentation, or a pitch to turn into a story. Build your story using concepts you’ve learned on this journey, and don’t forget to leverage your Visual Story Planner!

M Y A C T IO N P LA N N O T E S

Quickly jumpstart your team’s big presentation… or high-stakes email… or crucial pitch by leveraging the language prompts in our StoryStarters™ tool.

M Y A C T IO N P LA N N O T E S

Need inspiration? Navigate to Part 4 and see real-world examples of how to infuse storytelling into your own recommendations, updates, emails, one-pagers and more.

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E X P E R IE N C E

Find a storytelling partner

Work with one another to provide perspective and ongoing feedback on your stories.

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LEARN

Whether you are looking for feedback on your BIG Idea or a sanity check on your headlines, colleagues are a great resource to one another. The more you tell stories and collaborate, the better you’ll become at storytelling.

M Y A C T IO N P LA N N O T E S

Ask your partner or another peer to review your Visual Story Planner or a more developed story. Or, try uploading a video of yourself reading your headlines and ask others for feedback.

E X P E R IE N C E

LEARN

M Y A C T IO N P LA N N O T E S

E X P E R IE N C E

LEARN

M Y A C T IO N P LA N N O T E S

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The Presentation Company helps talented businesspeople at all levels bring clarity and meaning to their ideas and influence decisions through storytelling.