Anecdote

Employee Engagement Strategy: What’s Your Story?

August 6, 2013 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

Why strategy needs to be a story

Shawn Callahan from Anecdote wrote a fine post on the potential for organizational leadership to be disengaged from strategy because they don’t really understand or feel the strategy. If this is true for leaders it is frightening to think about how disconnected or disengaged other employees may be from the strategy of the organization. McKinsey&Company estimated that 65% of employees may be unable to articulate the organization’s strategy and Shawn’s post makes me think this number might be low.

In the age of engage, we must stop having senior leadership retreat to craft strategy. Social media offers great mechanisms for engagement with strategy and Shawn let’s us know how important it is to transform dry strategy statements into living story. Here is a section from Shawn’s post:

The strategy gets developed as an analytical and rational process (and quite rightly so) and the end result is a document. The document gets passed around the executive team for comments. It’s duly read and commented on and at that point those running the strategy process believe everyone understands and is on board with the strategy. But something quite interesting happens when they have to tell the story of the strategy. Firstly, by telling the story of the strategy they feel what the strategy sounds like. And you can literally see executives squirm in their seat with aspects of the strategy as they say it.

The Engage for Success movement has demonstrated that strategic narrative is one of the four enablers of employee engagement. Let’s bring engagement to life with a compelling strategy story because if executive squirm in telling the story how can we expect them to live the story of the organization.

To read Shawn’s full post click on his title: How to get all your executive team on the same page with your strategy.

So, what’s your story and how would I see it lived in the work of all employees?

David Zinger is an expert global employee engagement speaker and consultant who uses the pyramid of employee engagement to help leaders, managers, and organizations increase engagement.

10 Story Tidbits for Employee Engagement

June 14, 2012 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

10 Tidbits – Kevin Bishop – Anecdote – Employee Engagement – Boston Story Course

David Zinger picture of swans at Boston Commons (June 2012)

Stories are engaging. Stories create a fabric and foundation for our organization. Stories powerfully communicate what is going on in employee engagement in our organization.

Kevin Bishop from Anecdote in Australia conducted a one day workshop on story and leadership in Boston this June. I believe Anecdote does terrific work with story and organizations. It was an honor to attend Kevin’s session in Boston. The focus was not directly on employee engagement but I always relate my learning to the world of work and engagement. Here is a list of 10 tidbits I derived from the day. These are my thoughts and not necessarily exact representations of Kevin’s statements or Anecdote’s specific perspective:

Stories paint images in people’s minds. They are facts wrapped in context and delivered with emotion.

Be careful about using the word story in many organizations as many people will default on the “once upon a time” limited view of story.

Jerome Bruner, one of the world’s leading cognitive psychologists, stated that we are 22 times more likely to remember a story than a set of disconnected facts.

Stories are concrete – they move us away from abstractions.Words like disengagement take on new meaning and a high level of specificity when we talk about the time our boss created a needless and massive setback on the Miller project that lead to two members of our team leaving.

We need a greater focus on the little stories rather than thinking we need an epic heroic story for our organization.

Follow 3 pathways to stories: tell, trigger, listen.

Your behavioral story is stronger than your told story. As a leader even if you don’t tell stories you trigger many stories in your organization. What stories do your actions trigger in employees? How well are you listening to the stories already embedded in your organization?

We can all benefit from more deliberate practice with our story skills.

Think of narrative strategy: 1. In the past. 2. Then something happened. 3. What we are going to do. 4. What will we have achieved when we succeed.

We must go beyond story telling in organizations to a greater focus on how we elicit stories from within our organizations. It may be less about telling a great engagement story and more about asking: “tell me a time you were very engaged in your work, who were you with, what were you doing, what happened?”

What engagement stories are you triggering, telling, and eliciting? For a more direct understanding of story and leadership visit the Anecdote site.

David Zinger is an employee engagement expert who is keenly interested in story and uses story extensively in his engagement work. Contact David today to speak and work on the story of engagement at your organization or conference.

Employee Engagement and Storytelling for Business Leaders

June 1, 2012 by David Zinger Leave a Comment

I am looking very forward to going to Boston next week and taking a storytelling and leadership course. I will be looking for lessons, tips, strategies, and tactics for employee engagement. Here is some of the description for the powerful one day workshop being put on by Kevin Bishop from Anecdote:

Storytelling for Business Leaders

We all desire better ways to persuade, share what we know, and help those around us make sense of the complex world we live in. The development of our innate storytelling skills helps us to build confidence, convey ideas clearly, and probably most importantly, display our humanity.

We all want to express our ideas with great impact, yet eyes instantly glaze over the moment you beam your PowerPoint slides laden with dot points. We know informally that stories are engaging – we tell them at dinner parties and people listen and they ‘get it’. Yet few leaders systematically harness storytelling to communicate ideas, convey their organisation’s values, or inspire their people. Anecdote’s storytelling workshop will show you how to do this.

Our workshop is interactive because we strongly believe in the power of practical activities to foster learning. Throughout the day, participants will engage in hands-on activities designed to build their skills and knowledge.

What the one-day workshop is all about

Stories have an incredible natural power. Our workshop will teach you how to tap into this power in three ways:

Communication – how to get your message to stick
Influence and Persuasion – how to change behaviour
Insight and Empowerment – how to understand what’s really going on

Getting your message to stick

At a recent businesswomen’s summit, Ginni Rometty, the CEO of IBM, shared a story about how, early in her career, she responded to a big job offer by saying she needed time to consider it, as she was unsure whether she could handle the responsibility. On hearing about her uncertainty, Rometty’s husband boosted her self-confidence with just one simple question: ‘Do you think a man would have ever answered that question that way?’ Her little story was reported in Fortune, The New York Times and Harvard Business Review blogs. It stuck.

The telling of business stories is not about concocting events and delivering your tale to an enraptured audience. Rather, it relies on people sharing their own experiences in an authentic and empathetic way. Everyone has stories to tell, but in many cases we are unaware of them. During our workshop, we help participants to understand why stories work, and how they can become effective story collectors and tellers. We show them how to use these skills to dramatically improve the effectiveness of their communications. And the beauty of it is that these skills are equally effective in our personal and professional lives.

Changing behaviour

In 2009, we facilitated a workshop involving 300 survivors of the Victorian bushfires, helping them share stories of when a small thing made a big difference. It was the first step in helping these people to connect with and learn from each other about how to recover from the disaster.

The initial step in influencing your audience is to establish a connection with them. Once this has happened, there are then many ways in which stories can help motivate that audience and inspire action. This section of our workshop focuses on how stories can forge stronger relationships, open up people’s minds to new possibilities, and effect real behaviour change. We’ll show you how to bring values to life, make strategies stick, and strengthen employee engagement.

Understanding what’s really going on

We once met with the CEO of a major bank who told us about his organisation’s excellent employee engagement scores. We then collected stories from his staff and discovered that many of them were bitterly unhappy.

The final section of our workshop focuses on how to use stories to find out what’s really going on in your organisation, and how to then tackle complex and challenging problems: the ones that involve people and seemingly intractable differences of opinion. Some of the important skills required to do this include asking effective questions and helping people move from problem-solving to seeing the broader patterns at work.

A big thank you to Kevin and Anecdote for inviting both my wife and myself to learn more about storytelling and leadership.

If you are interested in attending, click here. This workshop is put on by Anecdote. Here is a 40 minute webinar recording on the richness of story and employee engagement. Stories are so much more than many of us first realize. Mark Schenk and Shawn Callahan, from Anecdote in Australia, lead us through 40 minutes of how to understand and leverage story in more powerful ways to assess, enrich, and enliven employee engagement.

David Zinger is one of the leading global employee engagement experts. He believes narratives approaches offer one of the keys to open up engagement for organizations. The work of David MacLeod and the UK task force on engagement stated that one of the 4 key elements of engagement is: Visible, empowering leadership providing a strong strategic narrative about the organisation, where it’s come from and where it’s going.