Telling Tales
How can HR become better at storytelling?Storytelling: the very word used to be viewed with suspicion. A tall tale is an unlikely story. But recently, storytelling has become respectable. Now everyone is talking about ‘stories at work’.
Search #storytelling on Twitter and you’ll find links to marketing, management and leadership. From an HR perspective, storytelling can help you recruit, retain and motivate staff.
Why are stories such an effective tool?
The science behind storytelling
People are constantly searching for meaning. Our brains perceive patterns in the world around us. We see faces in the clouds and figures in tea-leaves.
Seeing patterns helps us learn from experience: we avoid boiling water because we were burnt in the past. It’s also how we share knowledge: we fear rabid dogs because we’ve heard they bite. We communicate practical information by relating causal sequences of events.
Human beings are storytelling animals. Our minds evolved over millennia to share experience through stories. Dr Uri Hasson at Princeton University has found that our brains respond to narrative imagery.
If you hear a story, it activates the parts of your brain that would be involved in experiencing those events. When the hero eats a hot curry, your sensory cortex lights up; when he wrestles an assassin, your motor cortex fires up too.
What’s more, stories alter our brain chemistry: the minds of storyteller and audience literally synchronize. Dr Paul Zak has shown that when we listen to a story, our bodies release cortisol and oxytoxin.
Cortisol is the ‘stress’ hormone, made in the adrenal glands; oxytoxin is the ‘bonding’ hormone, promoting feelings of empathy. (Paul is fondly known by his colleagues as ‘Dr Love’.) So stories are a very potent way to communicate.
What does this mean for you?
Tell it as a story
When you’re making a presentation, make sure people listen. That means you have to keep their attention.
PowerPoint is fine for key points, but it shouldn’t be the script for your speech. Data slides are a good way of lulling your audience to sleep.
If you need to communicate corporate strategy, don’t rely on graphs and bullet points. Instead, try delivering your message as a story.
Corporate storytelling is a two-way process. Past events affect current employee experience; and the organisation itself is composed of individual stories.
Let’s look first at why a company should consciously construct its story. Your corporate history relates what has happened; it also operates as a feedback loop.
And as we know, a company’s image determines who will aspire to work there. Are you known for implementing ethical initiatives or for your exclusive onsite gym? If you want to attract a different type of applicant, try reframing your story.
Let’s look at why employees should be encouraged to tell their stories. When you’re hiring, naturally you want to recruit the best person for the job. And when staff are in position, you want to ensure that they are working to their maximum potential.
Arrange workshops for staff to develop their personal stories. Group discussions help people define stories around priorities and values; individual exercises help them identify stories around their own aptitudes and ambitions.
Sometimes this process can be life changing. It’s exhilarating when someone realises that their past experiences and personal strengths qualify them for a new direction.
That’s enough theory: what should you actually be doing?
I’m listening…
Develop a culture in which people are happy to share their stories.
This serves multiple functions. It ensures that management stay in touch with what’s happening throughout the organisation. It means that employees are aware of the corporate story, and keep up to date with changes in policy and structure.
And it helps to guarantee that the personal stories of employees corroborate the company’s wider story. Such corporate integrity is vital in today’s social-media-dominated world.
Here are some questions you could ask, to help someone tell their story:
- When did you join this company?
- What is your current job/position?
- Why did you choose this line of work?
- Who has been your professional inspiration?
- Tell me about… a problem you solved/a crisis you’ve faced/a funny incident.
What did you learn from this?
Now you need to turn this data into a story. Use a simple dialectic model: Problem – Response – Resolution. Highlight the lessons learned and how they could be applied elsewhere.
These tales can then be shared with others in the organisation. This could be in a departmental meeting, at a company conference or as a regular feature for your intranet or in-house newsletter.
Want to read more? The Storytelling Animal (2012) by Jonathan Gottschall explains why people respond to stories. Only Connect (2013) by Robert Mighall expounds storytelling for corporate brand management. Finally, my own book StoryWorks (2015) is a practical handbook on how to tell stories.
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