Whether it’s wobbly or collapsing banks, spiky inflation, flaky supply chains, AI disruption, mid-ranking skills shortages and talent retention issues (or all of these at the same time!), everyone in the leadership team must pull their weight when navigating your organisation through the waters of 2023 and beyond. Starting with you.
As with all things… you know the buck stops abruptly and unceremoniously with you. #LonelyCEO.
Shhhh…. don’t tell anyone … Storytelling is the best investment you can make!
Storytelling has a fantastic ROI and is a bargain too. Upgrading how you identify and tell stories is easily the best investment you could make in your organisation and yourself. Low on cost and high return on investment – no other lever you can pull has the same ROI. Imagine reducing your unwanted talent churn by 10% or even 5%. Imagine if you could increase your margin by 10%. Forget that… what about 1%? Imagine if your bid/win ratio was 2% better. What would that do to your numbers?
Leadership IS Storytelling
Storytelling makes it a hell of a lot easier to concisely and swiftly communicate your vision and values to your employees, customers and stakeholders compellingly and memorably, and you’ll be able to focus and motivate your team in a way no complicated and expensive membership scheme or loyalty programme ever will.
You can’t avoid or duck economic, political, environmental or corporate challenges, but you can make your organisation more resilient, coherent and focused.
And when the dark clouds lift, you’ll stand out amongst your former peers because you effectively and confidently told, shared and stood by your story. Real, honest storytelling helps you build trust and credibility by showing your authentic and vulnerable side when the chips are down and how you behave and handle yourself when things are going well.
This could mean survival in the short term, rewards, and repositioning when the time comes.
Essentially, storytelling is not just a skill but a mindset and a habit that every CEO, plus every C and senior leader) need to adopt in 2023, allowing you to lead and influence with empathy, whatever the scenario.
Effective CEO Communication is all about storytelling
As a CEO, your number 1 job is to be an effective communicator. Like President Zelenskyy, you are Communicator in Chief. And if you’re not, you should be! Head to Google and hit ‘corporate storytelling 2023’, and you’ll find 20 BILLION results telling you why corporate storytelling is so important.
Research by the McKinsey Global Institute in 2022 of 8,000 business professionals across 150 countries uncovered 56 foundational skills that corporate firms believe will help everyone be successful in the workplace against a background of AI, automation and technology.
Their research found four categories; digital, interpersonal, self-leadership and cognitive and 13 skill groups.
One of which, not unsurprisingly, covered communication, specifically:
- Storytelling and public speaking
- Asking the right questions
- Synthesising message and
- Active listening
Like politicians, in 2023, everything you do and say, inside and outside the workplace, will be scrutinised, analysed and widely shared online.
Actions and words have outcomes too! Employees, customers, suppliers ….. everybody is watching and listening. Social media amplifies their reactions, and you can have a massive problem in hours – because of your choice of words. Or your loose, lazy or unthinking use of words…. a choice is a conscious, purposeful act.
Everything you say or write can have a dramatic impact on your business. (Unless you’re just plain boring. There’s a time and a place for that, too btw, believe it or not!)
Your share price could plunge off the back of a Tweet, a poorly written redundancy letter, a misjudged statement, or an early or late or thoughtless reaction (or lack of) to an external event. If not brutally clear, your words can be misinterpreted or misquoted, causing confusion or worse among staff, customers and investors.
It’s why so many successful CEOs routinely turn to storytelling to get their message across clearly and concisely, making it easily digestible and shareable. Great corporate storytelling is also an effective way to build and promote a strong company culture that binds teams together, helps prevent unnecessary mistakes and creates positive opportunities. Storytelling should become a behavioural SatNav that keeps the company and its messaging on track.
A good story wants to be told. A bad story will be told. You choose which story you want out there.
Stories aren’t new – they are part of the human condition. We are hardwired for stories, and it’s why they are so powerful and why it’s crazy not to tell them. Jesus told stories or parables as lessons, and cavemen around campfires passed on stories. As children, nothing was better than having Mum or Dad read us a bedtime story – times we all fondly and vividly recall as adults.
Stories work because they wrap the core takeaway; the message, the facts, the lesson in emotion, drama, and colour – they make it come to life. Allowing the reader or listener to imagine and visualise it. And then retell it. Stories are there to be retold – that’s part of their power and potency. As a kid, often reading by torchlight under the covers at night, I devoured books every day – those words came to life for me in a cinematic 360 world.
Stories bring facts to life. They trigger emotion. They can create action and changes in behaviour.
(Read more about the dramatic arc and how a handful of adverbs can bring a story to life)
It’s a couple of years old now, but I recently stumbled across this video from the co-founder of Airbnb:
CEO Storytelling Examples
The real story about how Airbnb was founded – Nathan Blecharczyk Co-founder Airbnb – Startup Success
He takes the facts and injects humour, personal anecdotes and mini-stories within the full story about how Airbnb was founded to add colour and bring the story to life. It feels relatable and, for me, at least, is memorable.
Storytelling looks backwards and projects forward.
A CEO client talks about the relentless nature of being a CEO. We have worked on multiple internal EOY speeches together, which inevitably focus on what his team have done and his ambitions for the following year. He delivers the speech and is back at work early the next day. While his team is buzzing – he is fully aware that he only has 364 days until he next delivers the big event, the annual all-company State of the Union address. He knows that what we write is based on the substance and the delivery of those 364 days. He is focused on delivering the projects and the workstreams already underway and those yet to be started. He’s delivered the manifesto – now he needs to deliver the results.
So, how do time-starved CEOs succeed at storytelling?
Just like anything else. With a coach. CEO storytelling coaching focuses on helping you understand, identify and articulate your stories. Storytelling coaching helps you use words to get what you want – attracting, engaging and retaining talent; building your turnover through acquiring and retaining and maximising repeat, long-term healthy-margin clients; growing your share price and balance sheet.
Storytelling Coaching for CEOs
As a CEO, as the Storyteller in Chief of your organisation, you have so many daily opportunities to stand out or suck – whether speaking internally to your team, or externally to customers, stakeholders or to the media:
- Pitches
- Your AGM speech
- Internal comms sessions – live and virtual
- Board meetings
- Monday meetings
- SLT sessions
- Meetings with analysts and banks
- Meetings with regulators, agencies, local and national government
But it’s so much more. Events and dinners. Trade events. Informal meetings. Social gatherings.
In all of these situations, the buck stops with you. At the end of these events – are you up or down?
It’s up to you to make the most of those opportunities. The cavalry isn’t coming. It’s up to you and the stories you tell.
As a storytelling coach, I can help you identify, craft and tell better stories for all these situations.
Positive, compelling, memorable and authentic stories that help you improve all your key numbers: margins, costs, productivity, bid ratios, revenues, investor relations, staff engagement and talent retention.
I’ve helped business leaders from ambitious Silicon Valley startups to ”Big Ship” FTSE 250, FTSE 100 and DAX companies. I’ve helped clients reduce the cost of unwanted churn by millions a year, increase margins and acquire clients. I’ve been doing this for over 30 years, and I’ve never come across a company that doesn’t have at least one good story to tell, and I’ve never come across a company that was making the most of their stories.
But I’m not just a storytelling and speaker coach. I turned around, managed and sold a (tiny) industrial two-site group of three distressed companies in Germany with 140 people as a wartime CEO over a period of 3 years. So I get the enormity and pressures of your responsibility – and I know how ridiculously busy you already are.
This is why my CEO storytelling coaching is based entirely around you,
your diary and the way you work best.
One CEO prefers working with me at their house on Sunday mornings – fine. One prefers evenings by Zoom – fine. One likes Friday mornings at 05:30 – fine.
Schedule a quick intro chat with me on Calendly to discuss what you want to achieve and what works for you. Or just text or WhatsApp me at +447775504299.