Storytelling in Organizations

Sometime ago, I was in conversation with an HR Head of an upcoming and a pretty successful start-up, who mentioned his challenge in building a uniform culture within his organization as fresh people were being inducted. In his organization, he had founders, core group and then the new comers. He mentioned that the somehow the new comers were not able to get the grip on the culture. He also mentioned that employees came from variety of backgrounds – elite colleges, renowned product companies and some from service companies.

During our discussions, I casually suggested if they have experimented the use of Storytelling to document culture within the organization. He sounded very surprised and doubted if this could even work in his fast paced start-up company. However, here are the reasons why it would work in any organization.

To build Culture:

Culture is built in any organization in ‘Two Touch Point’ way. Any new employee joining the organization builds a culture the moment they meet at least 2 people saying the same stuff. Imagine Sally joins her new office and asks her buddy John over lunch – ‘Hey! how do things generally work around here?’ John replies, ‘You are in good books till you don’t open your mouth! You know Catherine; she spoke her mind in the meeting the other day. Nobody has seen her ever since’. Now over next 2 days if Sally meets someone else, who confirms these stories... Boom! The culture is formed. So create positive stories that employees can talk about. They become your torch bearers of culture.

To teach Values:

Have you been through those boring preachy Values sessions in organizations? If yes, how easy is it to understand them and live them? These value sessions are attempted to make the employees understand the expected behaviours. In one of the organizations I worked, we would encourage our employees to share their personal stories at work displaying those values. This helped everyone to understand what those values really mean. Also, it created a kitty of positive stories that can help create the culture.

To teach valuable Leadership lessons:

Leaders sometimes may not have time to spend passing on the leadership experiences directly. By sharing personal experiences in form of stories help retain those lessons. Also, those lessons remain with us forever long after the leaders have moved on... Dr. Abdul Kalam, ‘Missile-Man of India’ and the greatest leader in Indian history used storytelling to motivate us and drive home the point.

As Knowledge Management tool:

Some companies are using customer stories or incidents to be documented for future reference in their Knowledge Management tool so that the problem statement is well understood. I am sure, we have all heard of a General Motors and the vanilla ice-cream story arising out of customer complaint story. We can document stories as business cases as well.

Stories have the power to Move people!

Powerful, heroic internal organizational stories have inspired people to act differently and achieve business results. How leaders took a tough call in times of difficulties and changed the course of history is not new for us.

Stories help connect us with the content emotionally. These emotions then drive our actions. If these actions are channelized, possibilities are limitless!! This HR Director confessed he had underestimated the power of storytelling and also mentioned that he thought it’s a new buzz word in the corporate world.

So are you ready for another success story?