People Hear Statistics But They Feel A Story

One of the most important goals of any business is to drive growth.

One of the biggest missed business opportunities is engaging individuals in your organisation to see their role in creating the future. When growth is a generic goal, people can assume that someone else is leading it. Disconnected from purpose or vision, growth can feel like a performance driver that only serves the goals of shareholders and nobody else. For companies to grow positively, and strategically, people in the organisation need to feel excited about what growth brings.

The key to framing growth for your organization is making sure people see business as a process they benefit from. Conventional objective-setting tools tend to be reactive rather than responsive. And most leaders tend to fall back on expressing their origins, and what’s come before, rather than guide people to consider what lies ahead.

In these circumstances, there is the opportunity to pull together rational and emotional drivers that engage both hearts and minds in a strategic narrative that sets out HOW, and WHY people want to grow. Story telling serves as a powerful tool for cutting through the noise of dry business objectives, function-specific strategies, KPIs, and OKRs to make business more emotionally relevant to the people in an organisation. It connects the fabric of the business; corporate strategy, product, go-to-market, brand, people & culture, in a single, coherent narrative that aligns everyone behind the business promises and the actions required to deliver it.

Stories have the power to move and inspire people. Unlike a traditional plot line which tends to be self-contained with a beginning, a middle, and an end this narrative is more open-ended. It prompts people to see themselves in a new context. It calls on them to imagine what they can do to pursue a higher purpose. It moves people into action by helping them understand the role they need to play on the journey ahead.

A strategic narrative does three important things:

1. It establishes a clear point of view that will influence, guide, and help create your organisation’s future. It expands your perspective beyond the products or services offered and connects the business to the broader context of customers’ lives and their aspirations.

2. It ties everything together. All businesses, whether big or small, have multiple initiatives going on at any given moment. If the narrative about how they all integrate is haphazard or unintentional, people will start building their own. The result is multiple, individual narratives in pursuit of different end state. In other words, chaos and confusion adds to the chatter

3. It promotes capability development and mastery. For staff to be truly invested, the narrative must invite some level of co-creation. You must give everyone the tools and direction they require to do their jobs well, without being so prescriptive as to limit their tactical freedom to execute. In the creation and execution of the story each member of staff is invited to use their imagination to help build and strengthen the business.

The approach to developing a strategic narrative is not as a once-and-for all alignment activity. It’s intentionally designed to be revisited and updated over time adapting just as the business navigates its market.

About the Author

Les is a coach, consultant, and facilitator who works with growth-oriented MDs and CEOs of businesses in “scale-up”. He is also a director of 20-20 Management which is a performance improvement company that specialises in leadership development and growth.

Les has a proven track record of helping clients deliver successful results by addressing vision and strategy, organisation structure, culture, and performance, and managing change to create more accountable, affordable, and agile businesses.

Contact Les to share an experience, thought, or idea or if you have questions about how to improve leadership and business performance.