GET YOUR STORY STRAIGHT

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Some executives view communicating with employees as an act of good will: A philanthropic burden that accompanies their ascension to the leadership team. They’re wrong.

Communicating well internally isn’t just about the courtesy of keeping people in the loop. Done well, it’s also a powerful lever to meaningfully improve performance. 

As Ben Horowitz says, “Companies get results when everyone is on the same page and everyone is improving.” Those two goals are interconnected, and effective storytelling, as Dan Coyle writes in the Culture Code, is the discipline that binds them together:

 “We tend to use the word story casually, as if stories and narratives were ephemeral decorations for some unchanging underlying reality. The deeper neurological truth is that stories do not cloak reality but create it, triggering cascades of perception and motivation. The proof is in brain scans: When we hear a fact, a few isolated areas of our brain light up, translating words and meanings. When we hear a story, however, our brain lights up like Las Vegas, tracing the chains of cause, effect, and meaning. Stories are not just stories; they are the best invention ever created for delivering mental models that drive behavior.” [8]

 The next time you see a big change in your organization coming – an acquisition, an organizational restructuring, or simply a need to reinvigorate things and refocus people on a new set of goals – don’t just think about the plan. Think about the story that people need to hear – the story that will help them understand, commit, and act. Enlist your team to help you.

And when you think your people “get it”, do us a favor: Keep retelling the story, even if it gets a little old.

 As we often tell our executive teams: 

“When you’re sick of saying it, they are only starting to hear you.”