Stories That Inspire

"Do you have a pillow to go with this story?"  Such were the words shared by friend and colleague Susan Poryles (an HR manager for Thomson Financial) as I began a story over Mexican food one night.

Tough words, but ones that reminded me that just because you have a story, it doesn't mean you have one that will engage your listener.

So what makes a good story?
Screenwriter Robert McKee has coached storytellers that went on produce, write or direct films like Forrest Gump, Erin Brockovich, The Color Purple, Gandhi, Sleepless in Seattle, Toy Story and Nixon.

In his 2003 interview with the Harvard Business Review, he tells businesspeople how they can adapt principles of storytelling to inspire and engage employees. His advice goes contrary to what we are taught in marketing, especially how to write customer success stories. 

"Do not tell a beginning-to-end tale describing how results met expectations. This is boring and banal. Instead, display the struggle between expectation and reality in all its nastiness."

Make it Believable
The reason I find this advice so good is that it supports a number one rule of corporate storytelling: make your stories believable. If executives, in their attempts to engage employees, tell stories that are too mom-and-apple-pie employees dismiss them as corporatespeak.

Alternatively, McKee suggests executives, especially CEOs, tell stories that are personal and close to them. For example, the CEO of a medical technology firm, orients new employees with stories of his father - who died of a heart attack. In his grief he realized that if there had been some chemical indication of heart disease, his father's death could have been prevented.

He tells of how he led the company's discovery of a protein that's present in the blood just before heart attacks and develops an easy-to-administer, low-cost test.

New employees (or candidates) find this story far more engaging than PowerPoint slides and statistics.

And getting people engaged is what instilling your brand in the internal workforce is all about. In its 2005 poll, Yahoo! Hot Jobs learned that 90 percent of people looking for jobs online consider it very important or important to be able to support a company's brand, products and vision.

So leave the PowerPoint deck and financial statements behind when you're communicating brand or a new strategic direction.

Engage your people with tales that tell the real story. Make it personal and don't be afraid to expose personal struggle. Of course, in your story you'll want to communicate how you or your company triumphed, but try to do it using, humble, non-egotistical language.

Watch the corporatespeak. Your people are too smart for that. By inspiring, your audience won't be asking for a pillow.