What kind of storytelling is relevant and most effective during times of flux, upheaval and uncertainty? How can companies make teams feel empowered, positive, connected… so they can continue to give customers the quality interactions they’ve come to expect? When so much has changed and templates for how we do business are being redefined daily, great storytelling connects employees to their work. In every organization where there is a strong sense of moral motivation, leaders are always storytellers. So, it’s worth figuring out how to make an impact doing this well, and training our communications, marketing and sales teams to have alignment here. The stories we tell ourselves and each other will shape the way companies fare in the coming weeks and months, especially during the pandemic. How will your company do?
Excerpt from HBR…
I once spent a few delicious days studying Union Square Hospitality Group (USHG), a collection of high-end, casual eateries started by the famed New York restauranteur, Danny Meyer. He had recently claimed the key to his success was creating a “culture of hospitality.” I set out to discover how.
One day, at his Shake Shack (now a juggernaut global chain) in Madison Square Park, an employee I’ll call Bert was dragging a bit. Bert was relatively new and hadn’t really bought into the whole hospitality thing. He was sneaking peeks at his cell phone while pretending to be busy around the outdoor dining area when his supervisor spotted him and torpedoed toward him.
Most organizations have a few Berts in them. In fact, let’s be honest. Most of us are somewhat like Bert much of the time. We go through the motions, phoning it in, but engage in our work less than we are capable of. Measures of discretionary effort — the gap between what we’re giving and what we’re capable of giving — show that most of us are checked outmore often than all in. The consequence is not just lower productivity; it is lower quality of life. Half-hearted effort isn’t fun.
Fortunately, there is a lot a leader can do to help employees feel a deeper sense of motivation (and resultant satisfaction) in their work. And the first place to begin is with connection.
Connection happens when you see past the details of a task to its human consequences. When you feel connected to the moral purpose of your work, you behave differently. Now “moral purpose” might sound lofty but it needn’t mean saving a puppy or curing cancer; it can involve any kind of human service.
And at the end of the day, all business is about service.
That’s where leaders come in. The first responsibility of leaders — whether front line supervisors, middle managers, or executives — is to compensate for the inevitable alienation that complex organizations create, and provide employees with a visceral connection to the human purpose they serve. And that’s what I observed Danny Meyer’s leaders doing better than most.
What would you guess the Shake Shack supervisor did with Bert? Deliver a reprimand? (“Pick up the pace, Bert!”) Lay on a guilt trip? (“The rest of the team is picking up your slack!”) Discipline? (“I’m putting you on notice!”). The supervisor did none of these. Instead, she told a story.
As Bert scrutinized his phone he stood next to spattered and cluttered dining tables. Guests passed him on their way to order food. The supervisor pulled up in front of him, put her hand on his shoulder, and said in a serious and sincere tone, “Hey Bert, twenty minutes ago a young mother left her two-year-old daughter on one of these chairs while she went to the order window to buy their food. When she walked away, her daughter began sweeping her hand back and forth over the table that was smeared with catsup from one of our previous guests. Then she began licking it off her hand.” Bert cringed. Panicked, he looked at the tables to see which ones might put the next two-year-old at risk of catsup-borne disease and began wiping them down.
Leaders can maintain a lively sense of connection, as the Shake Shack manager did, through storytelling. It needn’t be an elaborate ritual involving an audience gathered for a relaxed evening. It isn’t.
Most storytelling is brief. It involves using concrete examples that reframe a moment by personifying human consequences. People’s feelings about their work are only partly about the work itself. They are equally, if not more so, about how they frame their work.
Do they see what they’re doing as a mindless ritual? Do they see it as empty compliance? Or do they see it as sacred duty?
If you change the frame you change the feeling. And nothing changes frames faster than a story.
It’s easy to go on autopilot like Bert did. Research shows that once a task becomes familiar, our brains devote far less cognitive resources to it. One of the downsides of this brilliant evolutionary design is that we disconnect. We stop seeing past our work to the people we affect.
In every organization we’ve ever studied where there was a strong sense of moral motivation, the leaders were always storytellers.
They understood and acted on their responsibility to overcome the inevitable alienation of routine organizational life by connecting employees with those they serve.