As much as I love stories, I didn’t have the burning passion of some of my classmates to go and write or tell my own. So I went and got a job. By my mid-twenties I had discovered that I enjoyed managing projects and I joined a large insurance/wealth management company headquartered in the UK as a project manager in their transformation program. I discovered how important stories can be in a corporate environment. It was a while ago, so what is recounted below is my recollection but you’ll get the gist.
It actually began before I joined - I got the standard welcome letter from the Chief Executive (I learned later he wrote this himself over a weekend and spent ages trying to get it perfect). It gave a vision of what he wanted the organisation to be like in the future – after the transformation program was done - and wow did it sound good! I hadn’t started yet, and I was already super excited about the potential, and understood that I played an important role in getting us there.
Stories were a critical part of the Transformation program too. Each month there was a meeting specifically framed as a storytelling session and focused on sharing examples of things people had done that chimed with the Chief Exec’s vision. But it wasn’t just the stories told individually – it was the repetition. Each of the executive team had a rotating turn leading the transformation, so they were all equally invested in it and although they might have used different words, and framed it according to their perspective, they were all painting the same picture. The program was a success by the time the financial came along in 2008, the organisation was in the best position it could be, having made changes. The program was such a success it is now a story of it’s own, with Harvard Business Review publishing a case study on how it happened.
I’m not claiming by any means that the stories were the reason for the success of the program – that was the result of a lot of hard work from a lot of people over more than three years. But would the program have caught the imaginations of the people in the business without the stories? Would everyone have believed that they had a role to play, or have been as committed to getting there? And would they all have pulled in the same direction? I don’t think so. And I say that from a place of experience. In the nearly 20 years since I got that letter welcoming me to a transformation program, I have worked on and now led a number of large and small change programs, aiming for the same result. But it’s really hard! It’s hard to create a story that everyone believes in and can see their role in. Really simply, without a compelling story the leaders implementing that change are unlikely to be aligned behind it, and the team won’t work towards it.
But stories aren’t just about large-scale change or transformation programs or the solo rhetoric of senior leaders. I used to work for one of the big four consulting firms and I vividly remember one of the leaders in my division on a briefing call to the whole team saying (in response to a question), “I don’t know – I haven’t done this before, let’s figure it out together”. I remember it because to my recollection it was the first time I had heard a leader acknowledging that they didn’t have all the answers. Not only did is empower us to help solve the problem but also gave all of us permission to say “I don’t know” sometimes. What a huge impact one little sentence can have!
Stories have a huge impact on an organisation’s culture too. Take inclusion - if a woman from an ethnic minority hears a story about another woman from the same ethnic minority being promoted because she’s done a brilliant job or a white man hears from another white man the benefit that diversity has brought to the team. Whether you are a leader or an aspiring leader, the stories you tell every day reflect your values, and affect the expectations you set for your team – how well they are included, recognised, valued and rewarded for what they do every day.
The older I’ve got the more I understand that how I perform at work is just a reflection of how comfortable I am with myself. Telling yourself the story “I can’t do this”, “I don’t deserve this” or “I’m not very good at this” just reinforces that thought. And how often do you repeat that thought to friends, colleagues or loved ones looking for reassurance? This includes repeating things like “I have imposter syndrome” – I’m not saying impostor syndrome doesn’t exist, but more that giving it the label can sometimes also make you feel like you have an excuse for justifying why you can’t do something - “I can’t do that – I have impostor syndrome” – sometimes that means you just end up wallowing in it.
I have had a few times in my career where I was stuck in a loop telling myself the same story over and over (usually feeling like a victim of other people’s actions). It was only when I changed the story and told myself a new one that I was able to move on to something bigger and better.
Everyone reading this will have a different story they would tell about me too: The stranger whose blog they randomly opened; a program director who has delivered a large financial services merger; the slightly awkward friend who always has their nose in a book, a management consultant helping organisations with their people, culture and change challenges; an operating model and organisation design specialist; a change leader and coach; or the owner of a brand new small business. The truth is that I am all of those things, and the next part of the story ties them all together.
As soon as I decided to set up in business for myself I knew
exactly what I wanted to do.
In the last couple of years I’ve started looking at the
impact that storytelling has in a corporate environment. I’m currently
researching a doctorate looking at the role storytelling plays in leading large
scale change. I’ve spent the last 15 years leading and shaping these kind of change programs, working directly with leaders
to help them implement change and communicate the culture they want to create. And over the last 10 years, as a leader and a
coach, I have helped nurture and nourish team members to help them flourish
into fantastic leaders themselves.
My intent with The Narratologist is to use my skills and
experience as a change specialist and as a leader to help improve people’s
working lives, in part through helping changing the stories people tell. I want to help organisations tell the best
change stories so that they can that help people understand what is changing
and why – where they are going and the role they can play in getting
there. I want to help leaders tell
stories that reflect the leaders that they want to be and the culture they want
to create, and I want to help individuals find their voice so they can tell
stories that help them be fulfilled and challenged and rewarded and
recognised.
A Narratologist asks "how humans make sense of
stories" and "how humans use stories as sense-making instruments” - this is what I do.
