How does a company of 6,000 employees make sure that all its employees adopt new behaviors? For Mike, a structural engineer, the answer is storytelling. He believes it’s the best way of communicating new cultural value to the employees he oversees.

In 2021, Esther led a storytelling training session for the leaders of leaders of a global aerospace and defense company. The training was aimed at preparing leaders to have the communication skills to train future leaders. It was here that Mike learned about leadership storytelling.

For the entire training, Mike was rapt. This felt like the piece that was missing from his own leadership story. After the training, Mike bought Esther’s first book, Let The Story Do The Work and he signed up for Better Every Story, Leadership Story Lab’s monthly newsletter with actionable storytelling tips.

“I’ve been reading the newsletters ever since,” said Mike. “I’ve learned how to listen to other people’s stories and learn from them.”

Storytelling Skills Are Critical For Leading Through Change

It’s not been an easy season in the aerospace sector, which makes the company communication goals all the more critical. The company lost major contracts and Mike’s team lost a lot of people. They had to pivot from designing and testing helicopters to developing drones.

This was a huge shift for the team — the process and objectives were totally different. “It became one of the ironies at the company,” explained Mike. “We built helicopters that have to be safe. And now we’re making toy drones. And the mentality has to shift. Engineers are not good at shifting.”

“To convince people to change, I became a storyteller,” said Mike. “We build prototypes now. People are not flying them. The biggest risk we have is making sure they don’t land on somebody inappropriately.”

Someone who has been working at the company for 30 years, making sure the exact same procedure is followed, making sure a product is 100% safe is going to have a hard time testing new ideas, explained Mike. But because he was able to help his team shift to its new mission, it’s allowed them to be more competitive. The company has a reputation for excellence — and now they can compete with the smaller companies in this new market.

After the leadership storytelling training with Esther, Mike started leading monthly listening sessions for the company to help lead the company’s cultural transformation. This was one the places where he’s had the chance to practice his storytelling skills. Each listening session is only an hour and it’s hard for participants to start sharing. So he uses storytelling during these sessions to help put people at ease. Through Mike’s use of storytelling Mike becomes a trusted guide who helps uncover the important stories of the people in his listening sessions.

According to Mike, the easiest and fastest way to get people to understand this company-driven cultural transformation is to “create a story based on my experience and based on the audience.” For example, the new behaviors the company wants its employees to adopt is collaboration and listening.

A Leadership Storytelling Example In Action

Graduating early to join the Army, Mike’s first leadership story was anything but collaborative. “I developed what I thought was a perfect leadership story: ‘Lead, follow, or get out of the way,’” shared Mike.

This story served him well when he graduated as a structural engineer and began working for an aerospace company — until he got married and had a family and decided he needed to pivot roles so could have a better work-life balance.

In a new role as a supervisor, the black-and-white leadership story he learned in the Army, no longer served him or the people he was leading. The training with Leadership Story Lab helped him discover how he could be a different kind of leader.

“My goal right now is basically making people better around me. I found my purpose,” said Mike. Now as a manager, he’s learned how to listen and help people move forward in their careers.

“I’m in the middle management role. So if I want to align the top-down goals with the individual goals, I’ll build different stories based on my experiences,” explained Mike. He considers a hierarchy of questions to help him as leader: “What’s best for the person? What’s best for the team? Are we doing our job for a company?”

He shared that the team or the individual may not always get the desired outcome, but in the long run, he’s supporting his team as best he can. Mike gave the example that it may be best for a stellar employee and for the company if that person gets a promotion, even if that means his team will lose a key person. He uses storytelling to help communicate these difficult choices with his team and to communicate to upper management about why his team members should get a promotion.

It’s a quick story that helps upper management see why an individual is ready for a promotion. He explained, “The best way to describe a person is actually to share the story about them. That’s the power of a story for me.”

Storytelling Is About Listening

When Mike first was approached about storytelling at work, he was excited about getting the chance to tell his own story. Mike likes to joke that no one ever forgets his voice — “I’m from New York, but also I never stop talking, right?”

Born and raised in Queens, one of 10 kids, Mike learned he had to work hard to be heard. “Being the youngest, you never get your word in. So I always found myself interrupting, talking too much, getting sidetracked. So storytelling was an exercise for me,” explained Mike.

Early in his career, he was given the feedback that he had to let other people have a chance to talk too. It was storytelling that taught him to be a better listener: “I’ve learned you have to listen to other people, to give them the chance to tell their story. And when they share their story, you connect!”

It didn’t come naturally. The first few times he asked story-generating questions, he jumped in with his own experiences and never let the other people finish their own stories. But now he has learned how to take a beat. “I realized that if I pause and hear their story out, without interrupting, the real stuff comes out,” he said.

As a supervisor, he’s learned that it’s this “real stuff” that matters to the team and the company culture. He has to listen to get to it.

“Many times in my role as a leader, people come to me expecting the answers,” Mike explained. “But I realize if I listen first and don’t react, I get the story about how they’re feeling — whether it’s frustration, or why they are having a hard time doing their job.” Mike learned that listening is actually more meaningful than having all the answers or his own story to share.

“That’s the power of listening to somebody’s story,” said Mike. “That’s the definition of facilitation — helping the audience learn in their zone, not in your zone.”

Using Storytelling To Shine A Light On Others

Mike’s learned that storytelling is key to communicating with higher levels of leadership as well. To show the upper management that his team had adopted the new company values of collaboration he leaned on his storytelling tools.

“I had somebody on my team take a picture of all these different people in this tiny lab, working on one product with one purpose,” shared Mike. “Because of that picture I had the opportunity to brief the executives on the impact of the transformation in company culture. I shared this picture with my vice president and I said, this is what collaboration looks like. We had an objective of delivering a product to a supplier with a two day deadline. On Wednesday, we had 1,000 pieces and 70 people in a small lab. And then on Saturday, we had a finished product on a ship going down to the customer.”

“That 45-second story — that’s what I’ve been practicing,” said Mike, “telling stories, the big versions, the small versions. That’s what I’ve learned. Storytelling is an everyday thing,” said Mike. “It’s not just a big one-time story.”

Mike now looks for a story in everyday conversations, not just when he’s on the mainstage talking to a large group of people. He found that storytelling is nimble because he can shape stories based on his audience and the context. As someone studying storytelling since that initial training with Esther, Mike has learned how to tell stories in short one-on-one conversation and longer stories for presentations.

Leadership Story Lab teaches the IRS method — Intriguing beginning, Riveting middle, Satisfying end — to give shape to stories.

He describes it this way: “What’s the catch? What’s going to keep them engaged? And then how can I give them something to take away in a short conversation? If I have a longer timeframe like for presentations for STEM, career changes, coaching, I can develop a little bit bigger story. Add a little bit more anticipation.”

Whatever the context, Mike’s learned how to pass on a message through storytelling, how to connect the dots for people and get to know people and build trust through storytelling.

“When you share your own story, they can relate to you. It helps build trust, psychological safety and confidence because they get to hear a part of your story.”

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