A Leader's Guide to Storytelling

Restoring Authentic Communication in a World of Change

Mark Dailey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000464467
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Comunicación empresarial

Part manual, part memoir and part call to action, this book demonstrates why the core skill needed by leaders in the next decade and into the future will be authentic and effective communication.

Communications based on character, integrity and values will be critical in helping leaders navigate the two mega trends of accelerated technological change and increasing demands for social change. This book is the first to marry practical advice on deepening communication skills with insight from a coaching and cognitive point of view into what techniques works and why, and to pull together the wider societal issues and the operating context for leaders.

Counter-intuitive and written to provoke thought and awareness, the author looks at the psychological and emotional effects of our communications and what leaders can do to inspire and engage, guiding them through three sections:

• A framework for effective communications

• A toolkit, detailing what good looks like in practical situations

• The authentic leader, an exploration of the changing communications landscape and why a different kind of leadership is needed

C-suite executives, leaders about to take that last step into the C-suite or millennial leaders about to enter the boardroom will value this book as an advisory guide, as a handbook to be used in internal coaching and training sessions and as a manual and aide memoir for themselves.

Part 1

Setting the Scene

Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003198994-2

It is the thesis of this book that authentic and effective communication – from everyone, but leaders particularly – will be needed more than ever in the years to come, not only to deal with the immediate, lingering and longer-term effects of COVID-19 but also to help us find our way between two conflicting mega trends – accelerated disruption driven by digitisation and technological change and the rise of social values and the significantly increasing pressure on leaders to take a stand on the great societal issues of the day.

We are entering an age which will be typified by these two mega trends, and this will require a substantial upgrade in how leaders communicate. In the shorter term, it will be imperative for leaders to be able to show empathy and to articulate in an authentic and effective way what is happening to individuals and organisations, as the wave of business restructuring and redundancies signals the start of the great realignment that will happen when the implications of COVID start to become more apparent.

Then, as the two mega trends accelerate, leaders will need to redouble their efforts to explain change, build resilience and inspire others to be confident.

The first trend will be seen in the wave of disruption that will gather pace as automation, artificial intelligence and algorithms begin to profoundly reshape business. The digital divide will describe the gap between those who are able to find employment directing this effort and adding value through advisory, creative and insight services and those who will be increasingly marginalised.

The second trend – the rise of the importance of social values and the demand for action on issues such as fairness, racism, climate change and sustainability – will be accompanied by roiling emotion and rising expectations.

The quantum of expected disruption and change over the next ten years will be of such a magnitude that the core business skill needed will be effective communication. To find a workable balance between the detached, inexorable logic of automated change on the one hand, and the visceral emotion of those yearning for social change but experiencing so much economic and structural disruption on the other hand.

A ‘third way’ of communicating will be needed between the ‘cool’ imperative of technological progress and the ‘hot’ emotions brought to the fore by surging concern for social justice. Leaders will need to be authentic and effective to intermediate between these two ‘zeitgeist-driven’ modes of communicating.

A perfect example of the gulf between these two ways of communicating was seen in the summer of 2020 with the great exam fiasco in the UK.

On the one hand, there were the apostles of automation with their outsized faith in an algorithm’s ability to make the correct determination of A level and GCSE grades in the absence of exams. Their position was marked by bloodless and technocratic explanations for why this was the best available and fairest methodology process-wise.

On the other hand was the hugely negative reaction from parents, teachers and students to the perceived unfairness of the process. Their unified and visceral response went viral in intensity and caused an embarrassing U-turn in Scotland and in England a couple of weeks later.

This kind of emotional and communications face-off between these two trends will only intensify and multiply as both accelerate.

It is the increasing dissonance wrought by these two conflicting trends that will make the ability to communicate what is really happening and what is really of value so important. Questions like what is fair, where do our best interests lie, what is important and worth preserving and what must we let go of, and how can we navigate our way forward and embrace change without marginalising whole segments of society will cry out for authentic and effective articulation unsullied by either technocratic impulses or feral emotion.

And so what does authentic and effective communication look like? I think the core of the answer lies with our strange relationship to storytelling.

People are innately articulate and eloquent provided the forum is relaxed, informal and the subjects are themselves or something they hold dear. In conversations, facilitation or training exercises and certainly in one-on-one coaching sessions – where there is no requirement other than to talk – when people are telling their story, they show all the hallmarks of effective communications: authenticity, engagement, brevity and above all a willingness and facility to say what it means.

This is easily disrupted by the weight of expectations, formality, the feeling that storytelling is inadequate in a business setting and above all performance, time and peer pressure. This easy-going eloquence dissipates as people react to what they feel they should do in a business setting. But in its purest, storytelling form – the story of me – people are eager to share and innately know how to do well.

We all know what good looks like. When directly asked, people always respond the same way:

• A topic that is relevant to me
• Delivery that is engaging, confident and authentic
• Content that is concise, meaningful and has clear takeaways

We are also able to translate this recognition and knowledge of what good looks like into extremely accurate and useful feedback. And what is astonishing is that the feedback always comes in the same order. People always give feedback starting with how it made them feel (audience), how well it engaged them (engagement) and then what they remember (content/structure). And they are robust, cogent and articulate in offering insight.

So the question is if we intuitively know what good looks, why do we find it so difficult to do for ourselves?

We have an innate ability to recognise what is good, identify the ingredients that made it good and articulate precisely when, how and why we perceive the communication this way.

Why having started with such a built-in competitive advantage in our ability to communicate informally about ourselves and easily recognise what good looks like in others do we squander that advantage? Why do we communicate well about other people’s communications but forget all this great feedback when it comes to ourselves?

This is the first great conundrum in communications – we intuitively recognise, understand and can articulate what good looks like in others – but we find it very difficult to do for our own communications.

What is responsible for holding us back?

I think the answer revolves around how we perceive ourselves and how we wish to be perceived by others. We tend to have deeply rooted beliefs and strong feelings about how we come across publically, what we feel our strengths are, what ‘being professional’ means, the reputations we want to build and strengthen, what we were taught at school, university and on the job, our innate personalities and confidence levels and our ability to trust ourselves and others.

And this complex ecosystem translates primarily into a yearning to be safe that manifests itself in the need to say more rather than less. Less leaves us open to being perceived as lightweight, perhaps deficient in expertise and knowledge. More is safer. And so, although we exhort other people to be concise, we exempt ourselves from this advice.

If you asked me to sum up the one thing most responsible for holding us back from being good communicators it would be that we vastly prefer to seek solace and safety in rationally delivering detail rather than emotionally engaging with others about meaning. For many of us, detail represents not only a safe haven but the chance to showcase expertise, buttress our point of view and garner external validation.

Detail means content and for many people content is synonymous with presentation. When you ask people preparing a presentation to estimate how much time they put into the three key buckets they have identified as constituting good communications – audience, structure/content and engagement – they usually score it this way:

• Thinking about what the audience needs – 5%
• Structure and content – 90%
• Engagement – 5%

Many presenters don’t think much about the audience – what they need, what will be important and what will resonate best with them. And yet, surely this is the primary requirement of communication – that we attempt to understand our audience and make it easy and worthwhile for them to hear our message.

Likewise, it is the same with engagement. If we think at all about engagement, it is usually as an offshoot of content – what audiovisual support do I need other than slides? What ‘icebreaker’ can I use to get things moving (talk about a Freudian slip and the clue being in the name)?

The fact is we actively do not want to think about our audience and we are wary of engagement. In a business context, the fear is that too much dwelling on the audience will keep us from focusing on what we have to do. And show too much concern for engagement and we open the doors to emotion and meaning.

Most people avoid emotion like the plague: too nebulous, too dangerous and too personal. We are exceedingly wary of talking about meaning: too presumptuous, too patronising and too pompous. Meaning demands commitment, prioritising and editing. It requires us to take a view. No one gets penalised too harshly for putting too much detail out there. But put too much meaning out there and you’ll awaken the trolls. Instead, emotion and meaning are deemed to better belong to our personal lives, not our professional ones.

This is entirely normal and almost completely wrong. Our presentations and communications come alive at exactly those moments when we go off-piste and say what we really think. Talk directly to the audience. Show little bits of emotion and take a stab at articulating meaning. Yes, of course, we need to include facts, detail and process. But what everyone remembers is ‘the other bits’.

The world is awash in information and attention spans are shortening precipitously. What we crave is meaning that is delivered in an authentic and concise manner.

And we need that now more than ever. And all of what we’ve just talked about applies to leaders, perhaps more than anyone else.

And so this book is a call to arms – offering guidance about what effective and authentic communications looks like and why these skills will be so needed, so soon.

The book is a distillation of what I have learned and observed about what works and what doesn’t in communications – and why. It’s also a warning that in the coming years, we are going to need to be infinitely better communicators than we have been in the past. The issues that will need explaining, the change pathways laid out and demystified, the consensus and bridge-building that will be critical to close the digital gap and the gap between cool, automated change and hot, societal change will all require significant communication skill and commitment.

The book is set out in four sections:

1. The current operating landscape and what authentic leadership looks like
2. A framework for understanding effective storytelling and authentic communications
3. A toolkit detailing what this looks like in specific types of leadership communications
4. How a coaching approach can best mobilise authentic leadership

This book begins by looking at the ‘cauldron of disruption’ and what will be expected of leaders in navigating a course through the current disruptive operating landscape. We’ll look at some of the technological, social and generational trends that are influencing the leadership imperative and creating the need for the rise of the authentic leader.

The second part of the book posits a way of looking at storytelling and effective communications through a framework of audience, structure/content and engagement. We’ll look at some important and counter-intuitive ideas like:

• The five-step cognitive map that should guide your efforts to connect with your audience
• How to combat ‘second presenter syndrome’
• How the trajectory of a typical presentation generates telling insight into what are the most important parts of storytelling
• How to communicate in exactly the order in which people expect to receive information
• How to use a communications ‘GPS system’ to understand why and when ‘you’ve arrived at your destination’
• Why storytelling is a leader’s more efficient and powerful way of communicating

The toolkit will focus on the challenges of specific forms of communication and how leaders can optimise presenting, perform in the spotlight, handle group dynamics, manage a crisis, navigate change and deal with the media.

This book ends with a look at how authentic leadership can best be mobilised. A coaching approach to leadership typifies many of the attributes of authentic leadership and offers a guide for how to put these ideas into practice.

Coaching shares the same kind of platform of character and trust that underpins a...