EP 35 How to Captivate and Engage Your Remote or Hybrid Team Through Business Storytelling

Storytelling is one of the most in-demand and underrated skills for leaders to discover in 2021. In this week’s podcast, we interviewed Yamini Naidu, economist turned master business storyteller. The new hybrid and virtual workplace will be new, challenging and definitely a more emotional game. The greatest leaders and managers will engage their workforce through masterful storytelling to create new relationships, and create a new future and culture. Every leader today is now further away from their employees and will need to leverage storytelling to bring their employees together.

Why Business Storytelling is Important
Storytelling helps us reach this meta-modern world and it helps us stay connected with each other. Stories are the Velcro on people's brains, nothing else will stick. So whether you work with products, services, teams, stakeholders, or you're pitching your work the most powerful way to do that any activity is through storytelling.

Personal Storytelling Versus Business Storytelling
Think of personal storytelling and business storytelling as a continuum. Business storytelling because you always have to have a purpose and a message. Business story telling gives leaders a new kind of power. Hard power is when leaders are direct, task focused and in a directing role. Soft power is when the leader’s power is focused on collaborating and being cohesive. The new power,  storytelling power offers leaders a different type of power in that it connects people to a story in a ways that solidifies a message and creates engagement.

Transform Bland Company Events into Captivating Experiences
When Leaders share personal stories, what they are doing is called micro storytelling. Macro storytelling is when storytelling happens across an organization. Leaders can think larger, go beyond a focus on individual stories and think about storytelling in areas like their brand promise or employee value proposition. 

How to Make Storytelling An Experience for A Company Retreat or Event

1. Provide a list of framing questions.
2. Break leaders or people into groups and get them to share their experiences and answers to the questions you provided. 
3. Do stop lights. In stop lights, everyone takes a pause at sharing, and share across the groups.
4. After all the groups have shared their highlights, ask the group as a whole, what should share across the organization?

Storytelling can be used in collaboration with planning events because every time we bring stakeholders together, we want to create an experience. So how can you create experiential moments at your next event? There's nothing more experiential than storytelling. Think about setting up your event like a campfire, with small break out sessions dedicated to storytelling in a unique way. 

Elements of Business Storytelling
Before you even start to craft a story, begin with the end in mind. What's the purpose? What's the message of the story? And then think about your audience? Who is this story going to serve? 

 Business Storytelling Requires Three Elements

1. Have a Clear Sequence. 
   • What is the simple structure of your story?  Make sure you continue to engage your audience. At the end, you do a very subtle, elegant landing on the message. 
2. Be Specific. 
   • Many business skills require abstract, conceptual and big picture thinking, the opposite of specificity. Crafting a story is the opposite of that. 
   • When you are specific, you do two most powerful things in storytelling, you create emotion, and you paint a picture. 
3. Test Your Story on Three Elements
4. Is the story personal? 
5. Don’t just call anything a story.
6. Always find the human.

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