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“Trust in authority relationships is a matter of predictability along two dimensions: values and skills.”( Ronald Heifets , Ledership Without Easy Answer )

Trust is a valuable asset for organizations, the ultimate  expression of social capital, as shown in chapter 2. But we live in the “Age of Dilbert,” in which cynical employees dismiss leadership trust as an oxymoron and frequently used platitudes become “the great lies of management.”

Great Lies of management                                                                   1. “Employees are our most valuable asset.”                              2. “I have an open-door policy.”                                                     3. “You could earn more money under the new lan “.            4. “We’re reorganizing to better serve our customers.”5. “The future is bright.”
6. “We reward risk takers.”
7. “We don’t shoot the messenger.”
8. “Training is a high priority.”
9. “I haven’t heard any rumors.”
10. “We’ll review your performance in six months.”
11. “Our people are the best.”
12. “Your input is important to us.”

Taken from : The Leader As Communicator

In one of the two discussions, a young CEO sat quietly and
pensively as his  colleagues complained about how their chief competitionhad made considerable gains and captured the fancy of “the Street.” When he finally spoke up, he asked to try out a new scenario for what the company might become. His ideas were prompted not only by what he had been hearing about the competition’s gains but also by his perception of where the market was headed and how the company might reposition itself to capitalize on it. In effect, he was composing a new story for the company (“I’ve been kicking this around for some time, actually . . .”).
Good discussion—open, candid, and thoughtful—emerged and shaped a new story line, and that in turn led to the drafting of a clear, comprehensive, and compelling statement of new business purpose. That statement would be worked over more in the ensuing weeks and would ultimately frame for all a new picture of their future.
The End of the Story
Storytelling is about meaning-making. From basic plotlines that reveal the essence of a company and its mission, all the way to stories that heal wounds, create alliances, or rally troops around new challenges and opportunities, stories help us make sense of the organizations we serve, and our place in them. So it’s not surprising that leadership communication relies heavily on storytelling: telling the right stories to the right audiences at the right time and involving others in the work of authorship as often as possible.

Taken from : The Leader As Communicator

Two Internet service companies, both with positive balance sheets and positioned for future growth, decided to catch their breath for a moment and see if all senior management team members had similar conceptions of those futures. One of these teams was in fact still assembling its leadership team, and two members had less than three months’ tenure with the company. Both companies took the step of holding a (facilitated) senior leadership discussion on the subject of “Who do we think we are?” and “Who do we want to be?”
Their common purpose was to generate answers not only for themselves, their boards, and their stockholders, but for their employees and their customers as well. It was the first time that either company had done this exercise.

With these meetings they wanted to develop a set of agreed- on message points they could all use to tell their story. They also agreed to the same criteria for these messages. The message points and the story they formed must be clear, comprehensive, and compelling (see the big-picture framing discussion in chapter 3). What  happened in both cases was unexpected. For one thing, there was hardly unanimity among team members in defining either present or future. Discussion within each team revealed differing opinions on marketplace issues and action priorities. Neither of the groups was ready to draft and disseminate. It was, as one of the participants suggested, something like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, with each one touching a different part and coming to a different conclusion about what they had in hand.

Armed with the knowledge that they were far from aligned, participants went to work on the problem and ended up with richer, more encompassing statements. They surprised themselves at their own willingness, even motivation, to “wordsmith”—certainly not their intention coming into the meeting. It was as if they realized that some tentative agreement about the words would enable them to agree about other issues more easily in future discussions. Framing the big picture with clarity and some consensus would allow them all to paint more effectively inside the frame later on.

Taken from : The Leader As Communicator

Most organizations like to capture the essence of who they are and what they do in a few brief statements, sometimes called an “elevator speech.” This is the basic plotline of the organization, and it can anchor all sorts of spin-off stories for a variety of audiences. The basic requirement of the basic plotline is that it is intelligible to any audience. The plot can combine elements of an organization’s vision and mission, refer to key values, or target important goals. But it must be told in a simple, straightforward, and consistent way, so
that customers, employees, suppliers, investors, . . .  hoever, all understand the story in essentially the same way. All in one elevator ride.

Basic plotlines are useful for several reasons. First of all, they
enable senior leadership to be on the same page with one another when talking among themselves or with others. One of the key tests employees apply to leadership communication is whether it is consistent through the ranks. If not, leaders lose credibility. It’s critical that leadership teams subject their plotline to regular reviews
(say every year or so) to guarantee accuracy, relevance, and continuity. This exercise also engages leaders in an act of collective narrative building (AKA meaning-making), where they can update and refresh their stories together.
Second, revisiting the basic plotline often reveals the existence of different or conflicting stories that need to be reconciled or negotiated. In some cases, resolution may require a new plotline, leading to a new consensus around a new direction. Finally, the basic plot serves as just that: a foundational story on which stakeholders can build their own, more extensive plotlines and narratives. Here is an
account of two relatively young, hard-charging companies who each decided to invest some time in “negotiating” such a basic plot among their senior leadership ranks.

Taken from : The Leader As Communicator

The first step was to touch base with a range of company  leaders, from corporate staff to frontline leadership in the field. What did they think about the future, and how might the organization best tell its new story internally, so that employees could get behind it? Phone interviews and focus groups across its global divisions yielded good insights about likely reactions to new story lines. Key message points were tested for clarity and credibility, and reactions were folded into a report that would guide communications moving forward.

The company also chose to take a close look at its various story telling media, in particular some rather costly company magazines and a recently launched Web site. It found that the magazine was clearly not the best medium to use to reach its worldwide employees, and that people relied much more on their division leaders to tell them about new directions and the business case for change.

In fact, continued reliance on traditional print communication vehicles would likely fail to improve a rather superficial employee awareness of its overall business strategies. Armed with fresh input from its research, however, the company could now create a new, coauthored story and deliver it in the most effective ways.

Taken from : The Leader As Communicator

As stories like these are handed down through an organization, a larger, organizational story, with many tellers, is crafted. This kind of collectively told tale becomes the basis for how people in the organization will understand both its history and how the future might best be designed. Stories that help people make sense of change typically let people know:
? Where the organization is going
? Why the change is necessary and important
? What specific steps will need to be taken
? How people can help make the change a success
? What’s in it for them

Because coauthorship strengthens group ownership of stories of change, you want to engage others in plotting important details. A Transformation Story with “Corporate” Authorship A major print communication company realized it needed to engineer significant transformation to continue to grow in an industry brimming with smarter, faster competition. Building outward from its core print business, the company planned to rebrand itself as a provider of all kinds of communications solutions. In the process, leadership would have to tell a new story to its customers and to its employees, one about where the organization was heading and how it would get there.

Taken from : The Leader As Communicator

Of equal importance in managing transitions is the way in which leadership can create credible, plausible narratives for the future. We’ll speak more on change communication in chapter 7. The current chapter addresses the role that storytelling can play in refocusing and reenergizing people in a new and different organization. In several companies we’ve worked with—each one going through a major restructuring—there has been a systematic storytelling “roll-down” to get several layers of leadership involved in shaping a different kind of future for the organization. Senior leadership first sketches out the contours of the story from a “big-picture” perspective, with three or four plot elements describing where the organization is headed and why.

The stories typically start with some statement about a challenge or a dilemma that had to be faced. From there, the story line might describe a chosen direction and how the people in the organization might best pull together to take the organization forward. Often the story is then picked up by other levels of management who are asked to develop it further, adding details about actions that need to be taken, and getting more specific about who will do what.

Royal Dutch Shell Group offers a good example. “The group’s managing directors first penned their own story lines about needed change and the future and then engaged the next layers of management in crafting their versions. Tales were told of years of profitable growth and technical leadership but also spoke candidly to presentday predicaments. . . .”7 These tales were then retold throughout the company and in the process, passed through operating divisions in more than one hundred countries. The result: “All concerned understood the case for change and told each other what they would have to do to bring the ‘new’ into being.”8

Taken from : The Leader As Communicator

Stories can also help to bring out craft knowledge and best practices that might otherwise remain unspoken and thus hidden to the organization (this subject is dealt with in more depth in chapter 12). Leaders can help people share knowledge and insights about getting the work done by encouraging them to tell stories at staff meetings about how they solved a particular problem or succeeded in pleasing a customer. Most people enjoy doing this, especially if they’re not singled out and made uncomfortable.

Creating forums for telling and hearing stories is a critical task for the organization’s leadership. Over time, people will come to link one story to another and to fit their own material into larger, available story lines. Novelist Robert Hellenga has a character explain, “I used to think that the bigger stories explained the smaller ones, that the bigger rings gave meaning to the rings that they enclosed, but now I think it’s the other way around, and that each story illuminates and gives meaning to the larger story of which it is a part, till you get to the farthest ring. . . .”6

CHANGE AND TRANSITION STORIES
In recent years, organizations have become more conscious of the role narrative can play in facilitating major transitions, in particular, restructurings brought about by mergers, acquisitions, and spin-offs.
Leaders responsible for knitting a new organization together have found it especially important to dwell on organizational histories. The intention here is both to honor past accomplishments and to identify those aspects of the past that need to be carried forward, as well as those that must be left behind. Commemorating past achievements and paying homage to past heroes are good methods for mitigating or softening the feelings of pain and loss brought on by these jarring transitions. Stories told about where you’ve been, and the people who helped you get where you are today, can build
confidence in the future. Such stories preserve the organization’s self-respect and leave its people more comfortable with the agenda for change.

Taken from : The Leader As Communicator

When leaders tell compelling stories, they influence others to pick up the same story line and retell it. Leaders’ stories that frame decisions and future plans will spread throughout the organization as other people retell them and rework them in their own words. Leaders want stories to be retold and spread. “Talking is remembering,” says psychologist Roger Schank.5

Storytelling is contagious.We all create stories for ourselves, and we play roles in one another’s stories. Organizations define themselves through stories authored by their members. In a very real sense, an organization exists in the texts of the stories people tell about it and accept as being real and true (even when they’re not!).

Leaders don’t have a monopoly on storytelling. Instead, their stories are edited, retold, distorted, and revamped, whether they like it or not. If anything, leaders need to invite their colleagues to contribute “material” to an ongoing narrative that describes the work of the group or team. This might mean working to bring more voices into play during staff meetings or issuing project “postmortems” that seek both to learn from and celebrate work that’s been completed. Throughout, leaders will want to thread smaller
stories into larger ones, weaving them together so that they illustrate and reinforce key organizational messages.

Taken from : The Leader As Communicator

Stories are good for helping people feel connected: They’re prime tools for building a sense of belonging and a reason to affiliate. “A community,” explains David Carr, “exists by virtue of a story which is articulated and accepted, which typically concerns the group’s origins and its destiny, and which interprets what is happening now in the light of these two temporal poles.”4 For Dave Hilliard’s senior leadership, a story helped prime some thinking about how the team might reconnect around a new mission.

How does storytelling figure in your organization? Do organization members know about its history? Would they be likely to describe the same future scenario for their organization? Do they share the same tales about particular people, past and present?

When stories about an organization are told and retold, they take on added significance and stature. They become part of the organizational lore and culture. One of us once worked for an organization in which a popular activity was to swap stories about a certain corporate leader who had a gift for indiscretions with clients. One tale, a particular favorite, had him telling a group of Toyota sales executives, “We’re going to make you the Cadillac of your industry!” These stories were told over and over again and never failed both to entertain and to reinforce a feeling of camaraderie.

Taken from : The Leader As Communicator