FOR HR LEADERS, organisational storytelling is a useful way to help implement change and growth in their business, according to Stephen Denning, author of The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling
FOR HR LEADERS, organisational storytelling is a useful way to help implement change and growth in their business, according to Stephen Denning, author of The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling.
Although it is still an emerging discipline in HR, Denning said HR professionals can benefit from storytelling because it’s an effective way to communicate with people.
“The ability to tell the right story at the right time is emerging as an essential leadership skill for coping with, and getting business results in, the turbulent world of the 21st century,” he said.
Storytelling is a flexible way of communicating strange, complex new ideas and getting people into action quickly and enthusiastically, he added.
“When leaders have to move an organisation from good to great, they find that the traditional management techniques of command-and-control don't work.
“Instead of command and control, leaders need to engage and enrol: storytelling is uniquely adapted to this challenge, because human beings tend to think in stories, and base their actions on stories,” Denning said.
He has worked with some of the world’s largest companies including Coca-Cola Amatil, IBM, McDonalds, the US Army and the Australian Federal Treasury.
“It enables managers to lead organisations into the future ethically and successfully by increasing the communication within organisations – becoming an essential skill all managers should develop,” he said.
Speaking at a recent Humanagement event on leading transformational change, Denning said storytelling can be used by HR professionals to improve the own interactions or to effect change in the organisation, enhance the performance of existing leaders as well as identify and train future leaders.
“The emerging discipline of narrative deals with leadership more than management. Management concerns means rather than ends. Leadership on the other hand deals with ends more than means,” he said.
“It concerns issues where there is no agreement on underlying assumptions and goals – or where there is a broad agreement, but the assumptions and goals are heading for failure.
“In fact, the principal task of leadership is to create a new consensus about the goals to be pursued and how to achieve them.
“Once there is such a consensus, then managers can get on with the job of implementing those goals. It is essentially a task of persuasion,” Denning said.
HR professionals can help executives and managers to understand their organisation's story by becoming better listeners, especially to staff and clients. They must also pay attention to the discrepancies between the stories that are heard.
“If what you hear is not to your liking, think long and hard before assuming that the staff on the front lines or the clients are wrong,” he said.
“If you don't like what you're hearing, the task is not to change the market's idea of who you are but actually to change who you are. And that can take a generation.”
One of the keys to successful organisational storytelling is understanding that different narrative patterns have different impacts.
“Grasping which narrative pattern is suitable for which leadership challenge is key to making effective use of the power of storytelling,” he said.
Then it’s “simply a matter of getting started and practising. Storytelling is a performance art and one acquires skill by practice”.
