EXECUTIVE UPDATE MAGAZINE
by Sheila Campbell and Merianne Liteman

Creating Legends and Telling Stories: The New Leadership Competencies

Storytelling. When you hear that word, do you think only of bedtime, kindergarten, or campfires? If that’s all that comes to mind, you are missing something important.

Storytelling isn’t just for kids. It has great power to communicate information, shape belief, stir emotions, build a sense of community, and spur action.

In fact, the ability to tell a powerful story and foster positive legends is a critical leadership skill that every executive should master.

Are we making you nervous?

You’re not alone. A recent article in Fortune noted that many people are disturbed to learn that "the ability to tell a good story is a critical aspect of success – especially if you replace the term ‘storytelling’ with a more derogatory term: ‘hype.’" But "great storytellers," the article states, "can create self-fulfilling prophecies."

Storytelling isn’t hype. It isn’t manipulation or deception. It’s simply effective communication. If we have little to say, a polished presentation won’t make it persuasive. If we are dishonest about our intentions, we lose our credibility. But an honest story, told well, can move people to do extraordinary things.

In 1938, when polio was ravaging this nation, the March of Dimes told a compelling story: With contributions of one dime at a time, this dread disease could be eradicated. Citizens were galvanized and, by 1955, with a million dollars of March of Dimes support, the Salk vaccine was declared "safe, effective and potent." Polio was no longer a threat to public health in this country.

Its work done, the March of Dimes could have folded its tent and simply disbanded. But the organization discovered another important story that needed telling: Contributions of one dime at a time could eradicate birth defects. The power of that story continues to fuel the March of Dime’s success, not just as a fundraiser, but as a prime force in the passage of the Children’s Health Act of 2000.

Stories are the tales we tell to make what we care about dramatic and memorable. A story puts relationships, cause and effect, and priorities into a cohesive whole that sticks in people’s minds.

"Stories are the real thing," says management guru Tom Peters. "They are how we remember, how we learn, and how we visualize what can be."

How to Tell A Business Story

Stories should be a part of the way you talk with people every day, not just the framework around which you build speeches and other formal communications. So how do you tell a good business story? Keep these four principles in mind.

1. Stories are short and memorable.
Long stories lose your audience. Here’s a one-sentence story Bill O’Brien, the retired CEO of Hanover Insurance, tells to warn of how constant evaluation can kill innovation: "Managers are always pulling up the radishes to see how they’re growing."

2. Stories are about somebody vivid.
We can see the people the story is about, even if we don’t know their names. Retired. Navy Commander Mike Abrashoff tells of he was first piped aboard as captain of the U.S.S. Benfold.. His introduction to the ship was the sound of the derisive cheers of the thoroughly demoralized crew that marked the departure of his predecessor. Abrashoff publicly vowed he would work with everyone on board to make morale on the Benfold the best in the Navy. His motto became, "Recruit your people every day, even though your crew is already on board."

3. In stories, something happens.
In a good story, somebody does something, and we see it happen in our minds. Max DePree, the former CEO of Herman Miller, Inc., a furniture manufacturer that was regularly ranked one of the ten most admired companies in the U.S. by Fortune magazine, told this story to his staff:

At a church service "a middle-aged man began to sweat profusely, turned an ashen gray, rose partially out of his seat, stopped breathing, and toppled over onto this daughter sitting next to him." The whole church hierarchy was in the room. They did nothing. But in less than three seconds a young man with experience as a paramedic was at the stricken man’s side."

DePree told his staff that he wanted them to know this story because "the hierarchy didn’t respond swiftly or decisively." The people who did were what he called "roving leaders" and Herman Miller’s hierarchy needed to let such leaders take charge when they were needed.

4. Most importantly, stories make a point.
Ross Perot made an art form of telling deceptively simple stories. This is one he told about his time on the board of GM. "At GM, if you see a snake, the first thing you do is go hire a consultant on snakes. Then you get a committee on snakes, and then you discuss it for a couple of years. You figure the snake hasn’t bit anybody yet, so you just let him crawl around on the factory floor… I come from an environment where the first guy who sees the snake kills it."

Creating legends

A legend is a story that is told and retold, often gathering momentum with each retelling, like a snowball rolling downhill. In organizations or industries, legends grow when a leader or an organization takes an unusual or extraordinary action, or achieves something (or fails) in a spectacular fashion.

Christmas Eve is the worst night of the year to work for an airline. Bad weather, crowded planes, missed connections. And people are desperate to get where they’re going.
On that night, the most awful job at the airport is handling baggage. That’s why, for many years, Southwest’s Kelleher has spent his Christmas Eves at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport hauling luggage.

This has become a legend at Southwest. And the message to employees is that Herb (that’s what all the employees call him) cares so much about us that he’ll give up his holiday to help us out – not just with words of thanks or encouragement, but with his own labor.

Imagine what this does for morale and loyalty.

Legends can arise whenever an organization deals with visible challenges or difficulties. When people don’t have all the facts, they make them up to fill in the missing pieces in ways that make the most sense to them. So the savvy leader gets involved in creating legends, rather than inheriting them.

You obviously can’t control the stories that your staff, board, members, customers, or competitors tell about you or your organization. No matter what you say is important to you, legends will spring from what you actually pay attention to, how you react to a crisis, how you allocate scarce resources, what you model, what you reward, and what you punish.
If this is a conscious process, then the stories will reinforce the message you are trying to convey, and if the stories describe something memorable and worth repeating, legends will grow.

On the other hand, if your actions are inconsistent or your words are not in concert with your actions, the legends about you and your organization are unlikely to be those you would wish to have circulating.

Leaders who foster positive legends make these behaviors habitual:

1. Give people a galvanizing vision.
Most great leaders have a clear idea what they want their organization to accomplish, but "increasing non-dues revenue 15% next year" is not the kind of statement that gets people jumping out of bed excited to come to work in the morning. Positive legends are sparked when your staff can imagine vividly what such an achievement would mean in their everyday work lives – so clearly that they can see it, taste it, feel it, and they want it.

2. Interpret what’s going on and give it meaning.
Exceptional leaders are able to read the environment – both external and internal – to give meaning to what’s happening in their organizations.

Right now, for instance, as your people hear talk of a possible recession, or see your member organizations cut their budgets, or have friends laid off from their dot.com employers, they need to hear that you have a strategy for dealing with a bumpy economy. And they need to know that you want their help. Legends will help you communicate that.

To communicate clearly to her staff that they should break the rules to help the organization survive, an organization executive put dozens of dime store ceramic cows in the middle of her conference room table. Any time a staff member was stymied by a sacred cow, they just smashed one. This story, in its telling and retelling has become a legend in that organization.

And Nordstrom fosters their legendary customer service by giving new employees a rule manual that says, in its entirety: "Rule #1: Use your good judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules."

3. Keep the goal present daily.
Legends are created when leaders talk about what they want to achieve all the time, every chance they get. Get your strategy down to one or two really compelling goals. Start every meeting by reminding people of them and post them everywhere you can think of – on coffee mugs, mouse pads, bathroom mirrors. When you think your staff will scream if you talk about them anymore, that’s just when they’re beginning to look at each other and say, "I think she means it."

4. Provide the kind of service your members will want to talk about.
One of our clients believes so fully in the quality of their member conferences that they offer to refund participants’ money for any part of the meeting they didn’t feel was worthwhile. They don’t have to do this very often.

There any many customer service legends about Nordstrom.

Here’s one of our favorites: A friend of ours wears a foot brace, and one shoe needs to be two sizes larger than the other. He went to Nordstrom to buy six pairs of shoes – three pairs in both sizes. When the sales person found out why he was doing this he told our friend just to take the shoes he really needed. That gesture may have cost Nordstrom $400. They’ve recovered many times that amount in free publicity, referrals, and extra business from that friend alone.

5. Do unconventional things, particularly when you want to change course.
Nothing delights your staff more than when you do something dramatic and unexpected – especially if you’re seen breaking the rules to demonstrate your own passion.

A CEO wanted to let the people at his annual meeting know how sorry he was that his organization released a new accounting software package to its chapters before all the bugs were out. He could have explained what happened, defended his decisions, or blamed the vendor. Instead, he stood up in front of the membership, acknowledged his error, and smashed a raw egg into his forehead. Everyone got the point.

Get Everybody Practiced at Telling Great Stories and Fostering Great Legends

This isn’t something you can do by yourself. Your staff, board, and members all have to get more practiced at speaking in the language of stories and legends. This won’t happen overnight. Most of us aren’t born storytellers.

Ray Kroc, the man who made McDonald’s a success, used to tell a story about "the great pianist who gave a marvelous concert and at the end a lady rushed up to him and said, ‘I’d give anything in this world if I could play like that!’ And he said, ‘No you wouldn’t.’… meaning that she wouldn’t pay the price to get it – to discipline herself to do the studying and practicing required to be a concert pianist."

If you’re serious about changing the stories and legends told about your organization, practice telling more stories yourself and encourage others to tell stories too. Make your meetings, retreats, and seminars about telling great stories. (That in itself may foster a legend.)

Telling stories alone will not ensure an organization’s success, of course, and leaders who don’t tell stories well won’t necessarily fail. But — as many legendary leaders know instinctively and many other top executives have come to learn — we think Tom Peters has got it right: "If you want to involve your colleagues in the future performance of your business, then don’t just present them with the numbers. Tell them a story."

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