The Importance of Corporate Storytelling

In today’s marketplace, companies are struggling to meet and balance the needs and expectations of an ever-growing list of external forces: investors, shareholders, boards of directors, consumers, employees, government agencies, the media…a seemingly endless list. . The only way to meet the needs of these stakeholders is through an engaged workforce that is passionate about the organization they work for.

Corporate America must understand that employees are the ones that deliver (or betray) the company image on a daily basis. Companies can maximize performance by mobilizing employees under one mission, exciting them with shared values and sending them into the marketplace with the tools necessary to deliver on brand promises. As Paul Argenti states in Corporate Communication, “Even when employees understand the company’s brand promise or key customer deliverable, it is not until they believe it that they can really help carry it out.” How do the best companies touch employees? They tell stories: why the company was founded, what the leaders envision the future to be, why the work being done is important.

Think of your own career history – at which company did you stay the longest? On which projects did you do your best work? I’ve always done my best work for clients who not only had a clear vision of what they were working toward, but a real connection to why they were doing the work to begin with. One of my favorite clients was a pharmaceutical company full of spokespeople that told stories. When the Global Head of R&D, Pr. Paul Herrling, was asked in an interview why he became a pharmaceutical researcher he told the story of how he survived polio by being airlifted out of Egypt to Switzerland as a child. When the same company launched a non-profit institute to treat dengue fever and multi-drug resistant tuberculosis in the third-world, the CEO, Dan Vasella only made brief remarks at the opening (two years in the making). He told the story of how he fought tuberculosis as a child, how his sister died shortly after, and how those experiences motivated him to try and help heal others suffering from this disease.

I was deeply engaged in the launch of this institute because I believed in the value of the work I was doing, and my client stood firmly behind the idea of corporate social responsibility. Since my own organization also had a history of social responsibility, I was able to align my values with my work, and understand how I contributed to the bottom line. As Annette Simmons suggests in The Story Factor,

“People don’t want more information. They are up to their eyeballs in information. They want faith — faith in you, your goals, your success, in the story you tell…Faith needs a story to sustain it - a meaningful story that inspires belief in you and renews hope that your ideas, do indeed, offer what you promise. Story is your path to creating faith.”

Corporate icons such as Jack Welsh, Lance Armtrong, or Dan Vasella understand the value of humanizing themselves and their corporations through storytelling. John Seely Brown, even quantifies the financial value of storytelling in Storytelling in Organizations.

“A well-known economist Deirdre McClosky wrote an article in the American Economic Review, that 28% of the Gross National Product (GNP) in the United States is accounted for by persuasion…Law. Public Relations. The ministry. Psychology. Marketing. What do these people do? They persuade other people…If persuasion is 28% of the GNP, you could make a good argument that around two-thirds of that is clever storytelling. On that basis, storytelling would have amounted in 1999 to activities valued at 1.8 trillion dollars, a number of decidedly non-trivial dimensions.”

We tell stories to explain, to demonstrate understanding, and to find common ground. Storytelling is a means of information sharing that binds and motivates people in a way that facts on paper never can. Storytelling is the foundation of any good relationship, whether between loved ones, friends, coworkers, or managers. One story can even drive hundreds of people to work together under one shared vision, and accomplish any goal.

Shauna Wreschner