Transcript
[00:00:05.870] - Imogen
Hello and welcome to Dear Comms, the coffee break podcast where we tackle your biggest corporate comms challenges. I'm Imogen.
[00:00:13.350] - Amanda
And I'm Amanda. We're here to give you practical, no-nonsense advice so you can focus on the things that will really drive influence, engagement, and impact.
[00:00:23.800] - Imogen
Now, LinkedIn is one of those platforms that you either love or you hate, but there are, there are occasional rays of light and common sense. And today's guest is one of them. Rachel Warner has experience across the spectrum, I'd say. She's worked government departments, global organizations, and even our pacey startups that we love. Nowadays, you can find her running, and this is in her own words, a zero bullshit communications and writing training for any organization who is going through change. Rachel, having worked across such a wide range of different sectors, Are there any that just get the idea of storytelling quicker than others?
[00:01:06.960] - Rachel
In terms of who just gets it, I'd say startups are really good. They are brave. I tend to be working with the owners directly, the founders, and they instinctively know that they need to stand out. So, they're really good. I'd say that organizations like larger corporates, slightly trickier. Normally, the comms teams get it, but they need some help convincing the C-suite. And government departments are a lot better than you'd think, or that most people would think. I think they have some really good examples of storytelling in action, which I think most people would be surprised about.
[00:01:43.910] - Imogen
Why do you think there is such fear over being human, over having a personality, over showing vulnerability in our communications?
[00:01:55.580] - Rachel
I think there's a few different reasons for it. I think it's habit. It's how things have always been done. Even thinking about public speaking at school, it was all very formal, wasn't it? And same with our writing as well. We've been taught to write in a particular way, which actually doesn't work well for the working environment. But I think also, as well as the habit and just the way things have been done for however long and everything that we got taught at school, 'cause it's risky, it's like sharing your vulnerability, showing your human side. It's a lot safer to hide behind a corporate shield. So, it does take, it takes some courage, it takes bravery.
[00:02:34.970] - Imogen
Can you think of any leaders that you would hold up as a great example of a leader who has personality and who lets it shine?
[00:02:43.590] - Rachel
So, there is one leader who I think uses storytelling really, really well, and he's called John Fitzpatrick. He works in government, so he's director at the Government Digital Service in the UK at the moment, but he used storytelling in his role at the Ministry of Justice. He totally gets the power of storytelling, but also, as a leader, he shares it. He's just one of those people that is open to sharing his vulnerabilities and gets the value of doing that. So, I think a lot of people could learn a huge amount from him. There's loads of stuff that he's written, blogs that he's written online as well, so it's worth checking him out.
[00:03:22.570] - Imogen
I love the fact that sometimes the most unexpected sectors or areas are the biggest wealth of storytelling. And I think maybe it's because sometimes there are topics which are traditionally seen as quite dull or quite difficult, and therefore you're really pushed as a communicator, as a leader, to think about how can we make this interesting and connect with people on this topic?
[00:03:49.010] - Amanda
So it's getting better, but there's still quite some big misconceptions out there when it comes to about what storytelling is and isn't. I think there's this huge myth that senior means serious and serious means boring.
[00:04:03.930] - Rachel
Absolutely, I think one of the hardest groups of people to convince about storytelling are the, leaders themselves, then they're probably the group that could get most value from it. You can see it as a bit of fluff, it's a bit fluffy, it's quite intangible, it's hard to measure, and it can get really misunderstood. So, comms teams often have a bit of a fight just actually trying to convince their leaders to start using the techniques of storytelling in their communications.
[00:04:30.880] - Amanda
I think sometimes it's not just the leadership though, it can be the layer underneath. You know, I've worked with companies where the top was open to change, but the middle managers felt quite stuck. In translating what that looked like into the day-to-day. So, I think it's probably cultural in organizations.
[00:04:48.930] - Rachel
That's a really good point. I think the management can really struggle because they're kind of getting it from both directions, but also they're quite not often, they don't get that bigger picture clarity, which is where narrative and story come into its own. So, they're being told to translate it, and they haven't really been given the story themselves in order to be able to then kind of pass that message on into what it looks like day to day. It's a really tricky situation for them to be in.
[00:05:15.080] - Imogen
And often, they haven't actually been taught how to do it. I think that's something we forget. There's a lot of those sort of middle managers, which we, as communicators, we always talk about, you know, there's the bottleneck, there's our problem, we have to sort the middle managers out. But actually, what we forget is a lot of them haven't had the training in order to be able to do what we want them to do. They have been promoted, into the role, suddenly they might be managing for the first time, suddenly they've got all these additional responsibilities, and have we as communicators actually taken the time to train them and show them what storytelling is, what storytelling can do for them and their leadership?
[00:05:53.730] - Rachel
I would say the majority of the time, no. A lot of management, a lot of kind of promoted managers don't get management training. Quite often I come across, they do have management training, but the only comms training that they get within that is about public speaking, but that's not enough.
[00:06:10.680] - Imogen
Maybe the reason why it's so maligned or feared, not only at that sort of C-suite level, but also in that middle manager sort of tranche, is because of the definition we have of storytelling. And it's all very much sort of once upon a time. Maybe the worry is that there isn't a happy ending a lot of the time, or the ending hasn't happened yet. And so, business leaders are very reluctant to use this term of storytelling or use storytelling because they don't know what the ending's going to be.
[00:06:43.810] - Rachel
There's a lot to unpick there. So I think the first, about the once upon a time thing, I think that's what people think when they think about stories and storytelling. But the way I talk about it, and this is not to say it is the right definition, but if you think of a story, it's got two components. You've got the plot, like what happens, and then you've got the character. And the once upon a time thing, that focuses purely on what happens. You know, this happens and this, and then there was something really bad happened, and then that all changed everything, and then they came out the other side and everything was wonderful. Whereas actually, that's only one element of the story. The other really important component is the character. And without having a really strong character, at least one that we can get behind, then there isn't a story. If there's only a plot but no characters that we actually like, then it's not going to be a top, top show on Netflix. And it's not gonna work communications-wise.
[00:07:34.040] - Imogen
[Speaker:JENNY] It doesn't even need to be a character that we like, actually, just thinking about it, because actually, if we have a common enemy, that can be the character in your story as well. But I'm thinking, you know, we don't always have to have a good character within our stories. We can ask our audience to join us against a common enemy.
[00:07:57.910] - Amanda
I wonder, Rachel, have you ever avoided the word storytelling to get buy-in with the organizations that you work with? I mean, quite often Imogen and I will ask, how do you want people to feel after hearing this? Or what's the moment you knew this mattered? What's worked for you when things are stalling around the word?
[00:08:18.780] - Rachel
I quite often don't use storytelling, especially when I get the sense that it might get misinterpreted. So I talk about the science of story a lot, I'm doing some work with an engineering company at the moment, and like, they're engineers, they're logical, you know, they like to think, they like to see the logic behind things. And with storytelling, it can, as I said, it can feel fluffy, and it can feel a bit kind of infantile, you know, the childlikeness of a once-upon-a-time thing. Whereas if you talk about the neuroscience behind a story or a narrative, there's no getting away from that, how powerful it is. It's literally tapping into how the brain processes information. And so by kind of taking the, the science approach, the neuroscience approach, that helps people understand the benefits of the tactics. So I might not use storytelling in that sense.
[00:09:12.470] - Imogen
I've taken a very similar approach when we are— when I'm dealing with healthcare communicators as well, who tend to have that more scientific background. That does help them connect. I'm thinking more with leadership in your bigger organizations, maybe, because I think they tend to be a little more reticent. They bump on it a little bit because it seems like a buzzword. It seems like, you know, something a consultant would say. So, I'm wondering about what's the other option? There's always the word narrative, I don't particularly like the word narrative. I think it sounds a bit McKinsey. Um, what, what word could we use?
[00:09:57.240] - Rachel
So the interesting thing about narrative and story, because they kind of get a bit mixed up, is if I'm okay, if you're happy for me to, to mention a book that I read which changed my perceptions around all that, it's called The Narrative Age by Frank Wolfe, and he actually talks about the difference between narrative and story. So the narrative is that big overarching kind of northern star, "This is what we are trying to do," and then the stories are the smaller kind of tactical tactics and stories that come out underneath that big overarching narrative. In terms of moving away from the storytelling thing, and I completely agree, I think leaders, it doesn't sit well with them. I tend to tap into what it is that the problem is that they're having. 'Cause storytelling, at the end of the day, is a technique, like loads of other stuff in comms and everything else. It is a technique to get you from A to B. So, rather than talking about storytelling, it might be that they actually, they need to build better connections with their employees. It might be that there's been feedback that there's no authenticity, not as much as I don't really like that word, or there's a lack of trust.
[00:11:04.340]
And so, actually, it's focusing on what they're wanting to change rather than how we go about doing it.
[00:11:09.990] - Amanda
It seems to me that those that resist storytelling per se are often the ones who need it most. I wonder whether it's because they don't have experience of what good storytelling looks like, and that's why they're so reticent. What do we think?
[00:11:24.810] - Rachel
Yeah, I think it's really useful to share really good, simple examples of what good storytelling is. And like, as an example, And I'm gonna forget his name, which is really annoying, but with a new CEO, whose name I can't remember, of Mattel, the toy company, he went in, and everyone was expecting him to talk through the kind of standard, "This is what I wanna focus on for the next year," or whatever it might be. The first thing he talked about was how much of a nightmare it was trying to get his ID badge, and kind of the ridiculous amount of red tape that it took. And so, straight away, Everybody was like, it was a bit of a leveler. And like, COVID was a really good way of doing this with them. Not that I'm encouraging COVID to happen again, but COVID was actually, it was an interesting, uh, kind of turnaround in terms of how leaders communicated, because it leveled people out.
[00:12:16.870] - Imogen
It's about building connections, isn't it? It's about building that kind of common, common ground between you and your audience. You know, I, I go through the same troubles that you do when trying to get into into the building. I think it's more difficult to show good examples of corporate storytelling because they tend to be kept internal, and so we don't get to see them as much. You know, there are always the charities, for example, fantastic at using storytelling in order to grip the heart and get you to pay over money. But I think for people outside of the charity sector, that just seems like too much and it's not going to fly when you're selling rivets or whatever it is you're selling. Do you have any examples that you use of corporate storytelling that is kind of external, Rachel, that you can share that really kind of holds up what good storytelling in a corporate sense can look like?
[00:13:19.150] - Rachel
Actually, quite often the best bits, the most beautiful words, come from the conversations that we have with the employees themselves. And it's not me as a consultant or some fancy agency going off and sitting in some kind of, you know, tengram—
[00:13:37.930] - Imogen
Dark room.
[00:13:38.820] - Rachel
Room in London, you know, at some private members club. It's actually just having conversations with employees. And finding out what they think. Some of it's good, some of it's bad, but that's where you get, like, the gold is from the employees. And so that's the approach every time I'm doing any sort of story or narrative work or project. I want to speak to the employees.
[00:14:00.420] - Imogen
You know the reason for that? It's a very simple reason why those stories from employees resonate, um, better. It's because they are human. And there's so many times you see a leader, you can speak to them one-to-one, and they are wonderful. You love speaking to them. They come across as smart, they're sharp, they're personable, they're maybe funny. But then you get them in a town hall or writing an email or in the media, and suddenly they switch to this robot that is completely You're completely the opposite of what you're used to.
[00:14:41.410] - Rachel
It's how things have been done for so long that there's this automatic kind of sense of, well, this is how I need to do it, because this is how everyone else does it, which is a real shame, because I think we miss out on a lot from that. I think it's also, it's quite risky, you know, obviously, like sharing vulnerabilities, especially if you're a leader, it feels, it's safer to put up this corporate shield and be the same as everybody else in the same way. Standing out is, you know, is tough for everybody. And I kind of mentioned it before, but with COVID with everyone being at home and kids being off school, and, you know, we saw the life behind the leader, and the kid would come in on a Zoom call and the dog would start barking, and they'd be like, oh my God, when are the schools going to open? And it was a real leveler, and it's a real shame. I kind of, I did a post about it on LinkedIn, or an article, in 2021, I think it was. I was like, look, I really hope we don't go back to how leadership comms used to be, because this is so much better.
[00:15:39.730]
I do fear, sadly, that I think it has slipped back a bit, but—
[00:15:43.680] - Imogen
Oh, absolutely.
[00:15:45.020] - Amanda
It was so much better, and yes, it has slipped back, hasn't it?
[00:15:48.960] - Rachel
Helping them understand that stepping away from that polished, perfect persona is actually a hell of a lot more powerful, you know, like being yourself, being vulnerable, which Linking back to what I was talking about earlier around having that character that people can get behind.
[00:16:04.980] - Amanda
I think sometimes it's about being in the spotlight. Not everyone, we need to remember, is comfortable in that way. We need to not force the medium, really, as communicators. Find out what works for their voice. I think, Imogen, we did a podcast on this many moons ago.
[00:16:21.750] - Imogen
I think it was our first ever episode.
[00:16:23.360] - Amanda
Was it really? Oh, gosh. But you have people, as we've talked about, brilliant one-to-one, but useless on camera, and it's— We have to find ways around that, I think.
[00:16:33.180] - Rachel
And there are definite ways around that, I'd say. I'm always the optimist, but if they hate doing talking heads, then actually maybe at the town hall, you set up a conversation where they're sitting on, having a one-to-one conversation. So, it is actually a conversation rather than them doing a speech, or even something that I'd love, and again, we saw this a lot more in the COVID years, is them saying, like, "I'm really nervous, so please be kind." And again, that vulnerability, straight away you're thinking, well, you kind of, you start rooting for them, don't you? Because you want them to do well, unless they're, like, really unkind and horrible. Away from that, but enjoy.
[00:17:12.560] - Imogen
Everyone loves an underdog, don't they?
[00:17:14.580] - Rachel
Yeah.
[00:17:15.850] - Amanda
Wanted to wrap up with the good, the bad, and the ugly. Um, what's the worst piece of advice you've ever heard about storytelling? And what tip would you give our listeners if they want to succeed?
[00:17:26.680] - Rachel
I feel very strong saying the worst advice, but I think something that gets missed off with the whole storytelling, whatever we want to call it, is that there's all the focus on the— sounds silly, but on the plotline, on the story. So, what's happening, where we're trying to get to, what the big picture is. And that's obviously really, really important, but that other side of it, that how you say it as well as what you're saying, I think that gets forgotten. And I think that is really powerful, that tone of voice, the making sure that you're not sticking massive chunks of text into emails to talk about the story. That's not going to help. So, the how you say it is just as important, if not more important, than the what you say.
[00:18:05.890] - Imogen
I'm just thinking about what my key takeaway from this conversation is. I would say storytelling isn't scary. It is something that we all do naturally. Every day, when we're at home, when we're with our friends, our family, even when we're talking to our colleagues or talking to suppliers or talking to anybody, we are naturally inclined to storytell. And I think where people get hung up a little bit is on the theory and the structure. We've all seen those terrifying graphs of showing a storytelling structure. Those don't make sense to anybody, not even people who actually teach how to storytell. So I think we shouldn't get hung up on theory. We need to start by being human because storytelling in itself is about connecting with other human beings. There's nothing more to storytelling than that. It's about connecting. It's about sharing a common ground. It's about helping people understand where you are and where you want to go.
[00:19:15.500] - Amanda
Closing thought from me, don't force it. If a story feels hard to tell, that's often the red flag that you're not ready. So, if you can't explain it in 2 minutes without a chart, you've still got work to do.
[00:19:29.030] - Imogen
Unfortunately, we're going to have to wrap up there. I know that given the choice, the 3 of us could probably harp on go on about storytelling for at least, at least another hour, if not more. But, um, since this is a coffee break podcast and not a 3-course meal podcast, um, we're gonna have to wrap up. So Rachel, thank you very much for your time.
[00:19:50.430] - Rachel
Thank you for having me, Beth.
[00:19:51.590] - Amanda
I would encourage everyone to subscribe to Rachel's Friday newsletter, The Comms Nerd. She covers everything from words to behavior change to neuroscience, and we'll put details in the show notes.
[00:20:03.220] - Imogen
But that is us done for today. If you've got a topic you'd like us to cover, drop us a line. Um, like, comment, subscribe, share, do whatever else influencers tell you to do when they put out a podcast. Um, and we'd really appreciate it. So until next time, bye!
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