Episode #363: Seize The Moment With Your Leader Storytelling

Covid-19 has changed the world from a personal health risk point of view and has also trashed industries, careers and livelihoods. This is not the time for leaders to be simple observers of the meltdown, but to be collectors of stories from the devastation and the rising phoenixes. These stories can be for those “rallying the troops” moments or for public consumption in the wider world, as you detail your organisation’s saga. This crisis has a lot of dramatic tension bound within it, which lends itself to great storytelling material. So let’s make the effort to carefully collar what is going on around us.

Typical business storytelling will have the hero’s journey and the trials, tribulations and triumphs therein. If this isn’t a time of trials and tribulations and hopefully, triumphant organisational survival, then I don’t know what is. It is easy in theory, but harder in practice. We can be swept up in the maelstrom of each day’s specific challenges and not be awake to the legendary dramas being played out around us and to us. We must embrace these stories, because they will be the source of powerful memories and emotional connections for many people in the audience.

In the Covid-19 catastrophe, the heroes come under tremendous stress and strain. The opposition, obstacles, threats and their own personal frailties are all exposed. The heroes set about ensuring survival of the business. They gradually turn the problem around, as rivals beside them succumb and go into ignominious, commercial oblivion. We need to be keeping track of these exploits for future storytelling reference. The daily newspaper is full of stories every morning, but it ends up ferrying the fish bones and potato peelings to the trash can. We need a more permanent snare of what has taken place, day by day.

Within the team, there are those who have stepped up and carried the banner aloft under tremendous pressure. We can’t let those efforts go unrecorded and just be allowed to join the forgotten fishbones and carrot peelings. We need to be creating the narrative arc of the journey, as the heroes learn and innovate as they push forward. They take blind alleys and make choices that don’t work out, but these tough times add to the credibility of the story in the retelling. The higher the walls in front of the team, the greater kudos for managing to scramble over the top and keep moving. The bigger the failures, the larger and more valuable the lessons in the recounting.

Audience emotional resonance with the heroes is relatively easy, because this virus enemy is instantaneously threatening the whole planet. Everyone will remember what they were doing, how they were feeling, the losses suffered, the drama, the dangers and the close calls. Those listening to your story will quickly identify with the struggle and the people involved, becoming engaged in a way that is usually very hard to achieve.

Cause and effect is how we define what we know to be true in the world. This thing happened and set off this reaction, which led to this outcome, involving these people. The leader’s job is to refine our understanding of what has been happening and why we are getting the outcomes we have been seeing. This needs intellectual, analytical work. Written records, observations, snippets of dialogue, blogs, podcasts, video records all become the historic archive needed by the leader.

It sounds easy enough to do, except when you are in the middle of the disaster, it is hard to distance yourself from the business carnage going On around you. Nevertheless, the lessons being learnt need capture, the stories involved need to be told, the examples must be assembled and the raw emotion of today conveyed. Covid-19 is throwing up the material for a billion blogs and thousands of scholarly tomes on leadership.

We are in the moment. We are the wartime correspondents, capturing what it is really like in the front line and understanding how people feel about being so close to the end of their business world. We must emerge from the turmoil with insights, which we can convey thereafter in stories. People thrive on and learn through storytelling and here we all are, leaders during Covid-19, placed at the centrepiece of the unfolding story.

So, as leaders we need to add yet another ball to our juggling act. We need to be a character in the play and also be the playwright, capturing the details of the drama, as it envelops us.

Maintain high vigilance for elements of the hero’s journey both good and bad. We will come out of this dazed and dusty but also armed with pertinent and poignant stories to use in guiding the team. We need to be able to tell the story of how to survive a once in a lifetime business Armageddon. Write it all down now for later use. It will be a treasuretrove of hard earned lessons, wisdom and practical insight that most others will have thrown out with the fishbones and gobo peelings.