Leading through change
“Nobody goes into battle because of a spreadsheet”
Wise words spoken to me by a boss, when I worked for the Foreign Office more than 20 years ago. He’d come in to lead the team, though we already knew him by reputation - he was one of those people that people talked about in the organisation, they knew about things he’d done and been a part of.
He arrived at a time when the team was being battered by one of the intractable programmes of ‘organisational change’ that seem to afflict government departments with particular intensity. This change programme was a bit special, because not only did it involve shifting areas of geographic responsibility, but also coincided with a new IT system that to us appeared to replicate all the inefficiencies of previous paper processes with a volatile instability that seemed almost personal in nature. It felt as though the servers deep in the basement of the building had achieved malevolent sentience and a burning mission to prevent us from doing anything useful for more than an hour at a time.
And morale did suffer. For a team of pretty highly motivated people you could see it in the everyday interactions. Carping about the IT system gradually shifted to carping about the people managing the IT change programme and from there, to complaining about management more generally. And on up the chain until the negativity was about the organisation and our mission. Small comments, moving from cynical humour to genuine and persistent negativity about who we were and what we were doing.
Success came to those who were persistent and energetic in the face of adversity — not those who lost themselves complaining about it.
Our weekly team meetings, when we got the opportunity to ‘feed-back’, started to weigh heavily toward complaints about senior management who just kept telling us how great the system was and how it was driving efficiency gains (there were statistics to prove it).
In response our new boss started to tell us small tales of his past experience of being at the sharp end of organisational dysfunction. He’d had a varied career, both in the military and corporate life and had quite a few to share. A number of them involved lying a ditch full of water in dangerous places wondering what he was doing there. They were always self-deprecating and often funny but they all carried the same underlying message. Which was that to do tough jobs in large organisations, whether military or civilian, commercial or government, you had to make do with what you had, be resilient and not expect anyone, let alone your organisation, to provide you with the perfect environment to get the results you wanted. Success came to those who were persistent and energetic in the face of adversity, not those who lost themselves complaining about it.
Our struggles were certainly less taxing and dangerous than his had been, no water-filled ditches for us. The team got the message. Complaining about our lot in comparison started to seem ridiculous, an undesirable behaviour. Dry humour was still an essential outlet but deep negativity was not.
He had the ability to tell the right story at the right moment. It changed the atmosphere in the room and the fundamentally, the behaviour of the group. All done without self-aggrandisement or the heavy-handed leverage of authority. Not a statistic or pie-chart in sight, just a reiteration of what values and behaviours were required to work in the team.
If you want to lead people through change then you have to find a way to show them that you have been through challenge and adversity yourself, that you empathise with their struggles and their frustrations, but that to get through it you are all going to have to be resilient, innovative and persistent, together.
Storytelling is the structured system of communication that does just that. Humans have always used it to create group identity and social cohesion based around values and behaviours. It’s the same form of structured communication that allows us to project a vision of the future, a path to follow and a reason to move along it. It’s an essential leadership behaviour and there’s nothing ‘soft’ about it as a skill.
Great storytellers are made not born. If you’d like to know more about how to access and use the skill with immediate effect, drop us a line.
- Statistics don’t shift behaviour, and telling people the change is working when their daily experience says otherwise widens the gap.
- A well-timed story does what data can’t. It changes the atmosphere in the room and, with it, how people behave.
- Storytelling projects a vision of the future, a path to follow and a reason to move along it.
- Storytelling is a ‘hard’ skill, an essential leadership behaviour. It can be taught.
