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Great Stories Change Cultures

Guest post by: Ian Windle

Article Overview: It’s always fascinating talking to clients and listening to engrossing, sometimes astonishing, stories about their organisations and their Brands – what surprises me is how few of the really good ones are used as company assets to strengthen their cultures and inspire their workplaces to positive change. Many change initiatives fail is because they rely too much on the classic ‘data gathering, analysis, report writing, and presentations’ instead of more creative approaches that use great stories to grab feelings and to motivate real performance improvement.

Great Stories Change Cultures

It’s always fascinating talking to clients and listening to engrossing, sometimes astonishing, stories about their organisations and their Brands – what surprises me is how few of the really good ones are used as company assets to strengthen their cultures and inspire their workplaces to positive change.

Many change initiatives fail is because they rely too much on the classic ‘data gathering, analysis, report writing, and presentations’ instead of more creative approaches that use great stories to grab feelings and to motivate real performance improvement.

Once upon a time……..

A CEO was concerned about the wasteful purchase practices he had observed in his company with several plants in multiple locations in the US. He was convinced that reforming the purchase procedures would save something like $1 billion in five years. He was also certain that this would not happen unless a large number of people, especially those at the top of the organization, changed their mind set.

But he didn’t give up. Instead of making PowerPoint presentations about the wasteful purchase practices in the company, he quietly asked one of his summer interns to study how many different kinds of gloves the company was buying and how much it was paying for each. This was one item that all the company’s factories were using in large numbers.

The student found that all the factories put together were buying 424 different kinds of gloves. She collected a sample of each and put on it a tag that displayed the price the factory was paying to its supplier for it. When the project was over, it was discovered that one factory would pay as little as $5 for a pair of gloves and another factory as much as $17 for the same kind of gloves.

One day, the CEO had the 424 pairs of gloves sorted by which factory they came from, and displayed along with the price tags in the company’s boardroom. Then he invited all the division presidents to visit the boardroom. They couldn’t believe their eyes. They walked around the large table shaking their heads. They looked again and again at the gloves from their own factory. They could see for themselves the wide variation in the prices they were paying for the same gloves.

The CEO said it was the one rare event when no one had anything to say. They just bought the idea that the purchase procedures in the company had to be revamped.

The CEO sent the display of these gloves to every division and every plant and persuaded a large number of managers in his company to rethink radically the way they were buying not just gloves but other things too.

The story still resonates around the company. What are your Brand stories?

Capture as well as create your Brand stories

At LiveChange, good brand story telling lies at the heart of change. Many of our employee performance improvement challenges involve either 1) helping leaders understand why stories are important and helping them communicate those stories more effectively or 2) helping their organisations utilise their stories in creative, impactful and ultimately, more profitable, ways. In both cases they can lead to those all-powerful ‘aha’ moments that create employee behaviour change with equally powerful consequences for business performance.

When our team worked with Lexus we developed a customer service programme called ‘Creating Legendary Customer Service’. A legend being of course a story that’s told and retold and the more it is told the more legendary it becomes. The programme was all about creating beliefs and behaviours that would stimulate positive story telling by customers.

The red thread that ran throughout was that every one who came in touch with a customer had to deliver customer service to them that was memorable. If customer service is average you just don’t tell anyone about it, so it has to be over an above your expectations, it creates an emotional reaction from you and you want to tell people ‘you never guess what happened when I test drove that new car last week…’. It made the business really stand out in an industry notorious for ‘average’ service.

Values, stories and actions

Stories need to be anchored back to the values of the business. If a leader does the wrong thing or tells the wrong story, they are implicitly setting the wrong example, which some people will follow and the culture of the business starts to be affected. Some leaders are brilliant at it, they just know what to do, to talk to people constantly about examples of their values in actions, they show the positive examples of great things happening in the business, they don’t refer explicitly to the values, but people make the connection.

Leadership actions reinforce the right behaviours and values, which set the right example that people will follow. As the Harvard Business Review nicely summed up, to start a culture change all we need to do is two simple things:

1. Do dramatic story-worthy things that represent the culture we want to create. Then let other people tell stories about it.
2. Find other people who do story-worthy things that represent the culture we want to create. Then tell stories about them.

The Benefits for You

Intuitively having a set of values, a code of conduct, a great collection of customer stories seems right, but what’s the business case? John Kotter and James Hesket In ‘Corporate Culture and Performance’, show that companies with strong corporate cultures based on shared values outperform other companies by a significant margin. Research over an 11 year period showed that these companies grew four times faster, job creation was seven times higher and profit performance was an astounding 750 times higher!

Perhaps ask yourself if you are serious about creating a value-based organisation?:

1. Do your leaders spread examples of the values in the things they do and the stories they tell as role models for the business?
2. Are your staff engaged in the values, do they propagate the right stories, do they understand how they have helped your business success in the past and how they can contribute to success in the future?
3. Does your organisational structure and processes support or inhibit your values?
4. Does your physical environment reinforce the values?
5. Does your competency framework reflect your values?
6. Are you recognising and rewarding the right behaviours through your appraisal system?

If you want to capitalise on some of your own great Brand stories – do get in touch!

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Article Tags: behaviours, brands, change, culture, emotion, leadership, performance, stories, values



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