44 | MENTORS MAGAZINE | EDITION 2
And judgment is key whenever we share
personal information. Faulty judgment can
result in some awkward moments if not
lasting reputational harm.
Faulty judgment in personal stories isn’t al-
ways this glaring. But if you are unsure of
how your stories might land, run them first
by people you trust. In the end, with person-
al stories less is more and humility is better.
- Stories We Tell Our Teams or Or-
ganizations
The type of storytelling that is intrinsic to
successful leadership is the ability to tell
compelling stories of the future, to articulate
a vision, to both internal and external audi-
ences. Leaders need to master another kind
of story too—this kind is about organization-
al values.
Whatever the management goal, there are
storytelling strategies that can help further
it. A former Facebook director of engineer-
ing, Bobby Johnson, once saw the need for a
cultural shift in the company’s infrastructure
team. Although many of his engineers were
drawn to exciting new projects and innova-
tions, Johnson knew that other Facebook en-
gineers, the ones who worked behind the
scenes to ensure that the existing systems
ran faster and better than before, also did
critical work. He wanted to highlight these
“unsung heroes,” both to honor them and to
get more engineers interested in their less
glamorous but nonetheless essential work.
To accomplish this, he would take every op-
portunity—in one-on-ones, in meetings, and
in group e-mails—to share stories of im-
portant fixes that these day-to-day engineers
made and to publicly praise them.Similarly, if you want people to speak up
more in meetings and challenge each other,
share a story of how a lone dissenting voice
was able to change your mind about a deci-
sion you’d made, and how this wouldn’t
have happened if the person hadn’t felt
comfortable in challenging you. Or if you
want to increase collaboration among
teams, share a story about two teams who
decided to join forces and whose combined
creativity and brainpower led to important
breakthroughs for the organization. And if
it’s courage and risk taking you want to pro-
mote, highlight stories of risk-taking col-
leagues—and include their failures, to make
the point that learning from mistakes is just
another way forward.As you can see in the three types of stories
above, the formula for telling a story is sim-
ple. Decide which values you want to pro-
mote and which behaviors you want to en-
courage, and then make those traits the
themes of your stories, and include charac-
ters who demonstrate the desired traits. Do
these stories have to be true? It helps if they
are, and it’s even better if your audience
knows the protagonists. However, hypo-
thetical scenarios can pack just as big a
punch, as we’ve learned from neuroscience
research and our own experiences from the
myriad of stories that surround us.