Example Reflection – Storytelling     Challenge & Selection   According to a study by Thomas Ahrens, all fast growing companies have a very strong corporate culture  shared by all their employees. (Thomas Ahrens “High Growth Соmpanies: Driving the Tiger”)  Our company, the fastest growing mobile telecom company in Russia, is no exception.   We are proud of our strong corporate culture, our mission, strategy and the key values.  The company has developed a special one-day training course, mandatory for all employees, in order to  help them to adapt and appreciate the corporate culture. This training is not run by professional trainers  but by senior managers who have been working in the company for a long time and can tell a lot of  interesting facts about its history from their own experiences.   We call these people Ambassadors. During the training, a trainer uses a storytelling tool, giving  a lot of  examples of how we live our core value in order to explain the mission, strategy and the company values  to the participants. I’m very proud to be entrusted with the honour of being an Ambassador of  corporate values.  And here I want to refer to  Cameron Smith in the section “Storytelling Tool” of our course: «Every great  brand has a story and that story connects to the emotions, the characters, the values of the people».  StoryTelling is «about the connection that we give to people about a piece of information that we're  trying to share. A good story at its essence, is simply conveying a message that has logic”.     Application   The training script has a lot of common examples but each trainer adds something from his/her own  experience. There are many great examples of absolutely incredible achievements.  But unfortunately, when the growth speed is fast we are bound to make mistakes.  I want to tell the story from my own experience which I use as an example to illustrate the value  “Openness”.  One of the items is “Share your experience, knowledge and skills”.  It’s nice and easy to talk about your achievements but telling about your mistakes, so the others can  avoid them, requires more courage.  My story. Some years ago, the company was expanding fast to the regions and opening new branches in  different cities. I was in charge of setting up customer service departments. During the launch of the  first company I used to record all our mistakes and missteps. The list was quite long. When we were  launching the second one, I gave this list to my colleagues and we managed to avoid all these mistakes.  But we added some new ones to the list. The launch of the third branch went much easier and the rest  were opened without a hitch.  When I told this story at the training, from the reaction of the participants, who started sharing similar  experiences, I understood how important was to tell about this particular aspect of the value.    Insight & Approach   The company values stay the same but the script of the training is being revised from time to time.  I’m a part of the working group which is charge of these changes. In the team, we’ve decided to add a  point that we shouldn’t be afraid of telling about mistakes helping our colleagues to avoid it. We’ve also  made a constantly increasing bank of stories that can be used at the training as the examples of living  company values.So storytelling is a powerful instrument which helps us to ensure a visual and deep  understanding of company values which are in its DNA. Nothing illustrates this better than the words by  Cameron Smith “If you can raise the level of engagement in your business, you will do wonders to your  performance. And storytelling allows you to create energy and passion and excitement around  something”.

This course has made me take a fresh look at storytelling tool which can be used in all areas, especially  where the situations are human centered.

