Reflection:  Using Storytelling to Inspire Leadership to Improve Ways of Working

Challenge: Describe your challenge, including all relevant information.

I joined a new team within my organization three years ago, and we built it up from scratch with a small,  but mighty cross-functional team.  We were hugely successful in influencing and adding value to the  organization, which prompted a recent, large investment into our space.  We have expanded the team,  which has resulted in a complex matrix and web of inefficient decision making, unclear roles and  responsibilities, and too many priorities.  I was asked to lead a sub-committee to improve our ways of  working across the team.  During our upcoming offsite meeting, the expectation was that we would  have a list of ideas for how to solve our team challenges.

However, inspired by Design Thinking, I decided to spend the time with my sub-committee staying in the  question and driving deeper understanding of what the root problems were, rather than jumping to  solutions.  My company and team have a tendency of being uncomfortable with ambiguity and wanting  to jump straight to solving.  But we have attempted to solve the inefficient ways of working on our team  before, and the same issues continue to pop up.  I wanted to use this opportunity to test out my new  learnings from this course, show the leadership team the potential Design Thinking has within our space,  and specifically as an outcome of the offsite, use storytelling to paint a picture of the deep pain points  the team members were feeling, and to inspire and invite the leadership team to contribute to the  solution.

Selection: In your own words, briefly describe the tool you selected (e.g., what it is and why you  selected it for your challenge -- including any appropriate video lecture references).

Storytelling is about telling a compelling story, building empathy, and getting people to care.  The  majority of my career was in Sales, and I believe telling a story is key to driving engagement and  alignment with anyone, internal or external.  I chose to apply and reflect on Storytelling because if I can  spark feeling from leadership, they will be more likely to engage and work to implement the eventual  solutions.

Application: Describe how you applied the tool you selected to your challenge (e.g., what you did and  how the tool was applied effectively or ineffectively).

First, I created a survey for team members to anonymously submit feedback on their key pinch points  regarding current ways of working.  I asked specific questions regarding if team members:

  Felt supported by their manager

  Had role clarity individually and across the team

  Felt like they were working on value-added work

  Had clear and reasonable priorities and timelines

I then shared the survey results with my sub-committee.  As we reviewed the results, I prompted and  asked the committee questions that dove deeper into the problems, to really understand what people  were feeling and why.  We cut the data in several different ways and discovered some interesting  insights.  For example, we found that depending on a respondent’s tenure on the team, they might have  different concerns.  Team members < 1 year were more likely to feel like they were lacking the strategic  intent behind their work, or they felt the leadership team was not aligned on priorities.  Team members

with longer tenure were more forgiving and acknowledged the progress leadership has made in the last  year on being clearer on priorities.

Next, we developed a persona from each unique viewpoint, telling a story from the perspective of the  typical team member, creating a day-in-the-life portrait of team members and how this problem  personally affects each of them.  Here is one example of a persona we created:

We are early in our team’s journey, so part of my job is to help  navigate ambiguity as our team evolves. I believe that the team is  broadly aligned on the vision for our work, but the lack of clarity on  ownership slows down our progress.    I am confused on ownership between me and our business partners,  and between business partners and the rest of the team. This causes  not only frustration, but also missed opportunities.    Additionally, there is no clear alignment on how my business will be  supported by the other functional teams, so I often feel that I do not  have the resources to enact transformational change.

We shared these personas with the broader team and saw huge engagement from leadership, along  with accolades on our unique approach.  We closed our presentation with problem statements for each  persona that would hopefully leave everyone feeling inspired and motivated.  Some examples of the  problem statements were: “How might we better understand and enhance the value we bring to our  business partners?” and “How might we align and allocate resources within our teams to best pursue our  ambitious vision?”

The leadership team was moved to action and very interested in how we could take this further.  As a  next step, we will be setting up several “What If” ideation sessions, and then hopefully coming up with a  solution that both wows and works.

Insight: Describe the insight you gained from applying the tool you selected to your challenge (e.g.,  how an insight affected your thinking about the challenge and about design thinking more broadly).

Defining the personas painted such a vivid and disappointing picture of what our team was going  through.  It depicted how just saying “investing in our people is our #1 priority” wasn’t enough, and we  needed to push harder to live our values and reduce churn and confusion for our team members.  But it  also painted a story of hope, and how this is something we can fix.  Storytelling can’t just be about  complaining, it has to inspire and move people to act.

Approach: Describe what you might do differently next time -- applying the same tool you selected or  a different one -- and the reason(s) why.

The Storytelling technique was a huge success, and I would definitely apply it again.  However, one thing  I might do differently next time is carve out more time for developing the personas.  We only allocated  about an hour and a half to the exercise, and I think at least half a day would have been more  appropriate.

But we presented our personas to the whole team, and we actually realized two benefits:  (1) it  resonated so well with survey respondents – they felt heard and that finally all the stress and pain they  had been feeling could be communicated in a concise and comprehensive way, and (2) leadership  understood, they felt the pain in that moment too, and you could see light bulbs going off – they were  bought in.  The Storytelling aspect was so crucial to this process.  In the equation from the lesson:   Engagement + Alignment + Curation = Fast, Storytelling is what helps you achieve the first two, and I am  amazed at what great results we saw from investing in it.

