Reflection – Storytelling

Challenge & Selection

My work in the organization is to lead Learning and Development and Employee Engagement and  Storytelling turns out to be a rather useful and solid tool for me to accomplish my objectives.  Storytelling compels others to take notice of what I am training them for and it is a strong tool for  generating curiosity and thus facilitating Engagement. An engaged employee is one who understands  the purpose of the organization and connects his work objectives with the goals of the company. To  instill this understanding in employees, storytelling becomes a very useful tool as it helps them  understand things in a better, engaging manner and reinforces the learning that we try to impart.  I  spend a lot of time interacting with people and training them in various skillsets such as soft skills,  functional skills, etc. and more often than not, it becomes absolutely necessary for me to hook the  person’s mind into what I am training them. By converting my messages into compelling stories, my  message is delivered in a way that is easy for them to absorb and understand and that makes it all the  more effective for people to implement the learning in a practical work context. It also helps them  ascertain their goals and deeply understand the whole system wherein training becomes just a bridge  for them to cross over to a more knowledgeable state of mind which is aware of the decisions they  make and the problems they solve.

Application

I had applied storytelling in various contexts but would share one such instance where I did that  recently. There was a workshop which I had taken on instilling our Organizational Core Values in the  employees and one of the topics was ‘Humility and Respect’. I knew that if I explain this entire subject  with a powerpoint presentation it would sound too preachy and would not deliver the message as  effectively as I would’ve wanted to. Hence, I decided to explain this from the context of a story that I  had read once as a teenager. This was the story of Charlie Chaplin and how on his 50th birthday, they  had kept competitions across all the counties in England to do an impression of Charlie Chaplin and the  best impressionist who appears exactly like Chaplin would win the contest. Mr. Chaplin himself  contested from one of the counties, just to play a prank and there were many more who entered the  contest. In the end there were 3 people shortlisted for the final round among which one was the real  Chaplin. But when they announced the winner, it was no Mr. Chaplin himself but another person and it  was shocking to Mr. Chaplin that somebody can do my impression better than myself. This story was  told in a more engaging format to all and the moral of this story was to drive the fact that we cannot  ever think we are the best and there is always someone who could be better than us and we must  remain humble and grounded at all times. The tool was applied effectively to facilitate employees’  understanding of the subject at hand and facilitated their learning.

Insight & Approach

The story was received really well by employees and it was clearly impactful as they mentioned how  they understood things more clearly in their feedback post the training. It was quite insightful for me as  well as I understood that storytelling can actually create such a huge impact in help employees learn  values in a more engaging manner and the engagement aspect was at its peak during this exercise.

This course made me look at design thinking with a whole new perspective and although I had used it  before, it was randomized and not structured. The entire approach of What is, What if, What wows and  What works gives a clear structure to the entire thinking approach thus leading us to do things in a  more concrete manner and not in a random way.

This knowledge has really helped me in my Learning and Development career and would continue to  open up different possibilities in the future.

