When most people think of storytelling for business, they usually imagine flashy advertising and social media campaigns. But stories are also incredibly effective inside organizations, helping leaders do things like navigate mergers, shift culture, enhance experiences, and create strategic engagement. And nobody does it better than Alison Esse and her team at The Storytellers, based in the UK.

As storytelling and business transformation specialists, The Storytellers have spent the last two decades helping over 180 major organizations worldwide move people to accelerate change and transform business performance.

"If you can actually make it emotionally compelling, then it's amazing how much buy-in you can get, because you're winning people's hearts. You're not just winning their minds. You're actually helping them change their belief system about something, helping them change their attitude , and really creating that emotional connection that I think every human being responds very positively to."

In this episode, Alison shares the approach they’ve used to do things like double the size of Citibank, create best-in-class customer service at the Wynn Hotel in Los Vegas and trigger a dramatic shift in employee engagement scores at Kerry Foods.

“You know, we started this business 17 years ago and realized pretty quickly that if you position it as storytelling, you will get a little bit of pushback. And quite often leaders really don't bite because storytelling per se is not what they're looking for. What they want is a business outcome. So what I learned very quickly was that what we're selling was an outcome. We were selling change. We were selling acceleration and pace. We were selling leadership capability building.  But the tool that we were using to make it happen was storytelling.”

Our conversation also explores the strategic importance of using stories to help win the talent wars, create and shift culture and streamline strategy. The Storytellers have found a way to turn story design into a tangible, repeatable, measurable business performance accelerator that can work for any organization, anywhere in the world.

“Story is not just another initiative - it's a sense-maker. The narrative is what brings us all together into something cohesive, something simple, something easy to understand. And most importantly, something that people can really believe in.

And a lot of our clients in the past have said it's a fantastic decision-making tool. Because if something that we're doing is not relevant to that narrative, then why are we doing it? So I think it can be a way of streamlining. It can be a way of simplifying, massively, the amount of clutter that is going on in the workplace, and helping just create a really comprehensive set of priorities that you can then much more neatly plug all of those different initiatives into.“

Be sure to check out their work and follow Alison for more tips. 

***
If you like this episode, please subscribe, like and share it with your networks.

And if you want more great content like this to help you share knowledge, get support and grow your audience, join me on The Q.west for Good.