The Biggest Lie in Business is the Fairy Tale We Tell Ourselves

Nobody can afford the cost of a corporate fairy tale…

Almost every company agrees that storytelling is important, but very few are willing to accept the work and responsibility that comes with communicating a real, compelling and authentic story about their business.

Celinne da Costa of Forbes Magazine pointed out that:

“Storytelling is a powerful business tool and a skill that every business building a powerful and lasting brand should master.

We have been telling stories for as long as we’ve been human–they are an absolutely essential part of our day-to-day communications. When done well, storytelling can do wonders for a business: such as turn a brand into a legacy, create a robust marketing strategy, generate profit and win the loyalty and affection of audiences, to name just a few.”

Sadly, most corporate storytelling is nothing more than a sales and marketing push, fed by the need to connect with an audience in order to sell more products or services. At this point, business storytelling becomes a strategic branding exercise versus a way to create a powerfully deep connection with your internal and external audiences.

In Mark Schaefer’s “Big Little Book of Corporate Storytelling”, he notes that a lot of storytelling efforts fail because for one big reason — they are not believable.

A story becomes a lie when the tale that’s told does not align with what’s really happening inside the walls of the business. Too often, we want to embrace the vision of who we want to be, instead of being honest about the corporate culture that currently exists.

Businesses don’t mean to lie, they’re just beginning their storytelling journey in the wrong place. Instead of starting with a sales and marketing campaign, corporate storytelling needs to come from the leaders and employees that work within it.

People engage with stories because there is something about them that resonates and draws them in. Great stories are real, transparent, and tap into the things that unite us on a very human level. In business, it all starts with the talent within the organization.

In his Harvard Business Review article on “Why your Brain Loves Good Storytelling,” Paul J. Zak reveals:

“My research has also shown that stories are useful inside organizations. We know that people are substantially more motivated by their organization’s transcendent purpose (how it improves lives) than by its transactional purpose (how it sells goods and services). Transcendent purpose is effectively communicated through stories — for example, by describing the pitiable situations of actual, named customers and how their problems were solved by your efforts. Make your people empathize with the pain the customer experienced and they will also feel the pleasure of its resolution — all the more if some heroics went in to reducing suffering or struggle or producing joy. Many of us know from Joseph Campbell’s work that enduring stories tend to share a dramatic arc in which a character struggles and eventually finds heretofore unknown abilities and uses these to triumph over adversity; my work shows that the brain is highly attracted to this story style.”

Within any company, storytelling needs to be driven by the stakeholders that manage and lead the people, the workforce and the talent. The only way to communicate an authentic story is to tap into the real human aspects of your business, and then align those cultural drivers and across your entire organization.

Anything less is just a failed fairy tale.