Episode 12 | ALISON ESSE | Co-Founder, The Storytellers

Welcome to Face Forward, the inspiring change podcast on all things internal communications, engagement, leadership, and change. A beautiful day in London here again, and now I find myself at 5 Cromwell Place, which to most people wouldn't mean anything at all, but in a couple of minutes' time I'm going to ask Alison Essie, who is the one of the co-founders of The Storytellers, to tell us a little bit more about where we are. I came here probably for the first time in about 2014, 2015, when working on AIB's corporate narrative, and it struck me as such an important thing from the perspective of purpose that I wanted to have Alison on today to talk to me a little bit about narrative, the importance of narrative, and the benefits of having a really, really strong purpose. So hello.

Hello.

And thanks for having me.

That's an absolute pleasure. Nice to see you again.

Thank you. So I guess why don't we just do a quick 2-minute history of the building because it is really nice, particularly for somebody who's based in Dublin and has lived in Ireland for 18 years.

Well, it's, it's an amazing building. For your listeners, it's, it's worth mentioning this is a very impressive stucco-fronted townhouse which is located almost right opposite the Natural History Museum in, in South Kensington in London, and we were very lucky to be able to move into this house. It used to belong to a society artist who was called Sir John Lavery, and for those in the know, Sir John Lavery, who originated from Ireland and married— his second marriage was to a lady called Hazel Lavery, and she became an iconic figure for, because of the relationship that she had with Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish Agreement. So this house has actually been a place where Hazel and John Lavery lived. He was a society painter, so he painted the great and the good of the 1920s. They've all been through this door and up the stairs to his studio. But there was a political background to it as well with Hazel, his wife, and she was very, very influential in certain circles. And as I said, with Michael Collins, there was a lot of meeting going on with Winston Churchill and at the time of the Anglo-Irish Agreement. So this house became a kind of almost like a secret meeting place for them. And we're just— it's full of stories about the people who have been painted here. Sir George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill learned to paint here. So it really is very special, and this is a very impressive building. So we're very proud to be here.

It is a very impressive building. I was only saying there earlier that I just love to sit and rub the step, that worn-out step on the stairs. It's amazing. Yeah. And I guess stories is why we're here, because that's what you guys do. So why don't you tell me just a little bit about yourself and a bit about The Storytellers. Just give me a bit of background.

Sure, well, my name's Alison Essie. There were 4 of us who started round my kitchen table, not in London, we were in Oxfordshire, about 15 years ago almost to the day. I actually head up the business development, so new clients who are coming to The Storytellers would probably meet me as their first port of call. But the Storytellers really originated from a need to bring strategy and vision to life in a way that very large complex organizations and the workforce, which can be very disparate, they can be very far-flung all over the world, they have different microcultures, different languages, there are different teams doing different things, it can be very difficult to connect people to a strategy and a vision and make it meaningful for them. And so we wanted to find a way that really brought it to life in a human way, that could really bring meaning and an emotional connection to the journey that any business is on, and allow— and it's all really all about leaders— allow enable and equip leaders to be able to personalize that story for their teams so that they could— everybody could play their part in it, and they could very clearly make that line of sight between the, the role that they are playing and the outcome that the business wants to achieve. And we believe that every business is on a journey, and to bring that journey to life as almost as a story and then feed it with stories about your people, your customers, is a— makes strategy, which can be quite abstract, it can be quite conceptual, it can be quite, quite difficult to— it's quite intangible.

Turgid is the word that I have in my head.

Oh no, I wouldn't be so rude to say that about our clients' strategies, but they can be difficult for your man on the ground, you know, the frontline people in the business, to really make sense of what does this strategy that has been worked on probably by management consultants and the board or the executive team, what does this strategy really mean for me? If I'm out there sort of digging up pavements or if I'm out there putting telegraph wires up, what does this mean to me and how can I contribute? And this was all built on the premise that everybody wants to be a hero. I mean, everybody wants to have a part to play. Nobody wants to feel that something is being imposed on them, or that in particular in times of change and performance improvement when they need to change the way they work or they need to change their behaviors, it can be quite difficult to make those connections. So we developed a methodology that quite simply starts with a very emotionally compelling story that articulates the the journey that the business is on. And we have a number of different capabilities. We have a fantastic creative team. We bring it to life visually. We have great people who are great coaches and trainers who can train leaders on how to make this meaningful for their teams. We make films. We, we do all sorts of wonderful things. But this is really all about creating that emotional connection. Once you've got people emotionally hooked then their appetite to change, or to at least start to explore how they can make a difference by doing something differently, is far greater.

And I think for me it's that creating that red thread for that man digging up the pavements all the way back to the CEO. And you're actually right, from the companies that I speak to and work with, the role of the leader— they're the glue. They are the ones that can make the difference. You know, when I, when I run change workshops and I talk to clients and I say, you know, the CEO doesn't know the guy fixing the pavement, but the site supervisor, the foreman, whoever his boss is, he or she knows that person best, knows the context, knows what they're landing into, knows that they just got divorced, their mom died, their niece got married, they had a baby, their dog had puppies, whatever it is, that actually there's something that they can use then to bring that story to life for those people on the the ground. So I think there, that leader piece and the engaging emotional piece are absolutely critical.

I think so. I think one of the things that we've found over the years is that leaders, leaders are often very proud of the part of the business they're working for. They may be managers, but they are very proud of what they do, but they struggle to find to really understand why is this strategy relevant to me. And it's that disconnect, it's about really not really understanding or getting how this is actually going to make their— what's in it for me? It's, you know, what, how is it going to enhance my life, my, the life of my team, and in so doing the, the life of the company, if you like. So, so I think this is really geared towards leaders. It's about creating inspirational leaders helping leaders become great storytellers so that they can bring their people with them during times of change and massively accelerate the pace of that change and transform the organization. So it really is about creating inspirational leadership, and that's what this storytelling is all about. And I think now leadership— the storytelling, rather— is actually seen as a key an essential leadership skill.

Definitely, and there are— I'm seeing in a room normally when I say the word storytelling or engagement, I used to get a lot of rolling eyes. Now I tend to get a few less rolling eyes, so I think it is becoming much, much more mainstream. And if you look back to David McLeod and Engage for Success and the whole engagement world, that whole idea of having a really strong narrative, really compelling and engaging leaders employee voice and integrity are all the things that you were talking about, and therefore by looking at stories, by looking at narrative, by looking at leaders, you're driving the engagement of an organisation.

Well, I think it's very simple. We have been telling stories since we sat around campfires. It's how we learnt things, it's how we warned each other of danger, it's how we actually challenged each other to get to go and do something the next day that was going to be maybe out of your comfort zone. Saying. Stories have been our fodder for thousands and thousands of years. As humans, we thrive on narrative. It's how we make sense of things, it's how we make connections, it's how we learn, it's how we impart information. So if we're doing that in our personal lives, because that's what we do— you go down to the pub, "How was your day?" You know, you talk about the story of your day and what happened. Why wouldn't you apply exactly that same science to, to leadership? And it can help leaders become really authentic leaders if they're telling stories about themselves, their teams, about real people, about real situations. It adds an authenticity and a credibility that you often don't get when you're just reciting words off a piece of paper.

Yeah, I wonder, do you think that in the corporate world, you know, we often talk about this bringing your whole self to work, that people tend not to bring their whole selves to work. They tend to bring their professional selves to work and leave their personal selves at home, and actually by bringing their whole self could make them so much a better leader, but perhaps they're a little scared of doing so.

I think they hide a little bit behind those, particularly that language. I mean, I often joke that when you walk into business through the revolving door of your of your office, you suddenly adopt this rather strange persona and you adopt a language, jargon, corporate jargon that you would never ever use at home, and that can be tremendously alienating for people and it creates a barrier which I think storytelling can break through immediately because, as I said, it's about real people, it's about a real journey that either your business story or stories of your people that illustrate the kind of behaviors that you want to adopt and reinforce. And I think it's a bit of a no-brainer. The question is, how do you actually go around— how do you actually do it?

Yeah, absolutely. I had a very, very similar conversation with Harry Ashbridge in Monzo this morning, where we were talking about the proximity to a keyboard. As people get closer to a keyboard, they tend to start writing, and exactly that weird professional nonsense.

We're all guilty of it.

And we leave English behind us because we think, "Oh, keyboard, professional, more words, more guff, more nonsense, you know, buzzwords." But actually, if we could do the exact opposite, we'd be so much more successful.

And I think it takes a little bit of courage. I think it takes a little bit of guidance and maybe a little bit of coaching and training, but it is something that is inherent within all of us. And if we can just tap into that, that natural ability to tell stories and use them as a tool to influence behaviors and influence the sort of actions of your people, you can actually make the most amazing difference. And we've seen it happen time and time again. We've worked now with over 170 organizations all over the world. They come from almost every industry sector, and we have seen the most phenomenal results. And the appetite for this and the capability building in leaders to be able to articulate that strategy or the strategic narrative is something that they never thought they could do in, in that way.

So, and will carry with them for the rest of their careers.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

So I wonder then, back to a question that you posed to yourself earlier, how do you do that? I know that you work with lots of very large corporates generally, but for me, a narrative is as important whether you've got 300,000 staff and you're HSBC, all the way down to a guy that owns a hardware store in Ballygow backwards and he's got 10 staff. It's as important. So how, how would somebody that runs a business start to create a corporate narrative?

Well, that's a very good question. We, I think, would probably say that any narrative, any message that you want to drive through the organisation needs to be led by the leaders and led from the top. So we tend to start with the leaders of the organisation and we will extract that narrative from them, usually by one-to-one interviews with, for example, the executive team. Increasingly we're working with very large numbers of leaders because, for example, if you extend that invitation to a wider group of leaders, it means that their sense of ownership and their sense of involvement is much greater right from the outset. And we have worked with organizations where there has been quite a disconnect between between the senior leaders and the next tier of leaders, the top 100, top 150. So however you do it, whether you do it through one-to-one interviews, whether you do it through a facilitated conversation, you need to help people feel that they've had a voice in this story. This is not something, I repeat, this is not something that the communications department should draft and then just sign off.

Say no.

No.

Here it is, we've done it.

That is not a good idea.

I'm sure that never happens, does it?

I'm sure it never does, and if you'd like to look at our website, I can give you 9 reasons why you shouldn't do that. But no, I think it's really important that the senior leaders of the business own this story and that they have co-created it, they've co-authored it, so that they are going to basically champion it much more than if than if it's just been cooked up in the comms department somewhere. That's not to say that communications teams aren't fantastic and we need them as part of this process, but I think that having that sense of ownership from the executive team and having each one has got a voice in that story is really important. The second thing is that the structure of the story— I mean, the different companies use different structures. It's very important that you have a beginning, a middle, and an end, like any story, and that it has some kind of emotional and a rational flow to it. This is because we're all about hearts and minds here. So you need to pepper this story some with very rational facts and stark realities, and also you need to tap into the emotion of where we've come from, why we're proud to work here. It may be touching on our purpose, which is a more emotional— emotive subject to talk about. But you need to, in the story, cover off things that are important to you as a business, like purpose. It may be your vision, and that would typically be at the end of the story, the strategy, the, the brand your mission, perhaps the big opportunity. You need to talk about the challenge because that is the burning platform, and every story needs to have something to be resolved. That's what makes a good story. A story that is a whitewash of beauty is incredible. It's a bit dull. It needs to be resolved. There needs to be tension in it, and that's where your reality, the, the difficult things to have to accept, um, that come into play. It may be that you bring your values in, your culture, your behaviors that describe how we're going to deliver the, the strategy. Um, and it, it really just is in a very simple overarching framework. You just need to be able to describe the journey that the business is on most importantly, why we're going on this journey. It's amazing how many companies create narratives that talk about the what and the how, but they never give context, they never explain why. So the why, the what, the how in a very simple overarching narrative that can really be translated into something local for teams so they can think, what's our you know, our local reality, is the starting point for this story. What it shouldn't be are pages and pages of, 'This is our strategy, this is our vision, this is our set of values,' because people need to be able to see how they interconnect and how they link. There's no cohesion. So this is a story, a narrative. It's a flow of This is where we are now, this is where we want to be, and this is the journey we're on to get there. And it provides context for the strategy or the vision, but it's not the strategy and the vision. They, they appear as sort of moments in the narrative. But the most important thing is that people who are going to hear the story feel that they can be protagonists of the story, that they have a pot to play in it. They are the people who are going to influence the outcome of the story, and if you can actually create that sort of safe environment, then people will be so much more engaged in it. And written in the right tone of voice, I think it's non-threatening, it's, it's easy to understand, and everybody can, can get involved.

Okay, and so once we have that, once we have that narrative down on paper, and you talk about bringing it to life then for people lower down in the organization. How does that work? Because again, we talk a lot about storytelling and we do see a few raised eyebrows, and I think people are maybe still a little restive and scared, perhaps further down the organization, the more junior they are in terms of leadership. Yeah, about that whole idea of storytelling. And you know, for me, that's just examples— use examples and stories of things happening locally. See that thing that Jimmy did last week? Well, that's linked back to this pillar. In our narrative, which is linked back to the strategy. Oh, yeah, there's lots of nodding heads in agreement. Is that what it means?

Yeah.

Oh, well, I'm doing that already then.

Yeah.

Bingo.

So I think that one of the golden rules of getting the narrative out to the organisation is not to just post it out to people. That is not good. People might look at it and say, mm, yeah, that's quite interesting, interesting, but they won't— still won't be able to make the connection between their role and what they're doing. And I'm thinking of somebody sitting up a telegraph pole at this stage thinking, what am I doing right now that is going to contribute to it? And so this is really where the leaders come into play. This is how you take that narrative and you can explain to leaders how are they going to personalize How are they going to bring it to life for their teams in a way that is meaningful and relevant? And this is where they need to draw on their own experiences, their own stories, their own facts and their own environmental issues and start to illustrate that story with real-world experiences that the man up the telegraph pole can actually relate to. So the leaders have a big role to play in how to make this narrative meaningful all the way through, down through the organisation to, you know, to the frontline.

And would that be a cascade kind of process? The leadership team might do it to their directs, and each of those directs do it to their directs, each of those directs do it to their directs, down the organisation?

It can be, it can be. The best way to do this is to take that cascade approach, but what we also really recommend is having a group of champions that can push it from bottom up. So the champions, or the ambassadors of the story you might call them, are a network of people. You tend to choose them for their levels of influence, their passion, their sort of natural gravitas in the organisation. This is not hierarchical, so they don't have to be leaders. People with reach, people who really understand the organ, know what's going on, and you can actually train and equip them to be able to support those leaders and push, become your story champions. They become the people who are going out there looking for the stories that are going to sort of illustrate the narrative. They are the people who are going to become the role models of the story and encourage the leaders to become role models, because let's face it, not every leader is a great communicator and certainly not a great role model. So the champions and the ambassadors can provide that groundswell from the bottom up, as well as the formal cascade coming down, and when the two meet in the middle, beautiful things happen.

And I think that for internal comms team, where you're out in the organisation looking for stories all the time, this is manna from heaven served up on a silver salver.

Absolutely, and the comms team have a really, really important part to play in this because they become the facilitators and the channels that they use to actually get these stories out. It's all about the stories of your people that are really going to bring that narrative to life so that they— the thing that Jimmy did, you know, the other day, that is a great example of integrity or whatever your value might be, or something that Juan did is a really good example of collaboration. And you highlight those stories, you highlight the behaviors through the stories that really start to influence the way people think and feel about what's being asked of them with the narrative. And the narrative has to be a call to action, so there has to, there has to be something that people people feel they need to do differently to make it a success.

I think the stories happen all the time. I was in with the head of comms in OnPost last week or the week before, and we talked about an app that they've just launched because obviously they've got 1,000 postmen and postwomen out delivering letters. So again, back to your man on the telegraph pole, there you go. And some of the stories that they had had been sent into them that they were then able to redistribute back to that audience around, you know, a postman jumping into a river to save somebody that had fallen in. A postman who had to help a family give birth— a family's dog give birth to puppies because the vet hadn't got there yet. There's all these kind of stories that randomly come up that actually bring life and soul to an organisation where maybe there wasn't that before.

I think these are the unsung heroes. These are the people who are making this organisation tick. They're the people who are facing the customer a lot of the time. It's amazing how many leaders don't actually see customers from one day to the next. So these are the people who are actually representing your business, your brand, and living that brand, living your brand values or your corporate values, is a really important message to get across. And some of the stories that we've heard, I mean, there are— I don't even know where to start with some of the stories we've heard, but we've worked with businesses where there are stories that make you cry, there are stories that make you laugh hysterically, but these are the stories that you remember, of course, and these are the stories that get repeated. So you can use those stories as, or like, almost like mini Trojan horses to change people's behavior, because if Juan can do it, then so can I. And they can be incredibly memorable and Yes, many a time I've told the old story to a hard-nosed journalist and reduced them to tears just to prove the point.

That doesn't happen very often.

I have a knack.

Does it? Tell me about a success. Tell me about a project you've worked on as the storytellers where it's been amazingly successful.

There are a lot of them. I mean, over 15 years, you can imagine we've we've, we really have seen some amazing successes. I think the most, one of the most recent successes has been from a client who's very dear to our hearts called Kerry Foods, which is an Irish group, but Kerry Foods is the one of their subsidiaries. And their program, or rather their engagements initiative What they've actually done in service of the narrative that we created with them has won them multiple awards. The latest was last week, but they won the Personnel Today Awards of the Year. They have had the most phenomenal success in engaging their, their audience, their, their people, and really putting their people at the heart of everything that they do. So we created the story with them at a point in time where they needed to engage their people in their strategy, vision, and values, or their purpose, vision, and values rather. And they knew that just by sort of undertaking a show-and-tell was not going to engage people emotionally. So they called us, and we had worked with the HR director in a previous life, and we created the most wonderful story which is very vibrant and colorful. It was a foodscape. We actually physically built this foodscape out of real food. We made a film which depicted a group of pioneers— they've always seen themselves as pioneers of the food industry— sort of battling through the forest of broccoli and rowing up the river of butter and hacking their way through cheddar gorge. It was, it was really very imaginative, and their values sat— there happened to be 6 of them, and so they sat in this 6-chapter narrative. What made the difference for Kerry Foods was their absolute determination that this story was going to live. It wasn't just going to become another piece of corporate rhetoric that would sit on the shelf and get all dusty. So what they actually did was they introduced a number of initiatives to bring the story to life, one of which was called Trailblazers— again, an award-winning initiative that invited everyone in the organization to come up with ideas for, you know, innovation effectively from your people. That it was all about the nutrition of tomorrow The Food of Tomorrow, and it was a bit of a Dragon's Den type style initiative which they ran over a course of many weeks, whittling down the, the, the, as a competition to a finalist, and it just created a real sense of engagement. It meant that everyone felt involved and they could see that what they were being asked to do directly related back to this narrative of collaboration and innovation and being the pioneers of tomorrow. They realigned their recruitment strategy. The leaders of the organization, who I think had not been celebrated necessarily as the, the sort of ultimate communication gurus, they really took this story on board and and wholeheartedly supported and went out and actually engaged their teams in it. It was just an incredible success, and everything that Kerry Foods does now fits in some way, shape, or form back to that story, and if it doesn't fit, they don't do it. So it's, it's actually moved them from a financial performance point of view in a, in a positive direction. It's has created huge shifts in engagement, and I think, as I said, they've won and they've been recognized for it over, you know, over many months now. And I would say that their internal communications team and their HR team have really worked really closely together to make this happen, and it's just been a wonderful success.

It's lovely to have that very consistent north star that everything points towards? Because it's not just about— because it's not just about stories, it is about, as you say, taking initiatives like a Dragon's Den, but actually weaving initiative and pioneering and food and whatever else their values are through that as well, weaving that through everything.

Well, the story won't be credible if you are not realigning your processes, your systems, your initiatives to the story. So for example, if in the story you're talking about the kind of behaviours you expect to see of the organisation and then your performance management process is driving a completely different set of behaviours, it will make the story not credible. So you do need to look at the bigger picture and to see what have we got going on in the organisation organisation, and how can we align what we're doing with the organisation to make sure that it fits with the story, so the story remains relevant, it remains true, and it's something that people are going to continue to believe in, because only if they believe in it will they actually be prepared to change, and that's gold dust.

And I think on that bombshell, as they say on Top Gear, I think we might leave it there. It's been a really interesting conversation. I hope the listeners will get a lot of things from this. Alice Nessie, it's been a pleasure talking to you. Thanks very much for having me.

Thank you very much.

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