What Does a Great Story Look Like?

This week I have been writing about the power and value of organizational storytelling for the purpose of achieving sustained image and reputation leadership. But, what does a great story look like?

As someone who began my career in network television news, and then moved to a second career in public relations, storytelling comes second-nature … something I take for granted and wish I were better at doing. So I must stop, and dig down to explain the essential pillars of organizational storytelling.

Storytelling is about life. It is about sharing the human experience, something that is a common thread that tends to touch and connect with something inside each of us … that makes us laugh, or perhaps cry, or maybe just contemplate. We listen to a great story, and we often will retell it to a family member, friend or colleague. 

As I find often during consulting, storytelling can easily be used to communicate vision, concepts, ideas and build consensus for an organization or company.

If you are the storyteller, you must love your story. You must believe in what you are sharing, passionately. You must bring it to life so that the story is right there, living between you and the audience.

A curious image, like a photo, can help … so long as it is closely tied to the story. Here’s a great example of corporate storytelling, using a photo. It was shot by my good friend, Ed Lallo, an Austin-based professional photographer who started his career in the newspaper business … so he knows how to tell a story with his camera. 

There are as many different kinds of stories as colors in the rainbow. Just visit the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee. If you are interested in learning the spectrum of storytelling that might be applied to your organization, that’s the place to hear amazing storytellers and techniques. Yet, each story is about people. Not about concrete roads, buildings, companies, software, products, manufacturing plants or stuff … but about people, most often an individual who has experienced something in life. The story could be about the storyteller.

My old friend and colleague, Michael Deaver, was a masterful storyteller. He said that good storytelling must contain emotional, logical and analytical elements, working together, to capture attention. I agree. The emotional piece touches our hearts; the logical piece just makes sense; and, the analytical part is supported by facts and figures. We can tell a great story that might lack either the logical or analytical pieces but … it’s got to connect with the audience emotionally in order to really work.

Storytelling must also be timely and relevant to what’s happening in the world around us. Otherwise, while it could be a good story, it lacks perspective and context.

• Storytelling has a beginning: “Let me tell you a story …”
• A middle that contains an event or experience, and …
• An ending that wraps up the story with, perhaps, a lesson learned or a surprise twist.

While many people in public relations agree about the value of organizational storytelling, few practice it. There’s got to be a significant paradigm shift, from being overly obsessed with marketing, sales and promotion, and embracing a new style that is more sharing, more conversational, more open, more credible and transparent.

Let’s get something off the table – most press releases (at least 99.9997 percent of them) are not stories. They are sales promotion pieces, and that’s one reason why news releases are so ineffective in today’s world, whether to get the media’s interest or to capture the attention of anyone else. If, on the other hand, news releases were, God forbid, written as legitimate stories, I predict they could be wildly successful. But, they are not.

Techniques for organizational storytelling, and many more elements of contemporary communications leadership are detailed in my new book, “The Media Savvy Leader: Visibility, Influence, and Results in a Competitive World.”