How to use narrative to avoid disillusioning your workforce.

tl;dr. Business jargon makes sense to leaders but can fail to engage their workforce. A workaround is to use an illustrative narrative.

One benefit fractional executives bring to an organization is the shared experience acquired working with other clients. Whenever I explain this, the word synergy lands on the tip of my tongue and I just can’t bring myself to say it. Synergy is a word that makes me throw up a little in my mouth, and causes cynics to raise and eyebrow and sigh. It’s not alone — there are many business cliches that feel overused.

But I’m going to stick up for these ugly, but potentially accurate phrases. They are used as a shorthand that, when communicating with other business leaders, efficiently share positioning by relying on a shared understanding.

The problem is, when considered by those without that shared knowledge, for example the front line workers in a retail store, these important mission statements can lack relevance.

That’s because those front line workers are listeners and their leaders are tappers.

Elizabeth Newton from Stanford University created a study with two groups of people. The first group tapped on a table the rhythm from a popular song, such as Happy Birthday, and the second group had to guess the song.

The tappers predicted that half of the songs would be guessed correctly, but in reality, only 1 in 40 songs were recognized. It’s an experiment worth trying out yourself. Even knowing how unlikely your listener is to guess the song, you’ll still find it frustrating that such an obvious tune isn’t being recognized.

This phenomenon is called the curse of knowledge. It’s an absence of the beginner’s mind, and a real challenge to create the empathy requried to experience situations through your audience’s lens.

This is why business leaders don’t even blush when they talk about “unlocking shareholder value”. It means little to their front line workers, but to other business leaders, and critically to shareholders, it’s imbued with a knowledge that defines it as shorthand for a collection of company behaviours and priorities designed to actually increase value to its shareholders.

When using such phrases, it’s worth backing them up with narrative — a story that illustrates a concrete example of what it means to fulfill the cliched objective. When you tell the world that the customer is always right, you’re telling your staff that they are less important that customers. Clearly that’s not your intent, so what should you do?

A good example is the story of the Nordstrom customer in Alaska that tried to return car tires, and despite Nordstrom not selling tires, the sales associate called up a tire company to find out how much they were worth and then gave the customer their ‘refund’. This story has come to define Nordstrom’s importance on going above and beyond to make you feel like their favourite customer. And it does so without suggesting staff are less important — instead positioning the sales associate as empowered.

In fact it’s such a frequently cited story that I’ve read multiple times that it’s apocryphal, but it turns out to be true — well, mostly.