Fighting the good fight, for the people

Ryan McCarthy CA is a winner in management, as well as in the boxing ring. Acuity asked him for his formula for creating good workplace culture and bringing out the best in people.

BEFORE STEPPING into the ring for his first boxing fight, Ryan McCarthy CA was more nervous than he’d been in his entire life.

For nine months he had been training and his goal was to win. But it was more than that. He wanted to show “the best version” of himself “…in an incredibly confronting situation”.

That was back in 2012 when McCarthy, financial controller at leading medical technology company Stryker, was finishing an emerging leaders programme. While his peers chose to stretch themselves by building houses in Fiji or trekking to Everest Base Camp, he committed to two boxing matches. Why boxing?

“When you’re preparing for fights and you are in the ring, you have to be there 100%. It’s very  rare that in ordinary life you are truly present in every fibre of your being and I found boxing did that for me. I was then able to bring that back into my work.”

Aside from the hours of training, McCarthy needed to master the technical element of the sport. Mental courage was required.

“You don’t know if you are going to get your head punched in,” he says, “so I was pretty excited when I won. It was a perfect measurement of success.

“As accountants, a lot of what we do is supporting other people. We give advice, we keep control of a business, but it is typically someone else’s big moment when they hit their number. Whereas when I won that fight, it was incredibly primal, and very satisfying. It was my moment.”

Working well

Since joining Stryker seven years ago, McCarthy has advanced smartly up the ranks and has just become managing director at Stryker Medical.

It’s probably no coincidence that in May 2016 he received a Gallup award as a Global Great Manager finalist at a Gallup conference in Nebraska. Over two million participants enter into the award and according to Gallup, the ten finalists have to be consistently in the 90th percentile or above in overall engagement and to have shown high levels of consistent performance. On the awards night McCarthy wasn’t nervous.

“I just felt incredible peace. I had already won when I worked at an organisation where people care about me so much that they had done the nomination for me. There was no pressure to come first in the world.”

Last year Stryker was voted the second best place to work in Australia in the Great Place to Work awards. McCarthy puts this down to top-down policies, combined with a detailed multi-year plan initiated in 2014 and employees “knowing how their performance connects to that plan”.

It helps that healthcare is a thriving industry and while other businesses face disruption, Stryker is working to become the disrupter. In 2015, for example, they launched an orthopaedic robot.

Globally, Stryker is a Fortune 500 company with 36 years of uninterrupted growth and AUD $13 billion in revenue; in Australia and New Zealand there are around 500 employees with AUD $500m revenue.

Previously the Australian business had used some of the global Stryker leadership programmes, but in recent years, it has created equivalent local programs. The result: employee engagement has gone up year on year.

In practice, this means that “a work friendship at Stryker is somewhere between a best friend and a colleague,” says McCarthy. In November, he heard how a team member, Asmah, was working late one night. It was 7pm and a colleague, Kyle, asked her if she was going to be leaving soon. When Asmah said she was going to work for another 30 minutes, Kyle offered to sit with her and help her finish her work.

“Kyle is in a different team,” explains McCarthy. “Instead of him just leaving, he stopped to help Asmah so she could leave earlier. There was nothing in it for him but this is common at Stryker: the sense that we are all in it together.

“Culture is the sum of all the little things you do and the big things. [It’s also about] being purposeful about your people development, your accountability processes, your talent management… this is ten years’ worth of investment.”

And underpinning it all is the Gallup strengths-based approach that has been embedded in Stryker for more than 30 years.

Gallup strengths-leadership approach McCarthy is passionate about the efficacy of Gallup’s strengths-based process. When he was at the Gallup conference in Nebraska, many people stopped and asked him his “magic formula” for being a good manager. He told them that he selects the best talent, focuses that talent on what people are naturally good at, and then helps them turn that talent into a strength. As a leader, his role is “to ensure the individual has the opportunity to use those strengths every day in an engaging environment”.

But to build good teams, you first need to recruit the right people. Stryker is one of the hardest places in the world to get a job, he says.

“You don’t come without six interviews.”

Gallup first interviews any potential candidate and measures his or her profile with the level of talent required.

“I’ve seen IQ tests, profiles and lots of different ways of doing recruitment,” he says. “I’ve never come across anything as accurate as Gallup. It’s uncanny.”

Once employed, McCarthy then works on actively developing people so they can see a better future for themselves. For this he adopts Gallup’s 34 strengths framework. Part of the process is to also become “more aware of your weaknesses, which we call derailers”. These derailers can include a person’s dominant strength when it gets in the way of what a person is actually trying to achieve. “A lady in my team was very competitive,” he explains.

“So even though competition was very motivating, it was also a derailer because she was competitive with other people in her team. We then worked with her to help her redefine what she was competitive with, so instead of competing with the team, it could be about competing for an outcome.”

 

Feedback hurts – but works

McCarthy keeps himself accountable with “truthful feedback”. Eighteen months into working at Stryker, he had a 360-degree review “delivered with an iron bar”. McCarthy admits that what hurt the most was being told he was too focused on the outcome and not enough on the team. “I can move too fast, and leave people behind.”

Although he was frustrated at hearing the feedback, in hindsight it allowed him to become more self-aware.

“The further you go up in your career, the less truth you hear. You get into this spiral of thinking that you are incredibly successful and everyone else around you is not. Whereas keeping yourself grounded and having relationships that are good enough, that people care enough to tell you the truth, that’s the ultimate accountability.”

These days McCarthy actively seeks out feedback.

“Just recently  I had a one-on-one meeting with Richard Barber, commercial manager, and I kept asking him until he told me, ‘you can be very judging of people’. I felt fine with that. I am aware of it.”

So how can chartered accountants become the best managers that they can be?

“As an industry we need to be investing more in CAs getting better people leadership training and learning more relationship skills. A chartered accountant who has strong relationships and technical expertise  will be in far more conversations in a business and can add a lot more value.”

He’s also an advocate of CAs taking a proactive role in keeping businesses ethical and transparent.

“As a professional body we’ve got to continue to fight for public policy that is right for Australia and New Zealand. Taxation is a great example of where Chartered Accountants ANZ can make a big difference. Our voice needs to be clear and active.”

And his advice to other chartered accountants?

“Focus relentlessly on your own development. If you’re not fighting to develop yourself, you’re not going to win in the long term.”

As for McCarthy, he credits much of his success to his family. The only person more nervous than him at his first boxing fight was his wife, Sonja. “My family is my biggest support. They seem to believe that I can do anything. Knowing that just makes me feel like I can.”

Download the article PDF: Fighting the good fight, for the people

Seven female leaders share their stories of success

Seven successful female leaders on how they achieved their success and how other women can break down any door.

TEN YEARS AGO a female partner of one of the top four professional service firms was invited to attend a dinner celebrating her new partnership. When she arrived, she was refused entry as it was being held at a gentleman’s club.

On seeing her, a senior male partner at the same firm, simply said, “unlucky”, and walked right in. In 2016, the widespread recognition that gender diversity increases productivity and improves the bottom line means that there is an industry-wide commitment to increase the number of women in senior management roles. Here, seven senior female leaders give their hard-won advice on how women can break down doors.

Elizabeth Broderick, former Sex Discrimination Commissioner 2007-2015. Overall 2014 winner of the 100 Women of Influence Awards.

In developing the Male Champions of Change strategy, Elizabeth Broderick believes that our fundamental concept of work needs to be reimagined. “Let’s put talent at the centre and let work wrap around that.”

Once flexibility becomes the starting point the whole conversation changes, says Broderick, who describes the introduction of the all-roles flex initiative as “running like a wildfire” across diverse industries.

Broderick is convinced that the best way to promote gender diversity is the better sharing of paid and unpaid work between men and women.

“If you have more male managers taking primary parental leave this shifts the whole stereotype. That’s what will really help women advance because it sends a strong cultural message that you can be a serious player at work and be a father, whereas any number of women with young children doing that will not change corporate culture.”

In 2001, Broderick was the first partner at law firm Blake Dawson (now Ashurst) to go part time. She had two young children and her mother was dying of leukaemia, and her employer gave her full support.

This flexibility “buys loyalty in a way that money never can”, she says.

Her advice to younger women is to be solution focused. “There are enough people who can tell you what the problem is, not enough people who can explain creatively the solution.”

Theresa Gattung, formerly CEO of Telecom. The first woman to run a large New Zealand public company. Co-founded My Food Bag in 2013.

In the five years since Theresa Gattung has chaired AIA Insurance she’s seen a transformation from “no women on the board and in senior management to half-half”, a trend she sees across the financial services sector in Australia and New Zealand. Gattung believes that what you do is so much more important than what you say. As well as senior women helping bring others through, “you need a mixture of women. Some who’ve got kids, some who haven’t… Diversity within diversity.”

While governance on boards “is fine” it’s also about putting capital to work. “Some men do choose just to do boards but many do things that involve investing money, taking risks, building businesses. I think women tend to be less prepared to do that.”

In part that’s because the image of entrepreneurs is still male. Stepping up as an entrepreneurial role model herself, Gattung co-launched her new business My Food Bag two years ago which now turns over A$60m a year. The fail fast mentality, where you own the learning and move on, is key to success, she says.

Gattung admits she’s always “approached life as a sprint not a marathon”. She now recognises that: “Life is a very long time. You’ve got time to do everything, just not all the same week, though.”

Deanne Stewart, CEO of Metlife Insurance, with 20 years of experience in the financial services sector in Australia and internationally 

After 11 years working in London and New York, Deanne Stewart was surprised at how blokey Australian corporate culture was when she returned in 2007.

“Many people talked about this myopic, quarterly-return, aggressive, cost-cutting type of working environment; some even used the word toxic.”

This determined the next steps in her career path.

“I wanted to run a company and create an environment which is fun and caring but where you’re very clear about your goals and what high performance looks like.”

Fast-forward and Feldman has a leadership team handpicked for its diversity. The result: a turnaround in culture and more innovation.

Stewart thinks that for women to attain and sustain senior roles, there needs to be a 50/50 split at home, not just at work. What’s crucial are “constant conversations” with your partner.

In the workplace it’s not only about doing a good job.

“You’ve got to have an understanding of the commercial acumen and the P&L of a company.”

It’s also about actively finding sponsors as they “are sitting around tables determining succession planning”.

Lastly, Stewart urges women to be courageous in their career choices.

Terri Janke, lawyer and founder of Terri Janke and Company. Finalist in Telstra NSW Business Women’s Awards 2015

Terri Janke encourages younger women to become clear on their personal values and align their career with them and spend time writing out goals.

Once you’ve strategically looked at your path and managed the risk, you need resilience. Regular training helps, as do formal and informal mentors.

Janke has found her board positions helpful in learning financial skills and advancing her position as a director.

“I get to see how other board members think strategically. These people are better than an MBA especially when dealing with a crisis.”

Seeing firsthand how bigger businesses work has had a direct “flow on effect” in her own business while widening her client base.

As an Indigenous woman, she finds the biggest challenge is getting pigeonholed.

“I always felt I had to try even harder to prove myself. You feel you have to overcompensate so it’s been about developing that confidence and not doubting myself for being Indigenous and for being a that. Persistence is the thing.”

Kerry Doyle, CEO of Heart Foundation, recipient of Public Service Medal for Services to Science and Medical Research 

As a mother of five, working in a male-dominated profession, Kerry Doyle says that wherever you are, find a champion.

“It’s critical for some of those champions to be men. You’ve also got to find role models, somebody who looks like you that you can believe you can be.”

And if you’re the only woman?

“Don’t be afraid to be a pioneer.”

Doyle says when she started out it was almost impossible for employers “to conceive of someone with a large family having a career”. She doesn’t like to say that her “partner has been supportive, it sounds like they are doing us a favour. My time is as equal to his.”

To get ahead, she urges women to “be very self-aware”, gain experience in public speaking and presentation; and develop a virtual network through LinkedIn, Twitter with like-minded women.

“Back yourself. If you’re offered an opportunity, take the risk.”

Jane Halton, Federal Department of Finance secretary, former secretary of the Department of Health and the first woman to hold both these roles

Jane Halton didn’t start out thinking she was going to be a secretary of a department, but once in “striking distance” she thought she could do those jobs “as well as the chaps” in charge.

“You always want to work with someone from whom you will learn — somebody who is different to yourself and looks to be an expert.”

And when things go wrong, don’t crumple at the first knock.

“Often it’s not the making of the mistakes, it’s how you recover and learn that will be most formative. When I’m recruiting, theory is fine, but I want people who have had their feet in the fire and continued to walk afterwards.”

Halton says that even though she loves her work, her life isn’t defined by it.

“When I am home, I am at home.”

She likes to reflect on the day, how it’s gone and could have gone better. Her policy is always to ask if she doesn’t understand, to communicate, and to be inclusive in her conversations.

“I don’t think you can have a dialogue about a genuinely equal relationship between men and women if you don’t have men as part of that conversation.”

Norah Barlow, formerly the CEO of Summerset Group Holdings Limited, which became a NZX 50 company

Norah Barlow says that in her career, she hasn’t had other women around at all: “The people I’ve looked up to, my peers and my bosses, have always been men but I’ve never felt judged.”

When she was on the NZX 50 Index, she was the sole female CEO.

She never “pretends to be anybody” other than who she is. She thinks that too often women try and emulate men.

“Women in general are more consultative, wanting to make decisions from a big base of information, but men are more inclined to be quite speedy and make their decisions off limited information. Women try and act like that, instead of adhering to their natural principles.”

Whatever you do, she says: “think and act like you are in management from early on. Never think that a job is beneath you. Get into what you are doing as if you own it, as if you are it, then people respect what you are doing.”•

Download the article PDF: Seven female leaders share their stories of success

How stories transform company culture

Happy New Year to you all! It’s hard to believe it’s already February. Despite everything that is going on in the world and I think you’d agree, things can feel pretty crazy right now, the stories we tell ourselves and others are more important than ever. During this year on my Wordstruck blog I’m going to be exploring and explaining how you can use stories to create change in your life and in your organisation.

There are three parts to how stories work in business:

  • Storytelling
  • Story triggering
  • Story listening

In order to lead persuasively, whether you are leading an entire company or a team of three, or simply yourself, you need to know how all three work together.

When I coach leaders and CEOs one-to-one we start with storytelling. Once they’ve mastered the four story patterns that we use as part of the Storytelling for Leaders program™,  they are ready to delve deeper into the process.

We can move to using stories to create and shape the culture of an organisation. This is the start of a new and exciting phase. This marks the shift from using stories to communicate to using stories to influence and transform work culture.

So what is story-triggering?
It’s a way to create or amplify the culture you want. As a leader, your actions can trigger stories that are then re-told — both positively and negatively. This is the core concept of story-triggering. It is the equivalent of ‘walk the talk’. If there is misalignment between what you say and what you do, people around you will notice. As American author and businessman, Stephen R. Covey says, ‘You can’t talk your way out of what you’ve behaved yourself into.’

Now, over to you:
1.    Can you think of a time when you triggered a positive story in your organisation? What was the impact?

2.    Can you think of a time when, without realising, you may have triggered a negative story? With hindsight, what could you have done differently?

3.    What change do you want to affect this year? What is one thing you can do, so people repeat that positive story of change?

Look forward to hearing your thoughts!

How stories improve employee engagement

Welcome to the relaunch of Wordstruck! This is where you can find stories that can help you change how you engage at work. Stories that inspire, persuade and make a difference.

It’s well known that employee engagement is down. I mean really down. A recent Gallup poll put 76% — that’s  8.74M Australian workers — who are not engaged in their job. One solution: use stories in your workplace to communicate what you’re telling your team.

In August I ran a workshop for an IT group in a resource company. Beforehand I was told that the participants were more likely to be introverted and would find telling stories a challenge. Actually, the group couldn’t wait to get started. It reminded me that it’s easy for all of us to have assumptions and to always question those before you meet someone.

During the workshop I asked people to think about a Connection story.This is what you use when you’re first meeting someone or to introduce a presentation. It’s a way to establish rapport and trust quickly. It’s much more effective than just saying who you are and what you do. In the workplace, you make sure that it has a business or relevance point. This keeps it focused and relevant.

One of the participants in the group said that he preferred using numbers and stats rather than using stories. ‘That’s my style and it works for me.’ So, when I asked people to think about a connection story, I was surprised when he raised his hand.

He went on to tell the group how important it is to set goals. ‘I like to play and coach cricket. I was playing against a team a couple of years ago. It was really hot and I could hardly run the length of the pitch. Back then I weighed 150 kilos. I decided I had to change and hired a personal trainer. Together we set goals and eight months later I’d lost 40 kilos and then I went to lose some more. I know that if you are accountable to someone it really works and it’s helped me turn things around.’

The rest of the group went quiet as he talked. At the end, his manager said, ‘I never knew that about you.’ Someone else said, ‘That was brave to tell us that.’

That one story shifted the whole group. It gave other people permission to speak up and it created a deeper sense of connection between everyone in the room.

Now, that’s how you get better engagement.

Actions always speak louder than words

To be a leader who people remember and who triggers stories, is to be a leader who acts.

Chris Beer, former CEO of Luxottica in the Asia Pacific Region, and now CEO at Performance Hub, was well aware of this. In 2012 he became increasingly concerned about the appalling statistics of Indigenous eye health in Australia. Six more Indigenous Australians suffer blindness and are 12 times more likely to have blinding cataracts than non-Indigenous Australians.

‘I kept asking questions. Australia being a lucky country, why do we have third world eye health in remote Indigenous communities? It was unacceptable to me.’

Beer wanted all Australians to have the same eye health care as his children in Sydney. He launched OneSight, Luxottica’s global eye health charity program in Australia with a particular focus on Indigenous eye-health. .

What started as a personal challenge, he admits, became ‘an obsession.’ He wanted to get his hands dirty, to get involved and made sure he sat on the advisory board, gave up his time to travel to remote communities and told his staff. ‘Don’t just listen to what I say but look at what I do.’

Since the program started in 2012, over 500 Luxottica staff across all departments have got involved — and now it binds the organisation. Beer says, ‘It’s become a deep and rich part of the DNA of our organisation.’

When they first started, some of the Indigenous elders were sceptical. Beer went to Mornington Island and remembers one gentleman saying,‘“We love what you want to do but we know that you won’t stick it out. Bosses turn up, there are photo opportunities and 12 months later you disappear.” After year two, it was greatly appreciated that we’d returned.’

For Beer he’s had to learn patience. ‘When I used to run Luxottica in South Africa, one day I was a bit impatient and one of the team, said to me, “Chris, do you know how to eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”’

So what can you do in the last two weeks before pre-Christmas sign off to do something memorable?

To read more about what Luxottica and other companies are doing in Indigenous communities, read the full Acuity article here.

How unconscious bias affects us all

The hottest phrase on people’s lips at the moment is unconscious bias. I’ve been speaking to CEOs in insurance, professional services, in start-ups and in government, and they are all saying that to improve gender diversity we need to address our unconscious biases.

Google kicked off this trend in May 2014 when it published its woeful diversity statistics and pledged to do better. Since then, writes Ellen Huet, in Forbes, the search giant has put its 50,000+ workforce ‘through workshops on how to understand and stop unconscious bias, which is the set of deep-in-the-brain automatic preferences that almost all humans have.’

Facebook has followed along with countless other corporates worldwide. Even though these workshops can help in showing up our prejudices, experts in the field worry that there isn’t enough follow-through to make long-term change.

At Anecdotewe know that when we run Storytelling for Leadersworkshops, one day isn’t enough. That’s why we have a six-month ongoing program to help embed the changes.

We also know stories can shift entrenched views. Unlike an argument which is a push factor, stories are a pull factor. When we argue with someone and give evidence to prove a point, it can actually trigger someone’s confirmation bias. This means they believe their viewpoint even more strongly — making it harder to win them over.

Now, there are literally dozens of different biasesthat we can have which prevents us thinking or perceiving rationally. Even though our brains are powerful machines, all humans make errors in processing information. This means that when we meet someone for the first time — man / woman; black / white; abled / disabled — we can quickly come to a misguided conclusion about that individual. Canadian bioethicist and futurist, George P. Dvorskyspells out the 12 common biases in more detail.

HOW TO USE STORIES TO CHALLENGE UNCONSCIOUS BIAS
So, what fascinates me, is how we can use stories to effectively overcome our biases. This was illustrated perfectly last month when I went to a Women in Leadership lunch at the American Chamber of Commerce. On the panel, Dana Feldman, Head of Enterprise Sales Solutions at LinkedIn was describing how they are addressing gender diversity in the Sydney office.

I’m paraphrasing here. Feldman described how, at a casual lunchtime group for men and women, they addressed unconscious bias. After the meeting one of the men went to do an interview with a new job applicant for a sales role. It was a female applicant and at the end of the interview the male LinkedIn employee felt that she wasn’t right for the role; on his feedback form, he wrote that ‘she was too aggressive.’

He went to the recruiting officer and dropped off the form. As he got in the lift to go back to his desk, he had one of those Ah-ah moments. He asked himself, would he have had written that if it had been a man? No, he probably wouldn’t. He turned around, went back down the lift and changed what he’d written on the form.

The female applicant went through to the next round of interviews. Not only that, she got the job.

For me, this is a stunning example of how powerful unconscious bias training can be — but also how a story in so few words can illustrate this. And, of course, how it has the potential to change lives.

Over to you. How can we use story to overcome our unconscious bias — and to really affect change?

How to be an effective leader in a team

A fortnight ago I met up with Tony Tow, General Manager of 40K Globe,  an Australian organisation striving to train thousands of young Australians in social entrepreneurship. Tow, 27, knows how important it is to have a strong team around him. He not only manages staff in Australia but also in India and ‘things can get lost in translation.’

I’d initially spoken to Tow in connection with an article for Acuity magazine. I was struck by his enthusiasm and ‘can-do’ attitude. Tow embodies that terrific Gen Y approach to work. That you have to be willing to try new approaches and that work must have meaning. Otherwise, why do it?

Initially Tow followed a traditional chartered accountant’s path working for Deloitte. Then he heard about 40K and the next thing he knew, he was on a plane to India. Three years later, in 2013, he was hired as Globe’s first GM.

40K Globe offers a one-month internship to Australian tertiary students in rural India, providing them with an immersive village-based experience while teaching them social business skills.

He admitted that he was pretty young to be entering management and he’s still trying to find his style. ‘A one-size-fits-all doesn’t work,’ he told me. ‘It’s a one-size-fits one model. It’s figuring out what motivates and excites different team leaders. I think you need to spend time with each staff deeply and intimately.’ It’s also about having regular staff meetings — both with his Sydney team and with his Bengaluru-based team.

USING STORIES IN STAFF MEETINGS
I suggested that he try starting his weekly meetings with a little personal anecdote. So often, before a meeting starts (in person or via Skype), everyone is chatting and there’s an ease among the group. Then, when the meeting begins, people fall silent. Instead of a natural flow, the leader is telling — or in some cases — broadcasting. Now, sometimes this is exactly what’s needed.

But other times, what works better is a feedback-loop between leader and team. A little story triggers other team members to respond — perhaps with their own story — and it breaks down barriers. And the quickest way to get there and avoid that awkward silence, is to use a story.

HOW TO MAKE YOUR STORIES RELEVANT
1. Think of the point of the story. What is the relevance statement or business point? Start there and then use the story to show what you mean.
2. Exact details. Be as specific as you can so people will remember what you’ve said.
3. Keep it brief and think of it as an introduction to kick off the discussion.
4. Make it personal (within the context of your workplace).
5. Use word-pictures. These are images that people can visualise.

Since Tow started using this approach, it’s been working well and his team have ‘taken the cue’. So what are his stories? ‘A whole range of things – I’ve spoken about camping trips and other shenanigans/happenings on the weekend.’

Not only can this create more meaningful engagement in a team, it’s also an easy way to practise using narrative in your workplace. In time, it will become second nature. Whether in business or life, we are all looking for connection and stories are the quickest way to get there.

To read more about Tony Tow and the work he’s doing at 40K, read the full Acuity article here.

How to communicate better at work

Have you ever had that experience when you’re talking to someone and their eyes glaze over? Or you’re presenting to your team and you see people shuffle their papers, or worse still, glance down at their watch? It’s not a good feeling but it can happen to all of us.

It’s at that moment that you need to have a couple of short stories or little anecdotes to get your audience back to focusing on you.

At a recent Anecdote workshop, a woman was describing how small actions can make a difference. She was saying that she’d arranged to meet with her manager. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him come over and sit next to her. She said, ‘I really valued that and quite frankly not many GM’s do it.’

Now that tiny snippet says a lot — and in few words. It gives an insight into work culture and suggests a simple way to improve behavioural engagement. 12 months after this employee had shared her experience, other staff were saying the same thing. ‘You know what? When I see my GM, they come round and sit next to me.’ 

The best way to remember this sort of anecdote or mini-story is to start a STORY BANK. Whenever I hear something, either told to me or heard on the radio or television, I make a few notes in my story bank.

Like anything, storytelling takes practise. Even the so-called ‘natural storyteller’ would have practised his or her best ones in front of the mirror.

7 WAYS TO BECOME A BETTER STORYTELLER

1. Create your own story bank. Choose your medium. A notebook for those who like pen and paper. An App like  Evernote  for those who want to sync their stories across different devices. I use both.

2. Make notes as soon as you can to get down the gist of the event. When you do, look for the key moments or turning points.

3. If you can, jot down any sensory details. If it is about you, how were you feeling? Anchor the experience in your body.

4. Give it a title. This helps recall.

5. If you know them, make a note of people’s names, the name of the company, any job titles. (In the case above I didn’t have them so for me that’s an example of an anecdote rather than a full blown story.)

6. Work out the ‘Most Important Thing’ — or MIT — of the story. This is the point of the story. Sometimes one story can have several different points and can be adapted to suit the moment.

7. Practise, practise, practise. As a writer I know how important it is to have a ‘writing buddy’ who can encourage me when I’m working on a new book. I also have a ‘story buddy’ who I practise my new stories on. And don’t be worried that they change over time… that’s a good indicator of you becoming more comfortable in telling them. And the versatility of a good story.

So over to you. What story can you use in your work today to make sure your message is heard?

Why leaders must take risks

Taking risks and bucking the trend always takes guts. Especially when you are trying to shift the current economic and commercial paradigm.

But everywhere leaders and companies are shifting the dial. In June I went to the Conscious Capitalism conference in Sydney and heard dozens of ways organisations, large and small, are making a difference.

After working in the corporate world for over a decade, James Meldrum and wife Monica knew they wanted another approach when they founded their Melbourne-based organic food company Whole Kids.

The idea for Whole Kids came because they couldn’t find any healthy, tasty and convenient snacks for their family. In their words. ‘Just about everything was full of junk.’

Taking a big gulp, they spent their life savings on starting their business and put their house-buying plans on hold. In 2005 they manufactured the first run of the Whole Kids products. Now you can buy them in Woolworths.

From the start their purpose was ‘way above just making money.’ It was also about being social responsible, operating as a family and giving ‘people room to bring the best self to work.’

Ever since Meldrum had done an MBA in America, he’d followed companies like Ben & Jerry’s and Patagonia. Then three years ago he discovered Conscious Capitalism. ‘That’s when we realised that what we were doing had a name. Conscious Capitalism gave us a language.’

Americans Raj Sisodia and John Mackey, co-CEO of Whole Foods, founded the Conscious Capitalism non-profit movement in 2008.

THE 4 PRINCIPLES OF CONSCIOUS CAPITALISM:
– Higher purpose or the ‘why’ of a company
– Stakeholder orientation that focuses on optimising value for all parties including the environment
– Conscious leadership
– Conscious culture that builds trust and transparency among all stakeholders.

Whole Kids is also one of a handful of Australian companies to have been B Corp certified; this third-party independent assessment audits a company’s social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency.

For Meldrum it’s about trying to make work as fun as possible.

As there are only 10 in the team, career opportunities are limited. Instead Meldrum focuses on how to create professional development opportunities for the staff and offer other meaningful benefits and rewards. On the staff strategy days they spend half the time working through the Conscious Capitalist principles.

‘We look at how can we make people more healthy and more happy. One of the team said she’d really like to run a marathon, she’d never run a race before. We asked how could we help her as a team? We gave her time off to run every week. And then we all joined in. Now the whole team runs.’

So what meaningful risk can you take at work to make a difference?

If you’d like to read more about Conscious Capitalism, read my full article in Acuity.

How to be a leader who inspires

Diane Smith-Gander has had a long and industrious career. Among her many roles today, she is the current chair of ASX-listed Transfield Services, with a market cap of AU $800 million and first elected President of Chief Executive Women (CEW). But when she looks back, it is the time she spent as Westpac’s Zone Chief Manager in country Queensland in 1983, the first time she had a sizeable team and a critical profit and loss role, that she cites as crucial in learning how to be a leader.

At that time Peter Ritchie, former chair of McDonald’s, who was then on the Westpac board, challenged Smith-Gander on what she did when she went into a Westpac branch. ‘Ritchie would go into a McDonald’s store and make and eat something because it demonstrated his trust in the product. I had to workout what the lookalike was,’ she says. ‘It’s how do you do that bit of leadership where you don’t ask anybody to do what you won’t do yourself.’

A LEADER CAN TRIGGER STORIES
Unable to go behind the counter because of the privacy issue in banks, Smith-Gander started by being helpful. If someone’s child had scribbled on a few deposit slips and strewn them about, she’d pick them up and put them in the bin.

Then she would always do a transaction ‘because as you put in your pin number, your entire relationship with the bank pops up. You expect the teller guys to maintain confidentiality for everybody and by being prepared to do that transaction, you show you absolutely trust the system.’

CREATING A MEANINGFUL RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR STAFF
While her actions created a new level of trust between her and her staff, and was undoubtedly a talking point in those country branches, the biggest impact was on Smith-Gander herself. It changed how she viewed and communicated with the branch worker bees. ‘I wanted to know more about them and it changed the way I communicated with them. What you discover is that we’ve got a highly skilled work force, and in many cases people are being asked to do a small percentage of what they are capable of, so I found that I could go into branches and ask for their advice and I’d get a stream of quality ideas based on their experience of the customer and working with the bank.’

This small gesture not only made Smith-Gander approach her leadership role differently, it also unlocked some of the power and knowledge held by her staff.

‘That was a big change for me,’ she continues. ‘To recognise that there is expertise and leadership everywhere in the system.’

So, over the next week what gesture can you do in your work that will make a difference to you — and inspire others?

If you’d like to read more about Diane Smith-Gander and her vision on helping more powerful women leaders, read my article in Acuity.