Read and Repeat is Dead – How Collaborative Storytelling Can Build Skills and Elevate Purpose

The days of a story written on the company wall for everyone to repeat are gone. You might have a wonderfully chiseled story that other people should share, but they’re not going to share it unless they can see their part in it – and can tell it as their own. To do this, you need to have a culture of bottom-up storytelling where you’re constantly gathering, shaping and sharing stories from your team members. Done well, these stories will reflect values, impacts, and customer stories that your team members can retell, and that inform the greater story you are telling.

Your CEO may be out there telling stories every day, but it’s just not enough. With collaborative storytelling, you’re building bottom-up and middle-out skills, growing the communications capacity of your team members to speak across channels and convey their critical insights and messages. But you’re also gathering the reasons why people come to work, and what propels them to return each day inspired. Meanwhile, your stories elevate the key moments of insight from your team that can propagate a culture of innovation, meaning and connection.

This will both support your employees to stay and thrive in their work, and also provides you with an endless flow of stories for social media that illuminate the transformations you’re bringing, the values you’re illuminating, and the impacts that you are having that are changing the world. And along the way, you’re working to keep your employees happy and connected, relevant, recognized, and appreciated as they develop new and critical skills that will help them communicate clearly and with purpose.