Stories That Stick: How Storytelling Can Captivate Customers, Influence Audiences, and Transform Your Business

Part of the hesitation with being vulnerable in the workplace may stem from
how people believe they will be perceived in those vulnerable moments. Brown

---

says that sometimes people equate vulnerability with weakness,
7
 but it’s actually
the opposite. Running a successful business means making yourself vulnerable
to risk, ridicule, even failure as you take chances—chances on expanding the
business, on making that big purchase.
Vulnerability also plays an important role when it comes to interacting with
your employees. In her research, Brown found the root of social connection lies
in vulnerability. When we’re vulnerable in the workplace, we connect on a
human level, increasing trust among leadership and employees, encouraging the
sharing of ideas, and increasing loyalty.
8
Fortunately, the purpose story is the perfect place to open up emotionally and
get vulnerable. And you don’t have to feel tied to telling a story from within the
workplace. One of the most exciting freedoms of the purpose story is the
opportunity to seek stories outside the walls of your company and the
responsibilities of your role. Have a transformational moment while at
sleepaway camp? Fair game. Learn an important lesson from the fallout of a
friendship? A viable option. Not only does this give you endless purpose story
material, choosing stories beyond the office gives your team the chance to
connect with you as a human, not just as a corporate figure, which, unless you
actually are a robot, is a very good thing.
A Moment
Like the previous two story types, your purpose story will be more
compelling if it includes a specific moment in time. This can be accomplished by
including something as specific as a place or a time the audience can picture,
like sitting in the bleachers watching a water polo game.
I find, with purpose stories in particular, the moment often coincides with the
explosion. It’s the split second before a realization. It’s the crossover point
between the normal, where things had been moving along as they usually do,
and the moment when things suddenly change. You learn a lesson. You gain a
new perspective. You enter the new normal.
That being said, although the moment may occur in a split second in real life,
in the story it should feel a little bit like slow motion. Where you zoom way in
and take your time.
For example, I hosted a workshop at an offsite retreat for a group of
executives. They were working on a variety of story types, and one was a
purpose story about finding a balance in work and life. A woman shared a story

---

of realizing how much time she was missing with her kids. But she didn’t just
say, “I realized how much time I was missing with my kids.” Instead, she
expertly included the moment component by painting the exact picture of the
realization: “I’ll never forget it. I was in my car, hands on the steering wheel,
driving down the freeway, thirty minutes into my one-hour commute, and I
realized, this drive has stolen too many hours from me and my family.” When
her story was done and the group debriefed what worked about the story,
everyone agreed that moment in the car stood out and drew them in.
Specific Details
The success of a purpose story hinges on the leader’s ability to make a story
that is technically about him or her feel like a story that’s about the audience.
With that in mind, whenever possible, build in audience universal truths. Details,
situations, emotions you know the majority of your audience is familiar with.
The vice president of the tech company knew that many of the people in his
audience had or have had teenagers in their home. If they were not a parent,
everyone in the room had been a teenager at some point and could relate. In
Michael’s story, he knew the room had stood at the crossroads of wanting to
quit; in fact, many of them were standing there at that moment as he was talking.
I’ve used details as specific as the My Little Pony dream castle in one of my
stories, knowing my audience had been raised in the eighties and nineties and
would remember the cherished toy. I once used the shoe brand Mootsie Tootsie,
knowing that a particular audience would be mostly Gen Y females.
In each instance, the use of specific details helps blur the lines between the
identifiable character (the leader) and the audience until they become one and
the same. And in that moment, your purpose becomes their purpose.
Purpose Stories and the Last Company Culture Frontier
In 2010, a psychologist at Emory University set out to determine what made
emotionally healthy, happy kids and administered a test to elementary students
in an effort to reveal some insight.
9
The test was comprised of twenty simple
yes-or-no questions designed to measure how much of their family history each
student knew.
Do you know where your grandparents grew up?

---

Do you know where your mom and dad went to high school?
Do you know where your parents met?
Do you know an illness or something really terrible that happened in your
family?
Do you know the story of your birth?
The results of the study were astonishing. The more the child knew about
their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives and the
higher their self-esteem. The “Do You Know?” scale turned out to be the best
single predictor of children’s emotional health and happiness.
Our team couldn’t help but wonder if the same could be true for
organizations. Was it possible the more team members knew about their leaders
and the stories of the company, the more connected they would feel to the
organization as a whole? So we tested it.
We administered a national survey to one thousand full-time US employees
ranging from eighteen years old to sixty-five years old to see what they knew
about their company’s stories and, for those who did know stories about their
company, if that made a difference in their overall job satisfaction. For example,
the survey asked questions like the following:
Do you know the story of how the company you work for started/came to
be?
Do you know if the company you work for has ever faced challenges or
setbacks in its history?
Our results revealed that those participants who answered yes to those two
questions were 40 percent more likely to affirm “the work we do at the company
makes a difference in the world.”
A little storytelling can go a long way in driving purpose in a company, and
that sense of purpose is what leads to lasting success. The purpose story helps
your team understand that what they do matters. There’s a chance the woman
writing code at her bedroom desk three time zones away doesn’t know she’s an
important piece to what you’re all trying to do, and the guy at the desk three
cubicles away probably doesn’t either. None of them may realize they’re part of
something bigger, something important, something with a powerful 
why
. And
they need to.
It’s easy to think of customers and investors as the only people you need to
sell to. They’re the ones whose attention you need to grab, who you need to
influence, who you need to transform. But as a leader, you’re facing the exact
same job with your people. If you can’t engage them and influence them, you

---

can’t do much of anything except write checks and hope people do enough to
justify them.
It’s a daily battle. One that, if you’re not already fighting it, you’re losing.
The question is, are you telling the right stories?
We’d like to believe that it’s open floor plans or employee manuals or staff
basketball courts or kombucha and beer on tap that establishes a company
culture, because then all we’d have to do is a little remodeling and keg
installation and we’d be set. But it is actually the intentional and painstaking
commitment to storytelling that builds and sustains culture.
Culture is a collection of stories that align and inspire. Employees feel more
connected and happier when they know about the history of their company. The
ups, the downs, and where it all started. More importantly, when they know how
the company faced adversity and lived to tell about it, they know the company
can weather the storm.
These stories—this sense of history—are the same for employees as it is for
families who tell their origin stories to their kids. Knowing their culture gives
employees a sense of belonging.
Get your stories right, and you’re golden. Get your stories wrong, and the
bridges to maintaining your people are as wobbly as the ones that permeate
children’s playgrounds and make your footing feel unsure and your grounding
shaky.
Does your team know how the company was founded? The biggest account
landed? The biggest failures? The greatest trials and triumphs, catastrophes and
comebacks?
When the day-to-day of coming to work becomes tedious, when your team
misses a goal, when your organization faces adversity (which it will), do your
people know they are a part of something bigger?
If you tell your stories, they will.
In Sickness and In Health
When times are good, a purpose story can drive a business to better performance
through better culture. When times are tough, like they were for Michael’s
company, it can mean nothing short of survival. Regardless of the times, a
purpose story is one anyone can tell—especially you. And often.
Of course, that is not true for all stories. There are some stories you cannot

---

tell. That’s what the next chapter is about.

---

CHAPTER SEVEN
The Customer Story