Motivate Changes by Listening & Telling Enchanting Digital Stories

Great leaders are great storytellers, envision and communicate a people-centric digital transformation.

At today’s “VUCA” digital dynamic, organizations face both unprecedented opportunities to grow and fierce competitions or great risks to survive. Digital leaders should be able to help people navigate through difficult changes, overcome their challenges; help people achieve their goals and objectives, and more importantly, inspire and motivate changes by listening & telling enchanting and engaging digital stories. The good stories are interesting enough to engage others, meaningful enough to touch the hearts, logical enough to connect the minds, vivid enough to reimagine the future and persuasive enough to rolling vision into the reality.

Tell the information-enriched story: The good story is about selling today for tomorrow. It's important to use data for telling information-based stories. It's also critical to listen to what stakeholders need from data - that makes it far more likely that they'll be truly engaged, and eager in what information can deliver. Information is not "just the facts." It's the business impact of those facts that ensures engagement. Digital leaders should tell the number-savvy stories, which can lead to more persuasive and evidence-based communication. Being informative and always bring a new perspective to the table. Present business-driven KPIs interest executive peers at big table: prepare for both good news and bad news supported by data. Either telling a happy or sad story, they need to have an optimistic attitude. Even thing's not going so well, the positive attitude will fuel the passion and solution either at the top level or casual meeting with staff. When releasing bad news, always prepare for some alternative solutions to invite diverse opinions and welcome collective wisdom.

Listen to the fantastic individual stories of their employees and knit them into a vivid business story: One of the very goals for digitalization is to build a people-centric business. Without people, there are no shows about digital transformation. The communication problem is rampant in the business world. In reality, the majority of employees are not engaged in their work due to the mediocre culture or lack of opportunity to grow and unleash their talent potentials. Digital leaders need to know their people very well. Gaining a deep understanding of people means listening to their stories with empathy, truly knowing who they are, how they think, and who they want to become, not based on their physical identity, but seeing through their character, strength, thought process, learning habit, personality. Communication is probably the world’s biggest problem as many listen to respond and not to think profoundly beforehand. When there is a lack of empathetic communication, it is the lack of trust among workers and management. To make things worse, there are so many things employees will not tell their managers what's in their mind. Figuring out the untold story - what employees are not saying might be the start point to greater retention and a more engaged workforce.

Tell the full story vividly about digital transformation, with shapes and colors, not just part of the plot: The digital transformation is a journey, not just about adopting a couple of technology gadgets or designing fancy interfaces. Digital leaders should tell the full story with the colorful vision, varying opportunities and possibilities, upward challenges and downwards risks. It should embrace creativity, context, cascade, tailor the varying business audience, in order to close cognitive gaps and enforce communication effectiveness. Such stories should be vivid enough to inspire more imagination and innovation; and persuasive enough to encourage comprehensive planning and step-by-step actions. Developing a compelling strategic business case is especially critical when an initiative is difficult to monetize. The story-lines might be developed around themes such as: How the initiative situates the organization within a growing and highly profitable product market niche; how the initiative builds business processes that differentiate the organization from its major competitors; how the initiative restores the organization to competitive parity by reversing erosion in customer loyalty and how the initiative ensures the organization’s compliance with regulatory requirements.

Great leaders are great storytellers, envision and communicate a people-centric digital transformation. They are able to represent themselves, able to persuade and to gain trust and respect. They need to have both thinking and communication skills to be able to represent themselves, persuade and to gain trust & respect; so the audience thinks they are not that far away from reality. Telling the story is about connecting, connecting takes vision, empathy, and creativity to touch hearts and influence minds, and motivate people to take actions for changes.

Posted in: Change Management,Digital Master,Digitalization