Elaine Baran

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The Organization’s Stories

In order to make a good hiring decision, though, it is necessary to do more than elicit the stories of your candidates.  It’s just as important to really understand the organization’s stories.  These fall into several broad categories such as history and founding, how we operate (in the trenches), war stories, great successes and great failures.

Some stories are well-documented, some are passed on only verbally, some just seem to be suspended in the air and some are lost as people and personnel change.   The better these stories are understood, the better they can be matched up with potential candidates.   For insance, companies that basically make decisions ‘by the seat of their pants’ will not likely find that a  candidate who describes one of her best accomplishments as spending 6-months creating a plan, aligning resources and bringing various areas together into consensus is a good match.  One of the hardest things for an organization to do is to recognize those aspects of itself that are “concrete”, that are part of the very fabric of the organization, and those that are changeable and adaptable.

I have a close friend who once took a job as marketing director at a small, specialty manufacturing company which offered a large number of highly technical consumer products (over 200 versions of the same product).   While the company espoused the need for marketing, and thought that they actually wanted good marketing (hence, the decision to hire a marketing director), in fact, their entire culture was antithetical to making good marketing decisions.  The president didn’t really “believe in all the marketing mumbo-jumbo” and decisions on which products to promote were not based on marginal return, customer response or market share.  They were based on what caught the engineers attention and what their direct (and very much hated) competitor was offering.   As with many niche markets, there was an incestuous back-and-forth among employees at the two or three main companies in the market, and significant animosity had build up over the years.   Many important business decisions were made based on this festering hostility, thereby making it very difficult for a new marketing director to influence or change the prevailing culture (the stories they told themselves) and to be successful.  The stories this company told themselves reinforced the idea that they were victims of the competitor, that nothing they could do would change that, that standard business practices wouldn’t work in their environment and that “they were special”. 

In fact, the myth that “our company is different” is one of the key points that consultants look for in working with companies.   Yes – all companies are different.  And no – it’s highly unlikely that your company is SO different that its problems haven’t been encountered before.   The key to defining the company’s differences is to be able to recognize the stories you tell yourself about them.  If you use your stories to create a distraction from the real issues, to build a case for never changing, to justify continuing bad practices, then you will be perpetuating a culture of failure.  If, on the other hand, you can use your success stories to encourage and motivate your employees to continually improve, to contribute, to assist their colleagues and to build the business to an ever-greater level of excellence, then you have stories that are working for you.

Our Own Stories

So while the purpose of this commentary is not to help you revamp your hiring practices directly (although it might be a serendipitous result), it is to make you think about both your stories and your company’s.  

What are the stories you tell about your work life?  Do you have a short list?  I have a list Nine Story/Lessons that I tell.  I tell mine to people I meet, new friends, new co-workers, family and (probably too many times) old friends.  They are the stories that shape our business life.  Each of these could have a title.  Mine sum up over 20 years of work experience:

1)                  Follow the leader – most of the time people will behave as they see the leadership doing, whether good or bad

2)                  Don’t play too small – you need to take bigger risks to play a bigger game

3)                  It’s OK to Play the Chain – sometimes it makes the most sense to follow the chain of command and not try to end-run

4)                  The Pocket Theory – there are good pockets of people/workgroups in bad companies and vice-versa

5)                  Act as you mean to go on – from the very first day, know your boundaries and act accordingly (don’t promise more than you’re willing to deliver every day over the long-haul)

6)                  Know when it’s time to go – or, leave before you’re really bored and irritable

7)                  Grow where you’re planted – learn something in everything you do

8)                  The Road Less Traveled – take the harder job, it may lead to more interesting opportunities

9)                  If an email doesn’t do through, thank God and re-write it – sometimes there’s a reason for the little errors that plague us, the unconscious knows

And finally – what are the stories from your company?  Many organizations have formalized these, others take a more informal approach.  When working with strategy, especially when trying to move an organization in a new strategic direction or effect cultural change, it is imperative that the strategist work with an understanding of the current culture. 

So take some time to revel in your own stories.  Explore what they mean.  Explore the patterns.  Get to know yourself again.  Compare them to your company’s.  Compare them to your clients.   Compare them to your dreams.  Being a Human Strategist calls for being aware of our human love of the story and how it ennobles our lives.