Matthew Dicks: commitment

Transcript context

…When people hear this, they may think, "Oh man, there's this guy at work, and he's always telling stories." And we're like, "Shut up." Just tell me what we need to do to make it a little more real of just what does storytelling look like where it's not annoying. It's not like, "Okay, everyone, gather around. Let me tell you the story of our vision." What are some simpler ways, and maybe non-annoying ways to think about what storytelling looks like in the workplace that's not just like a public speaking like, "Hey, everyone, I'm going to give you." Let me give a couple of examples. I have a storytelling book coming out next year on business. So there's a couple of heroes in that story. One of them is named Boris. His name's Boris Levin, he is a factory owner here in Connecticut. He's the one who convinced me I could start working with businesses. I thought it was just a storyteller who spoke about himself on a stage. Boris one day saw me for some fundraiser and said, "Listen, I want you to come and help me." I said, "I can't do that. I just tell. I'm using stories about myself." He said, "No, no, you can help me." And it turns out he was totally right. So Boris has done it the right way. Boris has decided to become a storyteller who will then translate his stories into his business. So a great example was, one of Boris's early stories, he came to me, and he said, "My son was at bat in the Little League Championship game. The bases were loaded, if my son got a hit, the team was going to win the championship. And if my son struck out, the team would lose the championship." It's a three and two count. It is like the ultimate baseball moment, and his son strikes out. He watches his son drag that bat back to the dugout. He's devastated. His son's devastated and Boris is devastated. So he is trying to collect himself so he can figure out the right thing to say to a boy who's just lost the championship for his team. By the time he makes it onto the other side of the field to catch up with his son, he sees his son running up a hill with his friends, and they're already laughing. They're heading to the cars so they can go to ice cream, and they can enjoy themselves. So Boris is falling apart. He's still devastated, but his son has already moved past the failure. Boris takes that story, and he crafts it as a beautiful story that he could tell on a stage, and perform and make, an audience laugh and cry. Once the story's done, he says to me, "So what are we going to do with it? How are we going to apply this to business?" And ultimately what happens is this, he's got a sales team. And quite often salespeople do not land the big account they're hoping to land, and Boris knows that when his salespeople fail to achieve what they want to achieve, they will often sulk for days. They'll wander around the office, and be useless because they're still trying to get past the fact that they just lost the million dollar contract. So he tells the story about his son, and he says, "Listen, there's nothing wrong with being sad, being upset with failure, but we cannot allow it to slow us down as much as we are right now. We have to think about my son. My son dragged his bat back to the dugout. He sat down, he sighed, his buddies patted him on the back, he collected himself, and he moved on. That's what we need to do. When we fail we're going to take a moment to collect ourselves, to think about the mistakes we made, to decide what we're going to do differently, and then we're going to move on. " what we need to do. When we fail we're going to take a moment to collect ourselves, to think about the mistakes we made, to decide what we're going to do differently, and then we're going to move on." That becomes a really important moment in his company. It's much better than him standing up in front of his people and saying, "Listen, every time you guys fail to land a big sale, you wander around this office like you're dead, and you're wasting our time. It ends today. Today from now on when you fail, you're going to move on." The story becomes something meaningful to everyone because it reveals something about Boris. He's a father, he's a father who cares about his son. He's the kind of father that most of us are in life. He shares of himself with his people, and he creates a tangible vision of what the sales team can do. He does that all the time. He comes to me, and he's not looking to solve problems through story. He's looking to develop stories that he can then deploy into his business. So I compare it, I say, band-aids versus bricks. If you're building bricks, you're a storyteller that's capturing stories and building bricks, then you can eventually deploy into business. If you're a band-aid person, which is fine, that happens. "I have a problem, Matt, and I need a story to solve it." Essentially what I'm doing there is I'm putting a band-aid over a problem, but you're not becoming a better storyteller. You're just using me as a consultant to help you generate a story that will solve a problem. That's fine, but you're going to need me the next time too. You're going to keep needing me because you're not really becoming a storyteller. Boris is building bricks. He is building a vault of stories that he can then deploy into his business. He understands how to tell them, and how to connect them to business. So that's something that you can do very easily. Another example, the other star of my book is a woman named Marsha Rakofsky. She used to be the director of corporate communications at Slack, and now she's sort of doing work on her own. But when she was with Slack, she and I were working closely together, and she had to create the narrative that was going to compete against Microsoft Teams. Essentially, Microsoft came along and said, "Hey, we copied your product and it's free, and everybody already has it." So Slack had to find a way to combat that, and Marsha was the one in charge of doing it. That's why we connected. She found me and said, "I need to tell a good story. Please help me tell a good story." So she crafted a brilliant narrative that worked fantastically. We worked really closely together, and it came out great. The way she came up with that narrative was a Tuesday night. She had broken up with her boyfriend, she was alone. She was feeling pretty lonely. It was in the midst of the pandemic. She had two glasses of wine in her, sitting alone on a Tuesday night, she suddenly had an inspiration. She wrote three words down on a napkin, and those three words become the story that we develop that allows Slack to compete against Microsoft.…

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