Telling A Difficult Story At A Story Slam
OVERVIEW
In my last two weeks of business school, a club run by two good friends of mine – Design + Business – hosted an event called StoryLab. The event, held at a local club venue was the MBA version of the popular Moth Story Slam events held around the country. I told a story about a difficult time in my life, when I struggled with work, mental health, and self-worth.
SKILLS AND AND INSIGHTS GAINED
Using Specific Detail – Prior to this story slam, I had never considered myself a storyteller. As a result, I focused very hard during my prep time to try to capture the essence of moments with sensory detail, and share that detail in novel ways. For example, I tried to talk about specific things I said or did, instead of discussing scenes in generalities. Using concrete details is very effective in storytelling because it better allows the listener to understand the emotion of a situation (which is interesting), rather than just hearing about what happened (which is boring). Concrete, specific, details also give the listener digestible pieces of information which helps the story stick in their memory.
Letting The Audience Keep Time – Telling a story is much different than recording a speech for playback later. The audience makes a huge difference because they laugh, they gasp, and they deadpan. While telling the story, I had to give up a little control of my story to the audience and let them guide my tempo. While I was speaking, the audience “told” me which moments to hold and which parts to move through quickly. They let me know which moments I could be funny and which details could be elaborated on. The signals audiences send are subtle – like breathing patterns, changes in the level of ambient noise, and stillness – but incredibly important to listen for while telling a story. The audience is your guide and timekeeper.
Authenticity and Vulnerability – The story I told was about a period of time in my young adulthood that I wasn’t proud of and that was traumatic. I would have liked to tell the story without embarrassing personal details, but I couldn’t – there would have been no story otherwise. After the event, several people, ranging from close friends to strangers, expressed their appreciation for my story because I discussed a difficult subject candidly. The stories that we fear sharing the most are the ones that are most moving, because we all have wounds. Vulnerability is empowering, not only for the storyteller, but for the story-listeners as well. Sharing stories rooted in deep emotion helps us discover our common values and builds compassion by reminding us of the sacredness of our humanity.
IMPACT AND LESSONS LEARNED
Originally, I was going to tell a story about my relationship with the game of football. But 2 days before the story slam, I decided to tell a different story which was much more raw. Even though I was unsure of how the audience would receive it, I’m so glad I told the story that I did.
I often think of life as a series of moments, strung together by our subconscious minds to make meaning from our experiences. We all have a choice in how we act during those moments. We can choose to be our authentic selves or we can try to show a manicured version of ourselves that we’d prefer the world to see. After telling this story at Ross’s StoryLab, I’ve doubled down on my belief that life is better lived authentically and on the uncomfortable precipice of vulnerable honesty.
Photo Credit: Brian Flanagan
Building a Successful Project Team From Scratch In City Government
Overview
As a continuation of my MBA internship, I decided to work on projects one day a week within Detroit’s City Government. I became the project manager of a team charged with restructuring a large city department. I received hardly any guidance on what to do, save for a broadly written executive order and the charge to “restructure that department”. Figuring out what that meant and doing it was my job.
Given that my challenge centered on retooling an organization, I decided that using a management framework I learned about in my MBA Program’s core Cost Accounting class – the McKinsey 7S framework – was a good place to start. This framework suggests that organizations must align seven interdependent pillars to be successful: shared values, strategy, structure, systems, skills, style, and staff.
SKILLS AND AND INSIGHTS GAINED
Building a Shared Vision – Because we received little guidance on what success looked like or what we should do, I decided to facilitate a brainstorm during our first team meeting. Using the 7s framework as a guide, I anchored our brainstorm in two simple questions: “What is our organization like today?” and, “What should our organization be like in the future?.
After about two hours and about 100 post-it notes, we had a much clearer, common understanding of how the future-state organization would operate, how it could be structured, and its existing gaps. For example, this brainstorm highlighted the need for a special projects manager tasked with capacity-building projects instead of day-to-day responsibilities serving customers. Because of a two-hour time investment early on, we avoided weeks of squabbling to reconcile individual team members’ visions for the organization. Instead, because we crafted a shared vision of success, our team was able to quickly build momentum and trust. Building a shared vision is a much better approach than jumping into problem solving without one.
Identifying the Right Problem – At the beginning of this project, I had a choice. On the one hand, I could have done what was most obvious and simply look at local government best practices and implement a new organization chart. After further investigation and reflection, however, I realized the root-cause-problem we needed to solve was changing a culture – implementing a new organization chart just happened the most obvious element of the solution. As a result, I led our team to think much more holistically about how we were restructuring the organization. Instead of only discussing sticks and boxes on a page, we talked about our customers, our purpose, employee motivation, and management systems. As it turned out, our task was so much more than an org chart.
Building a team to solve a problem is a fool’s errand if you pick the wrong one or misunderstand the problem’s root cause. That’s hard to do because understanding the root-cause-problem is a step in the problem solving process that’s easy to overlook because it doesn’t feel urgent. For example, at the beginning of our project, I felt pressure to produce a new organization chart as quickly as possible; stepping back to understand the culture of the Department originally felt like a waste of time. Understanding the “right” problem also isn’t easy – it requires an open mind and inquisitive dialogue with all the parties associated with a project. The hard work of identifying the right problem is worth doing, however, because solving the wrong problem wastes precious time in the long-run and is tremendously demotivating for team members.
Defining Success Metrics – “You can’t manage what you can’t measure” is certainly a cliché, but I’ve found it to be true. Knowing this, I tried to develop a simple metric to know if our team was making progress. What I decided on was a single number: the percent of future-state staff positions that were filled. What I learned along the way is that creating metrics – and even measuring them – isn’t enough. Metrics don’t matter if teams don’t see them. Keeping score doesn’t change behavior if nobody can see the scoreboard.
IMPACT AND LESSONS LEARNED
Building a team from scratch to solve a new problem is not easy. In the past, I would have rushed to start taking action to “make progress.” But as much as it feels right to rush into an ambiguous situation, that doesn’t lead to successful outcomes. The hard work of a leader is to simultaneously imagine the future and build it. You have to build a plane as you fly it.
That’s what I was able to do in this situation and it put my team on a path to success. I’m certainly not perfect at launching teams from scratch yet, but this experience proved to me that it’s something I can do well.
Finding Courage in the Michigan Daily's Newsroom
OVERVIEW
When I arrived on campus as an undergrad at the University of Michigan, I wanted to do something different than the student government activities I had always participated in during high school. After a few days thought, I decided to become a news reporter for the school paper, The Michigan Daily, and showed up to the newsroom in pursuit of that job. As it happens, that experience of being a reporter was one of the most interesting and enthralling of my life. I covered many stories in many places and practiced my writing skills, but more than anything being a reporter helped me become a better person and better leader.
SKILLS AND AND INSIGHTS GAINED
Pushing Back on Authority – The first story I wrote covered a Fortune 50 Industrial Products company who was accused of polluting a Mid-Michigan river with a dangerous chemical – dioxin. After I wrote the story, a PR exec at the company demanded that I make revisions to the story because in his view it was inaccurate. My editors disagreed. As a result, I called the PR exec and was forced to defend my reporting and in the end I assuaged the PR exec and my editors by convincing both that a limited number of revisions was appropriate. I had to push back on both parties – the PR exec and my editors – to ensure my article reflected the truth.
Learning in the Field – I once wrote a story on the economic impact on local Coca-Cola bottlers after the University suspended the sale of Coke products. I had written a good story, but my editors insisted that I get a comment from a Coca-Cola representative. I rebuffed, saying that I had tried calling the company for comment several times, to no avail. My editor then insisted that I go to a nearby Coke bottling site to get a comment. I reluctantly went, even though I was nervous about going into the field and I was worried about meeting my deadline. I went with a photographer and had a fantastic conversation with a truck driver from the company. As it turns out, getting out of the newsroom was exactly what the story needed.
Courage – When I was an undergrad, the school’s Theatre Department presented a performance of The Laramie Project – a play that describes the story of Matthew Shephard, a teenage boy from Laramie, Wyoming who was killed in a brutal hate crime because he was gay. The Westboro Baptist Church (WBC), a cult notorious for rallying against gay people, protested the school’s performance. As the reporter assigned to the story, I had to interview people from WBC, something I was terrified to do because of their reputation and my personal beliefs. In addition to calling them on the phone, I interviewed several protest and counter-protest groups for the story on the day of the performance, weaving in and out of picket lines and human chains. It was the first time I had to get over sincere fear to get the story.
IMPACT AND LESSONS LEARNED
I reflect on my time as a newspaper reporter and believe it to be one of the most developmental (and exciting) experiences I’ve ever had. Of course, it made me a better writer, but more than that it taught me how to push my own boundaries further. Now, I’m much more prone to do things that I’ve never attempted before because I regularly forced myself into uncomfortable situations as a reporter.
There’s a moment of nausea and anxiety I feel when I’m about to do something I’m afraid of. Being a reporter taught me how to get over that fear and push forward. It’s a skill I’ve found invaluable as a management consultant, blogger, public servant, and pursuer of intimate relationships.