When Working Woman magazine hosted a workshop in Chicago recently to promote its new listing of the nation’s 500 most influential female entrepreneurs, it was a man, 1-800-FLOWERS chief Jim McCann, who organizers tapped to deliver the keynote address.
To be sure, McCann, 47, is a powerful orator. Named as one of the top five business speakers for 1997 by Toastmasters International, McCann has a gift for a management talent that seems to be sweeping the business community: storytelling. There he was, president of a major American brand, describing the look on his high school girlfriend’s face when he brought her flowers. In another moment, he took listeners back to his days running a group home for boys as a recent college graduate.
“I learned more about management and life from those 10 young men than from anywhere else,” he said, pointing out in humorous anecdotes basic lessons on teamwork, working with cultural differences, not saddling people with impossible tasks and rewarding people with things other than money.
So captivating were the stories, audience members didn’t even groan when McCann finished his speech with a company plug for sending Mother’s Day bouquets.
But of all groups looking for a keynote speaker, it would seem a magazine about women would be inclined to offer the speaker’s job to a female. And weaving a good yarn for the sake of generating business would seem natural turf for women managers and entrepreneurs to tread. After all, we have traditionally been the story hour volunteers, the parents with “Goodnight Moon” embedded so permanently in our memories. Nevertheless, as a group, women bosses have some catching up to do when it comes to turning stories into effective business communication tools, experts say.
“Women still think they have to prove themselves and that they can’t bare their souls at work,” said Pauline Shirley, a Dallas-based communications consultant who is a past president of Toastmasters. “We have a tendency to think we can’t be as powerful if we’re telling these personal-life stories.” In fact, these stories are imperative to becoming a good leader, Shirley said.
In an age when we are bombarded with media messages and sound-bite business buzzwords, real-life stories are a way to come across as credible and conversational, whether you are trying to rally five staffers around a new project or entertain 500 audience members at a trade show. “We’ve discovered what it takes to get people to really listen,” she said. “The old oratorical, bombastic speaking doesn’t work today.”
Neither, however, does wearing your heart completely on your sleeve. Hauling out painful personal memories as part of a motivational speech to co-workers or underlings will not only drain you emotionally, but the audience as well, Shirley said. It’s best to avoid telling tales, also, of current romantic adventures or anything that could be perceived as off-color, she said.
Putting her own philosophy to the test, Shirley will next month do something she has never done before. In a speech to an over-50 crowd, she plans to talk about her mother. “I’ve always avoided (speaking about my mother) because I get too emotional,” she said.
At 58, Shirley is the youngest of 12 children raised by her mother, who will turn 100 in November. Her strategy for the speech: Keep it light. “It’s OK to take people on an emotional roller coaster, but you can’t leave them down too long.”
Patricia Fripp, a San Francisco-based professional speaker and author, disagrees that women managers are too buttoned up. If anything, she said, they tell colleagues too much detail about their lives, which can come back to haunt them. Stereotypes aside, however, she said both sexes can learn to use storytelling more effectively.
“People don’t remember what you say, they remember what they see,” she said, meaning that vivid, true stories go much further with an audience of any size than facts and figures. The key is the connection you make with your team, and it starts with what Fripp calls the “I-You factor.” Tell personal stories, she suggests, but phrase them in a way others can relate to on an emotional level. For example, begin a story by saying, “Have you ever had the experience when . . . ” and follow it up with an actual example of how things should be working at your firm.
Another tip: Try out your stories on your family, or on someone outside your field. If you can capture their attention with the yarn, Fripp said, chances are it will work with your team.
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E-mail: kiddstew@msn.com
