In the third episode of the CEO Insights series, senior partner Joydeep Sengupta speaks with Laurel Moglen, McKinsey’s managing producer, to discuss the art and science of storytelling, fostering an inclusive, collaborative culture through communication, and leading with humility.
CEO Insights, which features short, sharp perspectives on the evolving role of the CEO, is produced by The McKinsey Podcast in partnership with the CEO Special Initiative.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and length. To catch the full episode, click here.
Your company’s best storytellers are your employees
Laurel Moglen: What do the best CEOs do to make sure their team understands the company’s story really well?
Joydeep Sengupta: What I’ve observed is good leadership likes to rally the organization around one big idea or audacious goal. And once you have that idea in place, I think the question is around, how do you translate that into a simple story? What are the values? What is the strategy? And importantly, what are you not going to do? And lastly, when you do something like this, you do it together, right? You don’t do it on your own. Many organizations who have created cohesion successfully, take the top team, sometimes even the entire organization together, to try and build this story.
Laurel Moglen: How do CEOs prepare their employees to share the story both internally and externally?
Joydeep Sengupta: Storytelling is really an art. CEOs pay a lot of attention to how they tell the story. People use different approaches. I remember when State Bank of India was going through a massive transformation, and the CEO used a movie to communicate the story. It was called The Legend of Bagger Vance, in which a golfer had lost his swing and was essentially trying to gain it back, and he used the movie as a metaphor for the organization and what they would have to do. And that movie went viral among the employees because he used that single movie over two-day workshops, communicating to employees, et cetera.
The other thing I found is that many CEOs use storytelling as a way to create a collaborative environment and build inclusiveness in the organization. Storytelling is such an important aspect of how you build energy and excitement. I think most CEOs think about this as a real science in terms of how they design and plan for it. And I would use what I would call the “four-five-six” of storytelling.
High-performing organizations are four times more likely to dedicate resources to communication. Five times more successful if you get your employees to participate in that process of providing input, and six times more successful if you’re really able to cascade this all the way through the employees, not by yourself. Those companies where lots of employees are engaged in talking about their strategy and their story, both internally and externally.
Laurel Moglen: How important is it for CEOs to role model the behavior that they are asking their employees to emulate?
Joydeep Sengupta: It’s really important. Our research shows that 86 percent of CEOs believe they’re acting as role models for such inclusive behavior. But we found only 50 percent of their direct reports say they’re watching the CEO do that, so there is a real disconnect. And I think the disconnect stems largely from self-awareness, and what it takes to give up, quote, unquote, “your power.” For example, CEOs often invest a lot of time in developing the strategy, the approach, the story, and they want to be in the limelight telling the story.
But the fact is the CEO may have incorporated inputs from the rest of the organization, and in doing so, they might have compromised their own personal point of view. Giving up that sense of control is not easy. But the best CEOs often do that, right? They’re quite comfortable with others telling the story and supporting the notion that the story is something the whole organization owns. In fact, many of them would be happy if someone were to say, “Oh, we didn’t know it was your story. We thought it was the story of the organization.” And I think that is something truly powerful and something that we have seen work consistently time and time again.
Laurel Moglen: So, there’s a degree of humility that comes with a CEO who is able to do that. How do we encourage this quality if it’s so important?
Joydeep Sengupta: I would say that CEOs increasingly realize that there are many forms of leadership: being authentic, inclusive, collaborative, and having the humility to sometimes admit that there may be others in the organization who might do things better than them or may have something interesting to say, and in fact, compliment their strengths. This attitude makes them even more effective and more powerful than if they needed the credit as the one person driving change. And I think our research increasingly continues to see that more and more CEOs are embracing this notion.