The Stories of a Manager – Storytelling in Management
The world of business today has a completely different shape than a century ago; even each decade has its own conditions and criteria that don’t match the previous one.
The beginnings of the twentieth century witnessed tremendous changes in industrial manufacturing. For the first time in modern history, the world lived unprecedented rates of productions.
Companies that owned by private sector and business men that has thousands of workers on a full time job was something completely novel to all societies worldwide. From there, principles of business management made its first steps at the offices and halls of companies and factories.
Firstly management was based on trials and errors, so once a theory emerges that aims to improve the management of people and it stands on some studies and researches that support its claim, but sooner or later, people who adopt such theory and put in action find out that it’s not beneficial and it wasn’t the best option for them as its adverse ramification gradually emerge.
The same happened in many other fields, like in medicine, for example, in the fifties, some physicians in the United States recommended smoking as it has various benefits for the smokers according to some studies they conducted.
In the sixties of the last century, Prof. Douglas Mcgregor introduced what he called Theory X and Theory Y. The traditional theory x states that people are in general lazy, idle and chaotic, and so the best way to manage and motivate them is to put them below a strict and continuous surveillance, to seduce them with periodic incentives for their good work, and to face their mistakes with strict penalties so to avoid their recurrences. While theory y is that Mcgregor supports is that the instinctive nature of humans is enthusiasm and passion to develop, compete and gaining success and that humans are naturally motivated to work, so there are no needs to motivate him, because the role of an effective management is to maintain and protect those natural human tendencies – it’s not about motivating people, rather to avoid De-Motivating them.
So, one of the many tasks a manager should do is to maintain the level of the natural motivation his employees have, also to direct orders in the best way that cause them to submit and to execute efficiently, and nothing is compared to a well-crafted story that grab attentions and generate emotions. So, as more the manager grows his skills in storytelling as more the response of his people and their willingness to execute orders become bigger and more noticeable.
And here is an example of the talented manager and business man who could use storytelling to inspire everyone with various values that lead to a better performance, it was a story explaining the working principles of his company,
“The first day I ran this company was the day I entered that long dark tunnel, where I took everybody behind. The entrance of that tunnel was the first day where everything began, and its exist is the biggest success that everybody seeks to achieve, and the steps we make inside are the long days that we spend in our offices, behind our desks, while we neither know when nor how shall we get out of it, whether we’ll leave it to the right destination, or to where we never aimed from the first day.
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Everybody found a foothold in various places inside the tunnel, some who barely stood at the entrance so to use it as a swift emergency exit if it happens that everything around collapse, and others who insisted to be at the middle of the tunnel so they can’t see even their own hands, and others who found themselves lost inside, but they keep discovering their positions, and others who got exhausted from walking in the darkness, they sat down and stopped moving, and finally, two persons reached the exit, the light outside was about to blind them and also vanishing the darkness they sensed for long.
So, the first one goes out happily seeing the rays of the sun, but the other one, looks back at the dark tunnel, and he decided to go back inside, so he runs and yelled, calling his friends and colleagues, and once he blindly bangs at one of them, he hysterically laugh out of happiness, giving a glad tiding to his friend that he finally found the exit, so he guides him, and then goes for the other people inside to save them and to lead them before they quit and go back on their heels leaving the tunnel from the entrance… or never leave it at all and this is what we need in our business.
Finally, everybody goes out of the tunnel waiting for the last man, the man who led them all, so they sing and dance celebrating their success of passing the tunnel, but while they are in the middle of their party, they find their friend who left the tunnel first and alone, not caring to lead the others, they found him motionless, he was a dead body. Although he was the first one to find the exit, but he couldn’t survive outside alone for long, so he got exhausted, he stopped, he was sick, and finally he died…
They mourned him, they buried him, and then they all continued their journey, entering the next tunnel before the sunset… This is the philosophy, the strategy, and the vision of this company. We shall enter the tunnels one after the other, all together and leave it all together, we success all together, and we celebrate all together.”
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