Challenge
Ingraining APi’s purpose at a personal level to inspire all of its people
In April 2018, APi Group invited us to help meaningfully mobilize their purpose: Building Great Leaders. They needed a strategy to build better connections between their internal and external people, who come from a wide range of leadership levels, backgrounds, and roles. They had the right communication channels already in place, their people – from Group headquarters to head offices and in the field – were connected, but there was an ingredient still amiss: deeper, more personal, and inspiring leadership stories.
Solution
Training workshop at APi’s fall 2017 Leader Lab
Echo’s storytelling training team designed a customized curriculum for an in-person workshop that would take place at APi’s Leader Lab in September 2017. To prepare for this two-day event, five APi leaders volunteered to write a short but powerful and authentic story of their leadership journey that we helped edit, shape, and workshop. The workshop then centered on these five stories as inspiration for all participants. Videos, articles, a storytelling manual, guided role play, and group exercises all sharpened their new storytelling skills.
Result
It got emotional (but in a good way)
The magic wasn’t instantaneous. Some leaders still insisted on using their small group time to list their CV, brag about accomplishments, litigate the past, and pile false start on false start. All totally normal behaviour as participants shed their normal workplace armour and got down to the vulnerable business of sharing personal insights and emotions. But as one brave soul after another took up the challenge, the shift in the room was palpable. The theories we’d shared in the PowerPoint deck landed, and leaders began to … LEAD with their hearts, sharing and shaping inspiring stories about their personal connections to the business, to their work, and to each other. As volunteers stood in the last hour to present their honed stories to the room of nearly 200, there wasn’t a dry eye in the place.
Following the workshop, the organizers conducted a formal “follow-through” program for the second (Emerging Leader Lab) iteration. This consisted of two follow-up emails (two weeks apart), each asking specific questions concerning how they are applying their storytelling learning, challenges, victories, etc. In their responses, 72% of the participants were able to demonstrate that they had thoughtfully applied storytelling to at least some positive effect.
One more cool thing...
The stories kept coming
In room epiphanies are a great outcome of any training session, especially so big. But we managed two more major wins. We were invited back for a second session of Emerging Leaders, where we drew out more workshopped stories and set the stage for more powerful conversations. And we followed up for both groups with homework, both at home and at work, to make sure these newly honed skills stayed sharp and won more converts.
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