Storytelling and Interviews

I've been thinking about stories, the stories that make up our lives. Part of the reason my business writing students create their own leadership journals is to articulate their experiences into stories--both for themselves and for others.

Not only does storytelling recreate the experience, but storytelling adds to memory, especially the memory of others who hear the story. The stories we articluate in an interview become memorable to the employer first as shared experience and second as meaningful representations of the storytellers' being and qualities.

A helpful book on storytelling is Stephen Denning's The Leader's Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the At and Discipline of Business Narrative. In future postings, we'll incorporate storytelling more, but for now, here is an excerpt from Denning:

"You tell a story to show people who you are—to stop being a stranger. Once upon a time, several eons ago, a stranger was a rare phenomenon. In a calmer, slower, more intimate time, people knew who you were. By reputation. They knew your family. They knew your upbringing. They knew your history. They knew what you had done. You had lived together. You had grown up in the same village. You were already known.

"Now in these turbulent, fragmented, rapidly morphing times, it’s hard to know who anyone is. People don’t have the background about one another that they once had. And they are often asked to trust others about whom they know very little. They come from different backgrounds, different education, different religions, different races, different countries.

"How do you communicate who you are? People want to know what makes you tick, what gets you excited, what is driving you, what values you espouse, or what goals you have in life. How will you act in a crisis? Will you level with people? Will you save yourself while stabbing others in the back? Are you someone who goes whichever way the wind blows? Or are you someone of character who stands up for what is good and true and right?

"Thus if the audience can understand the critical experiences that have formed you as an individual, they can begin not only to understand the unique individual that you have become but also to infer how you may act in the future. Giving them an account of one or more turning points in your existence can enable listeners to get insider your life, to share your life, to go through what you have been through so that they can themselves experience what sort of a person you are" (pp. 80, 82).