A to Z of Business Storytelling -05

E — Emotions

Generally there is a belief that emotions are only meant for for personal storytelling and motivational storytelling and not a must for business storytelling. Just because business storytelling revolves around corporate life, it doesn’t mean that they can lack emotions. Even in corporate life, everything revolves around people. People mean emotions. The business storyteller needs to be aware of the significance of emotions, while narrating a business story.

Most of the time, business stories are shared to persuade the stakeholders (team members, management, customers etc) to take some actions. i.e these speeches are persuasive speeches. When we aim for a persuasive speech two factors namely Logic and Emotions have a major influence on the audience.

Few people are persuaded by logic alone, but emotions contribute a large part in people’s willingness to change their minds. Arousing emotions such as happiness, sadness, fear, anger, guilt and love in listeners is an effective tool.

Even after understanding the power of emotions, some of you may be wondering how to use emotions in business storytelling.

One of my bosses in my early organization invariably uses the power of emotions during his townhall meetings. In one of his meetings, he spoke as follows.

“Team, all of you are technically good in addressing the customers requirements… You are all good in coding skills and solve the technical issues of the customer in no time.

But I would like to make a special mention about Raghu today… Raghu is also an IT engineer like you… But he took extra interest in understanding our customer’s domain. i.e Oil and Gas… He went extra mile in knowing more about the oil and gas industry... Whenever he talked to the customer, his domain knowledge became evident... Our customer initially thought that we were just an IT services company... But when Raghu exhibited his domain knowledge, the customer understood more about our domain capability... They started sharing more about their business pain points and looking for solutions.

This resulted in additional purchase orders for us... Five more associates were included up in the team... Remember that we got these orders without participating in any tenders, without fighting with any of our competition... As the off-shore team size increased, five of our associates also got an opportunity to go onsite (USA)... All of them are from under privilaged family… They are going to earn their parent’s annual earning in just one month... Their overseas visit would turnaround their families… When the parents were at the airport to see off their children, they eyes were filled with tears and their hearts with joy.

All these were possible not by our sales team, but by a single man in our development team... Now do you think that you too can do this magic?.. Do you want to make an impact in someone’s life like Raghu?.. Do you want to turnaround someone’s life?.. If so, please don’t just settle down with meeting customer’s expectations…. Take some extra effort and exceed the expectations of the customer... At the end of the day, you too will have a sense of satisfaction like Raghu?… Will you all do that?”

That was just portion of a five minute townhall speech from my boss. But they moved many hearts since emotions aroused them. The emotions were not force fitted in the speech. They were so subtle, yet powerful. There are plenty of occasions in business storytelling wherein emotions can play a major role, including customer meetings.

If you want to leverage emotions in your business storytelling, here are a few tips:-

• Have a list of emotions. (Love, Hatred. Happiness, Sadness, Surprise, Anger, Sorrow, Fear, Disgust etc)
• Try to map the incidents of your story to any of the above emotions.
• Use vocal variety and body language to exhibit the emotions appropriately.
• Please ensure that you only map the emotions to your stories and not vice versa. i.e if you start force fit an emotion in a story, it would backfire.

Why wait? Open your emotional gate and transcend your content to the audience.

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