A to Z of Business Storytelling -14

Noteworthy

A business storyteller is a leader who makes a speech amongst his/her stakeholders (Team Members, Management, Customers, Sales People etc). with a purpose. He/she would not be on stage just to introduce the main speaker or give a vote of thanks in general. So, every speech of the leader shall be noteworthy to the audience. There shall be clear takeaways from the speaker.

In the speaking community, there is a popular saying that goes like this.

Yes. if you want to speak in front of an audience, you should have something noteworthy to say. Just saying something in front of an audience is a waste of time for you as well for others.

As mentioned in some of the previous posts, speeches can be classified as Informative Speech, Entertaining Speech, Persuasive Speech and Inspirational Speech. In the entertaining speech, the speaker can speak something or anything as long as the audience gets entertained. In all other genre, a general purpose is very much needed. The general purpose may to educate, inform, persuade, motivate or inspire. Once the general purpose is chosen, the speaker needs to identify the specific purpose of the speech. This is what I mean by noteworthy message. A noteworthy message has three essential criteria:-

• Audience view point — What do you expect the audience to do after your speech?
• Specific — The call for action shall be very specific and not generic
• Attainable — The purpose shall be realistic and attainable

If I give an example to encompass the above points, it would be easy to understand.

Instead of saying, “ I want to give a speech on cost control to my team members”, a business storyteller would say, “After listening to my speech, my team members would identify the unnecessary costs in the projects and would curtail them by 5% in the next two months”. Of course, the second approach is possible as long as the leader is using all the tactics mentioned in the business storytelling techniques. Just making a boring presentation would never achieve the purpose.

What are the other examples a leader can think of on noteworthy messages at the end of the speeches?

• Team members adhere to the timeline and discuss all the agenda points during the meeting, without extending the duration of the meeting.
• Sales team understand more about the domain before they sell industry-specific solutions.
• Team members complete DigitialPro101 certification before onboarded to digital projects.
• Customer facing teams understand the significance of customer retention and follow the do’s and don’ts of the customer retention policy.

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