Your business isn’t really about selling your product…
It’s about the narrative you build…
The stories you tell to mobilize people around your message…
The big picture vision for your future…
Narratives are what make great companies and great leaders.
When your narrative is strong, even your customers will want to be a part of it.
But how do you turn your vision into a powerful narrative—and communicate it to employees and customers in a compelling way?
My guest Guillaume Wiatr is the author of Strategic Narrative: A Simple Method that Business Leaders Can Use to Help Everyone Understand Their Business, Get Behind It, and Believe In It.
In this episode, he’ll give you the tools to build your strategic narrative.
Mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
Guillaume Wiatr: Building a strategic narrative is not an act of marketing or literature. It’s not an act of literature. It’s not an act of, you don’t have to be a great writer. Building a strategic narrative is an act of leadership.
Voiceover: You’re listening to the Build a Vibrant Culture podcast with professional speaker, coach and consultant Nicole Greer.
Nicole Greer: Welcome everybody to the Build a Vibrant Culture podcast. My name is Nicole Greer and I am absolutely delighted to have Guillaume Wiatr with me today. Guillaume is the author of Strategic Narrative, a simple method that business leaders can use to make everyone understand their business, get behind it and believe in it. That’s fantastic and his company is MetaHelm. He guides CEOs, founders and business owners to align teams and accelerate innovation adoption. Hello, things need to change out there. A former big firms strategy consultant Guillaume has founded four ventures so he’s been down the startup trail four times people.
He is sought after by senior executives of companies like Alaska Airlines, the Gates Foundation, Generations for Peace, AIG, L’Oreal, because you’re worth it, Spencer Stuart, GAP, Google, Microsoft. And don’t miss this. The US and French governments are after him. But for good reasons, good reasons. Guillaume teaches and mentors entrepreneurs at startup incubators. EMLyon International Business School and the University of Washington, Master of Science in Entrepreneurship, which ranks number three in the US. So get your application started today. Welcome to the show, Guillaume. I’m absolutely delighted to talk to you.
Guillaume: Nicole, likewise, it is such a great honor to be here. Such a pleasure. I love your podcast. It’s already very vibrant. So I’m ready. Ready to chat with you.
Nicole: Oh, that’s fantastic. And look everybody in his bookshelf behind him. Take a peek here. He’s got it all color coordinated like the girls at home edit. I love that you are advanced. Okay, so ladies, you should see his bookshelf. I’m just saying. Okay, so tell us, tell us Guillaume, I’m collecting definitions of leadership. What’s your definition of leadership?
Guillaume: Well, okay, that’s, there’s so many different things. We speak from from experience, I’ll speak from experience, right. I’ve been mostly in working with leaders and, and in capacities of leadership where things are very uncertain. You know, it’s really, really characterized by a lot of unknowns. So to me leadership is the is the capacity to forge a path forward for people and help people really drive adaptive change, really, that’s what it is. And again, that’s because I’ve been in the in the startup world, innovation world where, you know, we lead ventures, we lead organizations, we lead people, sometimes communities through through radical transformations. So there is a lot of things we don’t know. So that’s my definition of leadership.
Nicole: Now, I love it. And you know, the thing about it is, is that everybody’s talking about change management. But you could just put, like change management, equal sign leadership. I mean it’s a lot of the same.
Guillaume: Yeah, especially these days, where I think we, we can only agree that change is faster, change is bigger, more uncertain, global, coming from blind spots all the time. You know, areas, obviously, we were not able to predict, you know, a few years or decades ago. But they are some, but there are some massive changes around us, you know, in terms of our environment that we can predict. We know, what might happen if we don’t do anything. So, or not enough.
Nicole: Yeah, exactly. So leaders have to be like vigilant and on it all the time. Now, you should have some downtime. But when you’re on it, you need to be you know, thinking about what can we do to do better, so you don’t get left behind. Now, you have a book, right? And it’s about strategic narrative. So my guess is there are some folks going what’s a strategic narrative? Well, you kind of tell us what a strategic narrative is to begin? I’d like to understand that.
Guillaume: I’ll try my best. Because, this book is an attempt at defining what it is. My definition of a strategic narrative, is that it’s a system of stories that you will build intentionally, to mobilize people to join you on a new opportunity. So that’s the by the book, that’s my by the book definition. What’s behind this definition is the distinction that very few people make, which is the difference between a story and a narrative. And I was compelled to really explore that difference because I think that the difference has major implications for us, in the business community and people trying to build better organizations. So what is a story? What is the narrative? Most people will tell me well, it’s the same because you know, in our day to day language, we use those two terms interchangeably.
And it’s true that there is if you look at the Venn diagram with two bubbles, one says story when the other say the other one would say narrative. There is strong overlap. But in the way we use the word narrative, we have an opportunity to, to see different things. Such as a narrative conveys a viewpoint. A story could also but not necessarily always. A narrative has this open endedness that story doesn’t have. When we talk about story in storytelling, we learn that there is a beginning, a middle and an end, typically, that’s what Joseph Campbell has mapped out in the hero’s journey. I know someone was on your podcast to talk brilliantly about this very recently.
And so and it’s true you know, we think about this in terms of something that resolves itself, right. We go back to, we move on to the next stage. But we we go back to some kind of, of conclusion. Narratives on the other hand, and what what I want to make sure that we’re clear here, when I use the word narrative, I word, I use it in the context, such as, you know, the narrative about society, the narrative about justice, the narrative about economy, or the narrative about, you know, some something bigger than us. What we mean there is that there, it’s still unfolding, like, we don’t know what the end is going to look like.
So why does this matter? It’s because when you build a company, most people will say, well, we have a story. And I disagree with that. You don’t have a story. You have many stories, you have many stories. You have an origin story, you have something, maybe a product story, you have customer stories, because you’re gathering feedback and testimonials all the time. And you have 1000 stories, really, that can come all the way, you know, all the time. And the problem is how do we make sense of all those stories? How do we organize them? How do we know which one to communicate, which one to reshape, sometimes, because really, our team, for instance, need to change the way they work. That’s what I call a narrative.
So a narrative is, is a system of stories. Is a is really a combination of stories. If you could visualize it, you would probably see something in your mind, such as a constellation of a thing, and aggregate, you know, something that looks like a galaxy of messages. And very often time, that’s what I’ve experienced through my 23, or four years journey through this, through this exploration is that the in business, were not very conscious about this system. And we let it grow organically in a way that create chaos. And we wonder after that, why people are lost.
Why is it that we are misaligned? Why is it that we are not very differentiated in the market? And that’s because our narrative is all over the place. And you can see there, there is research that shows that in companies of about 1000 people or so only 10% of people know where their ship is going. Only 10%. I mean, just to wrap this up, despite, you know, huge efforts from communications and marketing and strategy to make sense, people are still lost. It’s because there is not a common narrative strong enough to point them to the right, to the same direction.
Nicole: Oh my gosh, like only reason I was interrupting is because I was like, my brain was about to pop off of my shoulder here. I was like, ahh. You know, when you hear like the truth, or you hear something that confirms what you see, everywhere you go, you’re like, yeah, yeah. I mean, and that’s what I’m sitting here thinking, like, I go out, and I work with companies and organizations, and here’s the thing, like, they know where they’re going between now and five o’clock, but what we’re talking about is like what is you know, it’s back to this thing that we all talk about as leaders, which is vision. But I find people do not have a very clear vision at all. In fact, I debate a lot of times with people around vision. I think vision should be like that’s a point on the map that we’ll get there and we’ll know we’re there because we’ve told the story of what it looks like when we get there. Like we’ll wake up and go look we’re here, and that’s when we have to get a fresh vision and consistently innovate.
Guillaume: I’m glad your head didn’t pop, number one.
Nicole: That’s right, she’s still on here.
Guillaume: That’s great. But um, um so no, what I mean is I’m also so glad that you, that that flip just happened in your mind because that’s really the flip that I’m trying to have people realize that they should also have like what I experienced, you know, years and years ago. And you’re, and I’m so on board with you, which is, companies will define it as some kind of a vision, they say, oh, that’s our vision. But here are the problems, is that very often time, it’s an exercise that they will do in a vacuum, or it’s just a leadership that will, you know, lock themselves up in a room for a few hours, or the retreat, okay, we will just wipe up some. And the problem there is that, because the process is dysfunctional, the vision is all about the company, it’s all about us, us, us what we will do.
And that portrays a narrative that is only it’s very limited, because it’s only internal. Like, outside, your vision may not be people’s vision, your mission may not be people’s mission. So how do you start those if you do that, then how do you attract the right talents? How do you work with your ideal customers? How do you raise money from the right investors? How do you make a dent, a difference in your community, when people are, you know, kind of all over the place trying to fix bigger challenges. There is limited, adequate and limited connection between the organization and the environment. So I just so agree with you on that.
Nicole: Yeah. And, you know, you were talking about how the different stories are out there. And one of the things that I will do when I in my company, I do a ton of training, I get, you know, try to do a ton of like, you know, group coaching and that kind of thing. And I will ask people tell me about a story about a time that you did this, or you did that. So not only do people have like this informal way that stories are out there. But a lot of people have a hard time like, what do you mean a story. Like almost like we’ve lost our ability to see ourselves through story.
And I’ll share just a quick, quick thing. I was talking with a credit union that I work with, and they’re fantastic people. And I said, tell me how the credit union started. And everybody everybody’s like, you know, I don’t know. Well, then the COO, who started as the mail guy, and is now the COO. He was the mail guy, back when we used to get mail, and he would walk with his cart. He would he would deliver mail. So that was a thing before email people. But he said, well, I’ll tell you how it started, because he’s been there over 30 years. And he said, a couple of guys who worked for the phone company got together and put money in a shoebox.
And they said, what we’ll do is if anybody who works here, needs a loan, like car breaks down, or they need something for their kid or some kind of help, we’ll put we’ll pool our money together in the shoebox, and we’ll loan them what they need. And that’s how, I mean now like, if you just think about that story, it’s like a shoebox. And I now the place is worth millions and millions and millions of dollars. But what a great story to tell people that are getting on boarded, to tell our members that are already members that you know, may not understand the rich heritage of generosity and care that’s inside this organization. So I just love stories and your narrative thing.
Guillaume: Yeah. And you see, like, what you’re describing here is actually it’s I do this exercise with my, you know, the entrepreneur’s community I work with. You know, the origin story exercise. And that’s what I mean by the difference between a story and a narrative. Your origin story is just one piece of your narrative, right. But one essential piece, and if I if I may add to what you what you did with this credit union, which is wonderful, I see this very often, like we forgot where the company comes from. In fact, we know, we probably most of us know the term the company DNA. And if I may borrow this metaphor for a moment, please, you know, the DNA is comes to us, if you look at plants around us, the DNA of each plant is in the seed, right? And plants will start with this and that will grow and the DNA will always be there. And so that’s how plants adapt, survive, pick the right shape, you know, according to shade or, or humidity and so on.
Organizations, on the other hand, also have a DNA and the seed is the origin story. So it’s probably the, the moment in time that triggered the foundation of the company. And so unlike plants, organizations need to be reminded of the DNA. Right. Constantly. And so I don’t see enough companies that will go back in time, and will revisit what the origin story mean, as of today. Maybe the maybe the company has changed so much that we barely see any connection with how it started and why it started. If you look at a huge organization, you know, international corporations they have so many lines of services, departments, locations that what is the connection now with what we, you know, we what we started in what we created in the first place. And so there may not be a very clear connection, but at least we should be aware of it. And we should understand why and how we’ve, we’ve evolved over time.
So I do this exercise with founders and, and CEOs that I work with. And, you know, it’s always striking to hear those comments like, oh, my gosh, doing this exercise, reminding me we completely forgot to talk about this. So I’ll give you an example. I worked with this company in France, who does business development coaching, and they do that online, and they’ve been a pioneer for about a decade or so in that space of doing it remotely, all virtually. And recently, the company has been through very, very, very significant growth. And needed to rebrand and needed to take some strategic decision as far as hiring is concerned, also, investment is concerned.
And the CEO had a hard time articulating where the, why this company needed to do that. He could do it, he could do it at the tactical level and explain, you know, all the ins and outs, but really what was the bigger picture. And I saw, I challenged him, you know, with that origin story until he realized that the reason why he started this company is this. He’s also a professional volleyball player. And when he was in his early 20s, he was playing volleyball, already a semi pro level, while also being a salesperson, then he was selling coffee and tea to grocery stores. He was an employee of a large corporation, probably Unilever or something, but don’t don’t quote me on this, but similar to this one.
And one day, he got in a really tough situation with one of his clients. And he tried to call the office, was back in the late 80s. So he could only call, not send an email, and try to seek support and coaching. And he got barely any response. And then he tried the following day. He tries to debrief the situation with his boss and didn’t feel heard, didn’t feel like he had the training. And from this moment on, he got he started thinking about how can we help salespeople better. And he never really put together that the reason why he was seeking this is because as a volleyball pro player, he was coached all the time, all the time. He didn’t have one coach, but five coaches.
Nicole: Right. This is how you serve the ball, and hit the ball and spike the ball.
Guillaume: Exactly. He was making the parallel between okay, in sports, having a coach is duh. All right, you don’t have a coach, you have a problem. Whereas in business, you have a coach, you must have a problem. Right? It’s kind of the narrative that most people still, you know, these days kind of have in their mind. The coach is only for when you have problems. And that’s the wrong narrative. I’m against that narrative to be very clear here.
Nicole: Hold on. Hold on, hold on. I gotta interrupt again. I agree. Yes. You know, the original coaching that, well, there’s a gentleman named Leonard, that, you know, was the first guy to get all this stuff written down about coaching. And it was supposed to be for high potentials, like, athletes. But now what is happening even in my own coaching business, that part of my business, is that people are like, here, this is a problem person. Could you coach him? But like, well, I can, or you could give me all your really good people. And we could get them going even faster. You know, so I love what you’re saying. So keep going. I just had to agree and say that, hello, everybody, when you hire a coach, you need to get your high potentials, so you can spike harder, hit harder, serve better.
Guillaume: I think my clients, and you should meet because I think I think you know, you, you have this similar mentality here. And all he’s all he’s been trying to do with this company is bring this mentality forward and really make this a no brainer in the in the company he serves now. And we had to go all the way back to the day he thought about this idea and, and thought about launching a business or to fix this problem, you know, way before he was he was actually forming this business. But it was so so funny. So interesting to hear him say that, yeah, I completely forgot about the story. And I should really, I should really share it way more with my team.
So, after this, he had a seminar with his team, during which he shared it, and that was in 20, late 2020, early 2021 and that had, that clicked for so many people and that’s after that they experience. So it’s probably not directly related, but it helps. They experienced 75% growth. They grew 75% the subsequent year. These people were so aligned that he was now confident to just let them all, and ask them to go publicly communicate with more clients, even people who are not client facing. Like if you have something to say about this company and what what our what our endeavor is here, please feel free because that’s how you build a strategic narrative is when you’re able to really get to the core essence of why this company exists and activate it in a way that people are not just an audience, they turn into participants of that of that narrative.
And by the way, that’s another difference that I make between story and narratives. Stories have an audience, people will listen, they’ll buy your story, they’ll buy your book, they’ll they’ll buy, you know, whatever you published, and if you have something great on your website, they’ll probably buy into your ideas. Narratives have participants. You know, people will join you, will send you like, I’ve seen this happen to some startup entrepreneurs I work with, came back to me and say, we are receiving checks from strangers. We don’t know who these people are, and they are sending us money to invest in our company.
We’ve never seen anything like that. And they say that’s because what we are saying what we stand for here in this market is really appealing to them and completely different. So that’s another example of what happens when you have a narrative. You have participants. They want to work with you, they’re begging at your door to really join you. Your pool of talent is just increasing because naturally, people don’t see themselves as employees, they see themselves as part of a community or tribe that share ideas that are bigger than just an organization.
Nicole: Yeah. And when you’re talking about that the first company that comes to mind is Grove. Are you familiar with Grove? Who is going from, who is single handedly trying to choose from going from plastic to plastic free cleaning products.
Guillaume: I’ve heard about it, but I won’t say that I know it. But I’ve heard. I know I know other companies are called the grove or grove something, but will. Tell me about it. Tell me. I want to know.
Nicole: Okay, well everybody check out grove.co. One of the great things about this company is that they are trying to get people to stop buying a plastic bottle of let’s say Windex, or a tin can thing full of Lysol or the various sundry things you have under your kitchen sink and get you to buy their product, which can be all made in a glass bottle and used over and over and over and over and over. So reducing the plastic footprint. And when they have their commercials on television, which I’m sure their commercials are on YouTube. So just go look up grove.co cleaning commercials or something, it’ll pop right up. And they talk about how they are going to change the way that we consume cleaning products. And so what a great narrative that is. And then just don’t miss this everybody. What Guillaume was saying is even the customers become part of the narrative, because I’m gonna buy stuff that I’m not using plastic anymore. And now I get to be part of the story. It’s so genius.
Guillaume: Yeah, yeah, you know, as you were, as you were talking, I am here on my screen, I just typed in grove.com on my brother. It popped right up. I see that I use actually some of their products without knowing that it’s from them. So which is which is even better. It means that the you know, the narrative works at a meta level that we don’t even recognize now. But I have many comments to bring here, which is, number one is you see how I described some something, I gave you a couple of examples. And immediately you could think about a brand that represents that. Okay, good. Because so that that’s what happens when you have a strong narrative. And I’m sure I don’t know Grone but I’m sure this was strategically designed not by by mistake.
Nicole: Oh, yeah, that’s some genius over there.
Guillaume: So that so that’s what happened. So what’s interesting, and I actually studied the the narrative around plastic and recycling. What’s the narrative around plastic and recycling. What have we been taught around this, this, this matter here. We’ve been taught that as soon as we see a recycle sign on a package, we just put it in the right container and the narrative is, we take care of it for you. It disappears and it gets recycled. Right? It’s not true. The truth is that I think it’s the data shows eight to 9% only 8 to 9%. So meaning 91 to 92% of what we put in a recycle bin does not get recycled. It gets you know that back to landfill.
So it’s just like we’re just filling the filling the landfill or get burned is creating co2. And so this narrative was was designed was fabricated to make people comfortable with the guilt, the guilty feeling of creating, producing more trash, more disposable stuff we don’t want back in the 60s and 70s. It was narratives that were crafted by PR departments communication departments of packaging manufacturers, you can look that up, it’s were very, very well documented. So having a strategic narrative can also be a bad thing. It could also serve a purpose that is negative for our community and society. Sometimes people tell me, oh, Guillaume, what you’re teaching us is the art of manipulation and propaganda.
And I’m like, maybe some of the mechanisms. I’m shedding some light on some of the mechanisms that actually make people move toward a certain direction. You may use these for bad intents, for sure, you can do that. What I’m trying to do is put it the hands of people who have a mission that is aligned with what the world needs right now. And we need, we need businesses for good. We need businesses that create a better place. So that was the other comment I wanted to make regarding grove.com here. I have, I’ve studied, I’ve documented now I have about 20 really solid case studies. I’m constantly researching companies. Another example we have, you’re probably familiar with mod pizza. Okay, so mod pizza.
Nicole: I know all the pizza. I know them all. the
Guillaume: Pizza lover. What’s your favorite?
Nicole: Who isn’t a pizza lover? But anyways, go ahead.
Guillaume: What’s your favorite?
Nicole: Well, actually, actually, here. I live in Concord, North Carolina. Come visit me in Concord, North Carolina. We have Afton Pub and Pizza. And on and on Monday nights at the Afton Pub and Pizza, you can get a large pizza. I’m not kidding. The thing is this big. It’s ginormous.
Guillaume: Two feet wide.
Nicole: It’s five bucks. It is the biggest pizza for five bucks. And, and you can have whatever you want on it. It’s Monday night. And the in here’s the here’s the secret. The best part of the pizza has to be the crust. Now there are crust people, there are sauce pizza, that’s, you know, there’s a topping people. I’m a crust person. Okay, so that you could eat that crust like bread, like the part around the edge. Like, It’s so fluffy and good. You can just get some butter and eat it like, oh my god, it’s so good. But anyway.
Guillaume: So that’s the narrative that they convey here is there everything is good in pizza. That’s right. And so and you said something interesting and related to mod pizza here, which is you can have any topping you’d like. So mod pizza is, was founded in Seattle in 2008 by a couple who were looking for better food options for the family as they were on the go. And they couldn’t really find something besides, you know, we’ve got the taco truck and McDonald’s and maybe, you know, pizza place that we don’t really want to go there. But we have to because there’s that’s it. That’s about it. So they thought about what if there were, what if there was a place where we could have healthy choices, we wouldn’t have to worry about how many toppings we want.
Because, you know, we can just the kids want what they want. And also where not only this place would serve customers, but also would serve the community. And that’s how they launched a pizza company and who needs yet another pizza chain in 2008. As the market is totally saturated, they launched this company with a completely new narrative, which is a pizza chain can be also a platform for societal change and societal good. You know, providing people with job opportunities that would otherwise not have, giving them decent benefits, decent pay, and making those places not just about the food budget, but also about the atmosphere and the connection.
And you can you go in these restaurants, you can actually feel it. So I think this is a fascinating way to build more sustainable companies. People ask me like, okay, Guillaume, this is they say okay Guillaume this is great. You know, this sounds very, like you know, you’re like you’re you’re a do gooder. That’s that’s great, but we’re in business here. I’m like, yes, me too. By the way. This company is one of the most profitable pizza chain in the United States right now probably their most profitable. Opened 500 restaurants in a little more than a decade, is going public.
Talk to me about business results that’s the way you go about it by starting a business with first of all what’s the new narrative we want to put out there? The product comes next. And I see so many people just completely all focused on product, product, product and all that and my product does this this this this this this that and like yeah your competitor’s product does the same by the way. But why are you why are you launching this? Why? Right? That’s the narrative should come first. So a yet another exam. I’ve got so many.
Nicole: I know that’s right. Well, right here in Charlotte, North Carolina, we have a gentleman his last name is Noble. And when you can’t make this stuff up his last name is Noble, like noble like a good guy. So not using your narrative for evil but only for good. So he has a restaurant in downtown Charlotte. We don’t call it downtown here. We’re very optimistic. We call it uptown Charlotte. Don’t you know? Anyway, so it’s uptown Charlotte. And he. It’s called King, The Kings Kitchen. And he gives jobs to people who are just getting out of jail.
Guillaume: Great. So great.
Nicole: That other people would not hire, because they would look at the resume. What are you been doing for the last couple years? Well, I’ve been incarcerated. And in this case, he says, come on, just get you back to work. Let’s go. Let’s make it happen. And so he is famous and a talking about Mod Pizza. It’s the same thing here in Charlotte. He’s opened up a great barbecue joint over on Freedom Drive, he’s got so many things cooking, and so much good publicity, because he is doing good things. Now you can like you said, call it manipulation. Or you could call that being a force for good in the world.
Guillaume: For good. Yeah. For change. Absolutely. Absolutely. And so we’re, I noticed we’re picking examples of like smaller businesses and maybe new businesses. And it’s true that I’ll say, if you start a company with the narrative first in place, and evolving, you’ve got greater great chances of success, probably greater chances of success, in my opinion. And what about existing company? What if you’re listening to this show, and go, well, I love what you’re saying, but I am an established company.
Nicole: Yeah, tell us what to do.
Guillaume: I feel like you know, where do we where do we even start? You know what? You know, so first of all, people have to understand here that we’re not talking about a branding exercise. We’re not talking about marketing, we’re not talking about PR. If you, and that’s a major mistake here, if you just think about this as oh, yeah, great, we’re going to do to reap, we’re going to rebrand, redo the website, have a few, you know, great articles and show off how great we are. This is like putting package over something that, you know, I want to be, I don’t want to be negative about but you’re just putting lipstick on something ugly. Yeah.
And but pig is pretty derogatory. You put your product your business is probably great, but needs to be needs to be re engineered. It has to come from the inside.
And I think that’s why, you know, here we’re talking about leadership. Building a strategic narrative is not an act of marketing or literature. It’s not an act of literature. It’s not an act of, you don’t have to be a great writer. Building a strategic narrative is an act of leadership. It’s really an act of leadership. It’s about having the courage to say, why did you start this company? It’s having the courage to disagree with your competition and say, like this pizza, you know, this owner of the pizzeria, they’re saying, you know what, I disagree with our hiring practices in our industry.
I think we should give chances to people who would not normally have chances to get a job. That’s that’s how you that’s how you lead into a new narrative. And I can go on with the with the leadership attributes that you need to work well, so. So another one is co-construction. A strategic narrative is not something that you design and build and write on your own as a leader, you have to be able to be vulnerable enough to bring in your teams, your collaborators, whoever this might be to co build, you know, with you. Like, do you think that you know, the founder of mod pizza, they had the idea, but did they, did they find all of the solutions to make that narrative come to life? No, it was everyone.
Nicole: They had a team of people. And they all had a different experience and have to share it.
Guillaume: Yeah. And everyone in their own store. Like how does inclusivity, how does justice, how does friendship show up in this region versus this region versus this community versus that community? How do we hold again, true for to support our values, they’re in each. So you have to you have to be able to, to do some what I call co creation. When you do this, what you’ll find is that when people have their fingerprints on the narrative, they build it together. So they need less oversight. It’s easier to manage, it’s easier to delegate, but it requires that mindset. It requires that courage to say, how do we carve out the time to really bring people together.
So the pioneer in that specific leadership practice is, in my opinion, and also in the food business is Starbucks. Who many many years ago decided to close all their stories and say, okay, wait a minute here. We’re not holding true to our culture, we’re going to close all the stores for how many days it will take us to just bring, you know, that this just is just, you know, how do you call your basketball, timeout reset. Let’s see how we can work this, this better together. Another principle I love is, say the things you’re afraid to say. Call out the elephant in the room. And so over the years, first of all I was I was I was not doing this very well, to be honest, I was just kind of glancing you know.
In my earlier early careers, I kind of tried saying what everybody was thinking and avoiding the conflicts and avoiding and so until I realized that I was not helping. And so it took me a few attempts to really see the value of talking. Being able to talk about the elephant in the room and developing a safe environment. And a zone of culture, a vibrant culture, right, that allows that allows for that. Like, you know, saying that thing, saying the things you’re afraid to say, speak the invisible, you know the truth.
Because when you will do that what you’re going to generate is a sense that people can trust you to put words on the things that they were feeling that they, that needed to be said. So you may ruffle some feathers, you may go against the grain, but ultimately you will normalize and you will rally the right people that will be, you know, loyal relationships with you for a very, very, very long time. So that’s one of the one of the principles and they are all in my book in Strategic Narrative. I just list 10 of them of the main one, I have more on my email list. And on my website, too.
Nicole: That’s good. And I was reminded of a book that I have read and I adore I have like a little Cliff’s Notes version of his book. It’s by Roger Shores. He’s from UNC Charlotte, excuse me, UNC Chapel Hill here in North Carolina. And I love what you said about you know, calling out the elephant in the room. And he has a great way he says it too. And I love the way he says it. He says you have to discuss the undiscussables. Oh, yeah, that’s how he says it. And and it’s kind of like, you know, we’re all delusional, if we if we don’t discuss it, right. And oftentimes, when I’m working with leaders, I’ll be like, you know, if you don’t discuss the undiscussables, you’re going to lose credibility.
And I think what I’m having an a-ha about Guillaume is that if a leader talks about the narrative, develops a strong narrative co creates it like you’re talking about, then it’s almost like, we can’t not talk about it. Because we kind of fall out of integrity. Like we’re trying to develop this better way. There’s no room for delusion anymore, we got to get real about what’s happening. This narrative has to tell the truth. And it has to tell us, you know, how to behave. How does, how does the narrative affect the behavior or the way that people move inside of an organization? Is there is there any research on how, you know, the performance goes up based on the narrative, the strength of the narrative?
Guillaume: So there, there is a lot of research out there. And one theme you might if you’re interested in, in looking at. One theme is, is the theme of language being performative. Performative, you know, what you say becomes your action. You know, the more you, you bring up a topic, the more you explore it, articulated, the more you will realize that unconsciously it’s in the back of your mind, it’s becomes ingrained in the habits of people, in the way you, you, you and your team, make decisions, for instance, or how you treat your customers. And this is a natural human function of things. And that’s why you know, it’s not new, it’s very ancient. Religions were built on that principle. We will gather every day, every week, to read the verses of our texts, whether it’s a Koran or a Bible, or the Torah, whatever religion you’re from.
And we will recite them and repeat them and remind ourselves of the guiding principles that we are here to defend. And so that’s, so religion, political movements, social movements understood this centuries ago, right. Millennials ago. And it seems like in our business community today, we forgot a little bit about this, and we forgot that, okay, it takes time. It takes time to build, it takes the guts to ride you to to stop and gather your team. And yeah, and give that opportunity for those ideas to transform into behaviors, right. I love this. I love this aspect of it. I’m still to be honest, I’m still discovering. I would need, I would love to have another lifetime to continue to explore just that. There’s a there’s a ton of research on that. I don’t have the paper next to me, right now.
Nicole: It’s fine. It’s fine.
Guillaume: I’d share some references here. But look up language performaty. Oh I can’t say this. You know, I’m French. So sometimes some words are difficult for me to say. But I performativity I think it is.
Nicole: Yeah. And basically what you’re saying is that, you know, if you say I eat healthy, I eat healthy, and then you eat something healthy. Exactly right. That’s exactly right. Maybe you have to lay off the pizza. Just saying. Okay. All right. All right. So tell us how do we get started? Of course, everybody that’s listening, you could call Guillaume. And he gets you started. But let’s say we can’t all call you because your phone would be ringing off the hook. So what how do we get started? What like, what are the kind of the steps of getting your narrative? How do we get our act together around this?
Guillaume: So, the first thing I, you’re gonna have to diagnose your, your situation, your organization, whatever the case might be. So the first of all, is not to rush into solutioning. Number one step is don’t rush into solutioning. You’re trying to evolve, if you have an established company into a new kind of organization, you kind of company. So the first thing is to, to frame the problem properly. And here is a framework very easy framework you can use. So again, you know, we’re talking about narrative is a system of stories. So stories could be told, stories could be visible, because they’re, they’re an artifact, there are products that whatever the case may be. Stories are told inside your company, but also outside your company.
So you might need to, you know, listen carefully to what your market says what your customers say. And basically, the framework is the following. Picture a sheet of paper, you can actually take a sheet of paper now, and you draw one vertical line in the center, one horizontal line in the in the center, and you get four quadrants. The first axis is, will be I’ll start with the horizontal one is, whatever is on the left is internal. Whatever is on the right is external. So you’re going to start, you can do this very quickly. But then you’re going to need time to go outside and explore. And you’re going to start listing, what is it that you hear and you see inside your company? What is it that you hear and see outside your company?
So of course, when you are the owner or the CEO or, or when you’re working with a company, you’re inside the jar, you know, it’s a metaphor. It’s hard to read the label outside the jar. So you might need a little bit of help, or pick up the phone and ask, you know, maybe some of your friendly customers. Like what, if you think about our company, what would you say that we do? Or what’s the first word that comes to mind when you think about us. And that’s, that’s doing some listening here. So on your on the left part of the sheet is the inside on the right part of the sheet is the outside. Now, I told you there is also, there is also you know, another axis. The other one is to look at.
Nicole: That’s right. The Y axis.
Guillaume: The Y axis is like to look at things from an individual level to a collective level. Right. So most people think about a narrative as a something that is collected, you know, it’s our, our set of values, it’s our culture. Oh, it’s expressed, you know, on our, in our employee book. Yeah, we’ve got our story there. And, you know, we’ve got, we’ve got some elements there. By the way, I just say story with our story, I meant our origin story, for instance. So these are collective, these are collective stories. So what are the collective stories you hear inside and outside? Well, I hear my, my employees are complaining about this, and that. That’s a type of story, so I need to address that. That’s inside, and that’s collective.
Yeah, if or my employees get really excited, they’re really we get really joyful when we address a specific topic. Like when we serve a type of customer, or when we focus on a specific type of service or product that really gets them you know, more, say more creative, for instance. Then there are the types of stories that are more individual. Okay, and I think I, I left the probably the most important last here, which is you as a leader. What is your leadership narrative, right. And that’s the internal and personal side of the strategic narrative. And that’s why I focus so much on this leadership side aspect of my work, which is, you know, asking yourself through the exercise of the origin story. Why did you start? Okay, some people will say, well, I wasn’t the founder of this company. I joined after. Well, why did you join?
Nicole: What drew you in?
Guillaume: What drew you in. Like, what, and you should be very factual and try to remember. What was happening that week, that day, that month, for you in your life with your family, or your community, your relatives, your friends. What was happening also in society at the time, so that you build that, that sense making story that keeps you passionate. And so that you face yourself in the mirror and be transparent. Like, can I still support what this company needs to grow as a leader? Or is it time for me to do something else and move on? Right? So very, very critical part. So let me summarize here, you get four boxes on a sheet of paper. I start, I’ll go in reverse order now. Oh, my gosh, let me make this clear.
Nicole: So we have a very advanced group of listeners. So don’t worry.
Guillaume: Okay, good. So take notes. So the first one is the personal internal quadrant of the framework. Your origin story, what makes you excited the passion that you that you bring to the table. Also, I will throw in this in the same quadrant, your productivity level. How productive, how dedicated are you? You know, do you do you think that spending 80 hours a week working this is healthy? Probably not. Where is your life balance in this? Right? So that’s the first one. The second one is the opposite quadrant is the collective and external. Which is very tied to the vision and the mission. I call this the opportunity dimension. Because I really want people to think about something that is not related just to their company, but something that is related to the great greater opportunity that you bring to the world.
So for instance, I’ll take your example Grove.co. What is the opportunity? The opportunity is to reduce our environmental footprint, right. So they’re not just the only business pursuing that opportunity, there are 1000s of other businesses trying to do the same. But when you go that route, what you’re doing is that you rally people to something that is much deeper than just a business. So that’s the opportunity quadrant here.
Now, I’m gonna go back to the upper left part of your sheet of paper here, which is what I call the perspective dimension. Which is okay, as a team, what’s the cement, what’s the glue, what makes us excited together? And you’ve got, you’ve got to get to write this down, you’ve got to document it, you’ve got to, you’ve got to publish it and make it a public declaration. So one of the exercises that I recommend that you can do you don’t need me to do this. Other people have done it very well is to write a manifesto. What are your five to 10 principles that you will really stand for? And that will help you to even hire people, right?
You’re gonna use that manifesto to see if you, when you hire people, like is there a fit here? You know, do do these people, are we hiring for cultural fit? Not just the technical skills? So that’s the that’s the perspective dimension, very internal, very collective. There are other things you can do. But right down those principles here. Say, we’re all about transparency. Okay. What is the story that illustrate that you are about transparency? We’re all about courage. Great. Are we able to talk about the elephant in the room? Are we courageous enough to do that? Write it down, write the story here. And you know, when I say write the story, again, I’m not saying write a novel. Just write a few words.
Nicole: String some sentences together people.
Guillaume: Exactly. He was Michael the other the other day, Michael did this. And that remind me, that reminds me of courage and transparency. That’s it. That’s all you need.
Nicole: Right. And another one on transparency. I’m a big believer in open book management. One of the narratives that I believe in for every, that a company should adopt would be like, we tell people, you know, where we’re making money, how we’re making money, where we’re saving money. And then there’s all sorts of stories that go inside that narrative. But like, you know, teach people business acumen is a belief of mine. And so transparency is, this is what the P&L looks like. Here it is. This is what we’re doing.
Guillaume: Here are numbers. Here the numbers, right? More and more companies are adopting also transparent, you know, salary policy, like they show where everybody’s salary is, and if you’ve heard of the Teal movement. Teal organizations will have processes internally that require everybody to weigh in on everybody’s salary. It’s fascinating. Have you ever heard of teal organizations?
Nicole: T L?
Guillaume: T E A L. Teal companies.
Nicole: No, but I am going to. I’m gonna do it.
Guillaume: In the show notes. We should add that but oh, this would be another podcast.
Nicole: Okay, let’s do it. Want to? All right, more from Guillaume. We’ll be right back. Did you hear that everybody.
Guillaume: All right, where was I? One, so dimension one, it’s yourself internally. Dimension two is, you know, upper right quadrant, is the opportunity. Dimension three is the perspective that your, that your company, your team will really be all together. Okay, the final one and, ah, we are here to do business, we have a product, we have customers, right? So why do I put it at the individual level? It’s because I see customers relationships as one on one individual relationships, right. And so here I call the product dimension. And I call the product dimension. And I want to I want to give, you know, I want to give credit to those who are very product focused. And that’s where that’s where they will shine in that dimension out of the four is that they will be really, really good.
But one of the things that I see very often, and that’s because of my product design background. People will come up with products that are not exactly what their market their customers want. And they do that because they’re very focused on their own narrative. They’re very self centered, they are very, and you will see that in their product description. It’s what I call when I see those products discriminate call that the brag zone. We’re the number one product, and we’ve got the X amount of awards, and we are the best in our category. And so okay, that’s great. That’s I’m good. I’m so glad I’m very happy for you. These are awesome signs of recognitions, you’re doing a good job.
But what are your customers actually saying? Let’s let’s hear, let’s hear it from them. And that’s why we’re in the external part of my model, which is, before you even launch a product, why don’t we do it this simple this simple exercise. Take a sheet of paper, and let’s write a mock, just internal press release, where we will have what the product does what it is or the service, by the way, I said product, but it could be services. And we’re going to imagine what our raving fans are going to say about about this, and see, and then we’re going to go test it and see if that’s what even that’s what we should even develop first. Right?
And if that aligns with our narrative. So you asked me about the very first step, there you have it. Something you can do on your own. Think you see it’s a holistic view of things, it’s not just marketing. I just hate it when people say, h, storytelling is all about marketing, it will make your brand clear. And it will it will hook people and you’re going to sell more stuff. This is so limited. This is so old school. This is just so deja vu. No, you need a global perspective on your organization. If you do this, right, what you’re going to see on your piece of paper is you’re going to start seeing the gaps.
Oh my gosh, now I see that we’re saying things inside that don’t, you know, relate to outside, we got to fix this. We got we got to make sure that there’s a connection here. This is why we’re wasting so much on profitability for instance. We’re making we’re taking too much time to launch new offers. This must be why. And so that’s that’s the conscious evolution that I hope some of our listener will will try. Because that’s a radically more powerful way to think about business.
Nicole: Yeah, I can’t I couldn’t agree more. You are making my heart sing over here. So listen, here’s what we got to do. Let’s talk about the name of this book again, because you need to go get it. It’s Strategic Narrative, a simple method that business leaders can use to make everyone understand their business, get behind it, and believe in it. And I’ll tell you, that’s that’s what we need inside our organization is people who are like sold out to do this thing to do this mission. This vision. So I have loved talking to you. I want to have you come back. We’ve talked about all sorts of things. We can continue this we can we can do that. Yeah.
Because here’s the thing. If people have the narrative in place and understand the stories around the narrative, because again, like you said, the story has a beginning, a middle and an end. But the narrative is like we’re writing the story together, right? And we’re not sure how the story is going to turn out but we continue to figure out what’s going on by looking at the things that were, okay and don’t miss this. Don’t forget his quadrant thing. Go back, reverse the whole thing here and go watch or watch or go listen.
Guillaume: I have a video on this too. On YouTube. Free.
Nicole: Okay, so tell us where we go on YouTube to find you. What do we type in on YouTube?
Guillaume: It will be under my name. Guillaume Wiatr. I know it’s a challenging spelling but G U I L L A U M E W I A T R.
Nicole: Okay, it’ll be in the show notes. Okay. And you can find him at www.metahelm.com, metahelm.com. And also, of course, he’s on the LinkedIn, on Facebook and on the Twitter and you can find him in all those places. And he can help you. But you know, get started, get your piece of paper out, sit down with somebody get it all dreamed up here. But I do know that you probably have one more little nugget you want to leave. There’s like a listener going no, no don’t stop. What’s one last thing you would leave people with, to kind of think about as they think about getting their strategic narrative together.
Guillaume: So my mission is to really turn every single organization into a source of inspiration that few can resist. So I’ll leave you with that. People will buy your story. But people will almost die for a narrative. So that sums it up, I think by now hopefully, I hope this inspires you to explore that forward thinking way of building businesses.
Nicole: Yeah, I agree. I love what you’re talking about. Guillaume, t’s been an absolute delight to have you on the Build a Vibrant Culture podcast.
Guillaume: Likewise, Nicole.
Nicole: All right, everybody, thank you for listening, we’ll have, we’ll have him back. Talk to you later.
Guillaume: Bye, everyone. Have a great day. Great day, and I look forward to chatting again with you soon. Take care.
Voiceover: Ready to build your vibrant culture? Bring Nicole Greer to speak to your leadership team, conference or organization to help them with her strategies, systems and smarts to increase clarity, accountability, energy and results. Your organization will get lit from within. Email Nicole@nicolegreer.com. And be sure to check out Nicole’s TEDx talk at nicolegreer.com.
