There is one thing people are not doing but easily could be to make their communication more effective. In this episode, we explore the power of storytelling, particularly as it pertains to leadership and business.
This week's guest, award-winning speechwriter, Elaine Bennett advises clients from Fortune 50 CEOs to entrepreneurs on their messaging. She also creates and delivers trainings on how to improve the writing of everything from internal communications to speeches.
In this conversation, we dive into the power of storytelling in business. Elaine also shares a great story about what she learned by working with and observing Warren Buffett in the midst of a crisis.
We talk about:
- Being stable in the eye of the storm
- Controlling the narrative
- Why stories are so important and what they accomplish
"Even if you talk about stories on every episode, you're probably still not talking about them enough -- they're that important. They're the only things that will separate you from someone else. If you want people to remember you and your ideas, you have to deliver them in a medium that people will take in and that medium is STORY."
Join us for a fascinating episode and, you guessed it, a bunch of great (and instructive) stories!
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To learn more about Elaine Bennett visit https://bennettink.com or find her on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook by searching "Bennett Ink". Or, on Twitter @bizspeechwriter.
- I'm Celine Williams and welcome to the Leading Through Crisis Podcast, a conversation series exploring resiliency and leadership in challenging times. My guest today is Elaine Bennett, whose name may sound familiar, but she is an award-winning speech writer and definitely not the lady from Seinfeld whose last name was Benes. This Elaine advises clients from Fortune 50 CEOs to entrepreneurs on their messaging and also creates and delivers trainings on how to improve the writing of everything from internal communications to speeches. Her own TEDx talk delivered in 2019 tackles the topic of how language can change the world. Welcome to the show, Elaine.
Hi Celine, nice to be here.
I'm very happy to have you here. I think that, first of all, I love that your intro involves a Seinfeld reference, very perfect for a speech writer and for someone with a background you have. I'm excited to get into all of this.
I can't get away from it. For the first three years that I was work working on SEO, she had the top spot when you Googled Elaine Bennett.
Really?
You would get Elaine Benes and I worked really hard and blogged every day. And finally you Google Elaine Bennett and you get Elaine Bennett.
Well, first of all, that is a lot of commitment on your behalf and I'm very impressed with it. And second of all, I'm really genuinely surprised that she had the top spot when it's not actually her name. That's fascinating.
Yes, yes.
Wow. So the way that I usually start this off is to ask the big broad question, which is when the name of podcast, is obviously Leading Through Crisis, when you hear the phrase Leading Through Crisis, what comes up for you? What does that mean to you?
Well, I think the first thing is, crisis, been through crisis and business and we can talk about that, but leading through through crisis, it sounds like it's gotta be big. It sounds like it's gotta be bold, general patent or... And it doesn't have to be. As a matter of fact, if you're not general patent and you try to be general patent, everybody's gonna know you're not authentic and nobody will listen to you. So the first thing to do is to stay within yourself, stay within your comfort zone within who you are and find a story to tell that will engage people. Now, this is not my story. It's a story a client of mine told from his experience. He was, growing up, his father would always joke at him if they were out walking and it started to rain and the client would run to get out of the rain. And the father's like, it's rain is not gonna kill you. And so then he found himself in a literal rainstorm as an adult, he was an a officer in the army and he was in Afghanistan or Iraq. And he and his team were pinned down in a field, waiting for the helicopters to come in and rescue them. And there were trees around that they knew that there were snipers in. And so what he did was, I don't think it was actually raining. This is a metaphor, Elaine. He stood in the field, he stood up and all of his men are lying down, hunkering. And he just went, walked to each one and said, are you okay, are you okay, and talked to them. But he felt like his presence, being so obvious and not hiding and not afraid, even though, of course he was afraid, of course, you're always afraid.
Of course.
But because he did that, that was his way of leading and he called it standing in the rain. Because scary situation, don't run, show your people that they're gonna be okay even if you don't know they're gonna be okay. I mean, he couldn't guarantee that none of the snipers would shoot. And you can't guarantee if you're in a business situation that everything is gonna be okay. The business, you could go out of business, something terrible could happen. You could lose your best producer, all sorts of things, but have a larger sense. Those things are small, they're discreet events, and you can get past them. Your largest producer leaves, you can find somebody else. You can train somebody. You probably already have somebody who's got the capability of doing the job. Your business goes out of business, start over again, find a way you can even bring your team somewhere else. So that's what leading through crisis means to me. It means being a stable center in the eye of the storm, whatever the storm is.
I love that idea of a stable center. And my personal lens is that I absolutely agree with you. Crisis sounds big and bold and scary. And the truth is that change is constant and there are no guarantees. This is the theme that I always come back to when I talk on this podcast, the poor podcast listeners. There are no guarantee, right? Change is always going to happen. So being able to be that stable center to use your language inside of whatever is happening, that's the leading, that's what... You don't have to be general patent to be leading you, you being and you having that stable center, that's how we get through whatever is happening in terms of crisis or change.
Yeah. And my client, he didn't stand up and make a speech. He made very small, personal gestures to each person, and that was far more effective than any speech he could have given at that point. So stay within yourself, be who you are and don't think that you have to do something big because, especially if big things are happening around you, the small things are gonna really help people feel stable and anchored.
Absolutely. And that example that you gave, which is a great example, I love that. The thing that really stands out to me is doing something that was a... If he'd stood up and given a speech, for example, that's actually more dangerous and makes the crisis worse. But by going person to person, and by doing these small things, it has a bigger impact and it makes each person feel safe rather than exacerbating a situation. And that's a really important lesson to take away from something like that. It doesn't have to be this big, bold, attention getting, whatever the case may be situation, there are other ways of doing it that might be more effective and he chose one of them.
Yes, yes.
Yeah. I love that. So I'm gonna, I do wanna ask this, 'cause you did say you have crisis in business you can talk about. So I'd like to circle back to that and ask for, what did you mean by that? What's the...
What could I mean by that? So way back at the end of the 20 century.
What a great turn of phrase.
In the early 1990s, I was working at Solomon Brothers and it was my first speech writing job. I was the speech writer for the CEO of Solomon Brothers. And someone, a couple floors down for me on the trading floor, did something he really should not and Solomon was almost put out of business, like almost overnight. And the reason we weren't was that our largest shareholder said that he would come in and take over as interim CEO and he would clean the place up. And because he had an impeccable reputation, the securities exchange commission said, okay, sure, go do that. So that was how I began working with Warren Buffet. So that crisis had a very big silver lining for me, but I was there through the very tense days of what's gonna happen to us. And I watched my boss, who was the director of corporate communications, and Warren also, when he came in, had some brilliant ideas about how not to spin this. I mean, somebody in the company who has since been fired, did something very, very wrong, you can't spin that. Yes. We don't tolerate that behavior. Yes, this person is out on his rear. Now we have to move forward. And so recreating the company's reputation as an ethical company was his primary focus. And so he didn't go out and make fancy speeches and he didn't go on the talk show circuit or whatever kinds of things companies do, he had just hunkered down. And when it was time to release the findings of what the company had done, again, he was brilliant. He didn't have a press conference. We took out full page ads in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and I don't know, maybe the Washington Post, a couple of other places and in very tiny type to get it all on the one page of newsprint that he released exactly what was going on and exactly what we were gonna do about it. And so his message wasn't filtered through the news media. It was, he got it out and then if the media it to spin it some way, it was obvious that they were spinning. Because he had said exactly what he wanted to say. So the main thing for me that I remember of that period, that period of crisis just before Warren came in, when we were, we in corporate communications were learning the full extent of the wrongdoing that had taken place and how high up the chain it went. And we were devastated. And I still remember one of my colleagues and she was a media relations person. And she was sitting the bullpen and she's got her feet up on the desk and her phone to her ear. And she's like, and the media's calling like, when are you gonna release this? When are you gonna release this? And she knew when we were gonna release it. And it wasn't yet. Hey, Rodge, how are the kids? How are you doing? It's really nice to talk to you. And I was just completely blown away by her calm and her ability to stay, to keep her personality in that situation and not clam up or shut up. And I developed such a respect for her in that situation. So that's another way of leading in a crisis, is just do your work and don't worry about it.
Well, it kind of goes back to that added that you can't, there's only, the only thing you can control in moments like that is yourself and your behavior. So doing your work and showing up as yourself that you can do. You don't know how someone else is gonna react. You don't know what else is gonna go wrong, or what's gonna go right. So what is in your control that you can do? And it sounds like that's what she leaned into in those moments, which is a great lesson in terms of leading. And I also wanna say, the story you told about Solomon Brothers, if that's what it's called, I'm terrible with names, and Warren buffet stepping in. It's really interesting because to me, I hear lessons on both the, when the crisis happened before he stepped in, lessons of what was done right and what could have been done differently potentially, and how it was handled and also really great lessons from him in terms of, in order to, I hear your things like, so if we want to retain or ensure is a better word, that this is transparent and people see what we're doing, then we control the narrative by taking an ad out as opposed to going through the media. It's a slight shift in terms of how we quote lead through crisis, but it makes a big difference when we think about how do we retain the transparency? How do we ensure that this is transparent? Not spinning, not trying to manage along the way with the storyline is which actually hands the control over to people and pulls you all and him and the company out of the story, but rather staying quiet and then when you're ready, stepping into... That's a great example of, instead of trying to... This is my two cents on this always is that people try to create certainty by managing a story or managing situations before they actually know anything or enough, because it feels more certain to them, which is always not true. It's not a real thing. It's not a real feeling. And he was very comfortable with the uncertainty of it and saying, they're gonna do what they're gonna do. And clearly that worked for everyone in the organization as well. I'm sure there's discomfort, but it worked in terms of the outcome. So it's a great example of how there's, on both sides of this there's always lessons.
Yeah. Warren showed up with a typed list of behaviors that he expected of people, and he had his secretary in Omaha type it up. And he came to New York and Xerox hundreds of copies of it and sent it to people to read. And if you look up the early stories about Warren coming to Solomon Brothers, I guarantee you that every one of them will mention that he had a typed list of behaviors that he wanted people to follow and everyone got one. And so for some reason, some executive decided that we needed a PR firm to come in and make it all better. And one day the PR people said to me, Elaine, why don't you take this list and make it pretty. Get it type set, whatever. And I said, well, you know what, hasn't every article mentioned that this list is typewritten? He said, yes. I said, don't you think that speaks says something about Warren and how hands on he is? And he said, oh yeah, okay, maybe we don't, you need you to do that.
So fascinating. So fascinating. So I'm gonna step into the role of communications when it comes to facing uncertain times leading through it, being that sort of grounded that staying with yourself in those moments. Because I think we often downplay... This is gonna sound so inain and I'm gonna called out right now. Because we talk about, and I'm gonna sit and tell you what, we talk about communication all the time and how important it is and then we downplay the actual role of communication when things go wrong, if that makes sense. It's like, of course communication's important, but then when things happen, we downplay the actual role of communication. Theoretically this makes sense, but in practice it's often overlooked or thought of too late in the process of dealing with things. That's why I said this is kind new.
Yeah. The first person you call, if you're the CEO whose company is in trouble is gonna be your lawyer, not your communications director. And that's not, that's appropriate, especially if there's legal liability, you've gotta worry about, you're not worrying just about yourself, but about your hundreds of employees or however, even 10 employees. But I think, and I love lawyers. Some of my best friends are lawyers, but sometimes you can focus too much on liability and not enough on believability or relatability. So I would say the worst thing you can do in communicating in a crisis is lie. The next worst thing you can do is lie, but try really hard to pretend you're not lying. So that's where we get words like down downsizing or rightsizing, we're gonna be rightsizing our workforce. Well, it's only right if I get to keep my job and somebody else loses theirs, it's not right if you're gonna fire me. If you're saying anything that your listeners, your audience is gonna have to translate into English, then you're doing it wrong. So you're not rightsizing. You are very sad to announce that we're gonna have to lose some of our people, perhaps a small amount now will prevent a bigger loss later and we're trying to work for everybody's best interest and we appreciate their service and we'll help them move on. It's not the most fun thing to say, but it's way better than pretending that we're doing something right. We're rightsizing. So speak English, don't make your employees or your audience have to translate what you're saying. 'Cause there's no way they can trust you if they have to translate.
I think that is applicable whether we're talking about a large organization, if you're talking about a solo entrepreneur, who is talking to, sharing information about their business, or what's happening. It's so important and people try to find the quote right thing to say, to prevent something bad from happening or to prevent something from being misinterpreted. And inevitably that means that things are misinterpreted because it's no longer how people actually communicate. It's no longer the truth. You're now focused on what's gonna sound, how do we avoid litigation or whatever the case maybe and it's... We don't respond to that and we don't relate to that. And it's, I do think, and I'm based in Canada, I do think that this is often worse in the US because there is more room for litigation, so it's more litigious overall. And so we see it a lot more in all kind of sizes of organizations in the US than we do in Canada or in parts of Europe. But it is very consistently, there's a filter that everything is run through before anyone speaks out and that's really, it's frustrating. It's frustrating.
Yeah. It's frustrating to have to deal with... I mean, again, I love the chief legal officers, I love the general counsels that I've worked with. And I know that they have an important job to do, but sometimes they can be a little trigger happy when it comes to certain words. I worked with a client who one of the functions of their firm was accounting and I was never allowed to use the word creative in relation to the work that they do, because creative accounting is a euphemism for skirting the truth or the skirting the laws. And I get where his sensitivity was, but his other people could be creative and not break laws.
Absolutely. And it's interesting because if you use the word creative in where it's not the phrase, creative accounting, it doesn't mean the same thing. So it is that it becomes that black or white, we can't use it because this one phrase at so... People are so interesting with where and what they tolerate with things like that. So I'm gonna ask this question because I think the world of... I'm gonna share my opinion. I'm not saying this is the only thing, but the world of communications is in general, whether it's speech writing, whether it's big corporate, whether it's individual communications, 'cause I know that you run the breadth of things, including TEDx.
Solopreneurs and yeah.
Exactly. And helping people with TEDx talks or TED talks. TED, well, it's not make it only the X. So I know that you're involved in a lot of these things and I think ultimately the world, all of that is to engage people, tell a story, leave them with information in some way, whatever that looks like. That seems to be a lot of the thread through this. And I'm curious, in the work that you've done and you continue to do, what are some of the key... Okay. It's gonna be a two part question. What are some of the key things that people are doing that are not serving them in terms of those sorts of goals? And also what are some of the ways that people can do a better job of being more effective with communication that are just kind of quick and dirty and easy, 'cause I think a lot of us just don't know, we don't even know what we wrong or what we can do right.
I think I can answer, address both of those parts of your question with one story.
Love it.
So I was at a conference and I'm sitting there at the opening plenary session and there are five people who gonna speech from each of the five companies that have sponsored this conference. And so I'm like, all right. So person one gets up and he speaks and he says, well, I'm from this company and we are really glad to be here because this is an issue that means a lot to us. Person number two says, I'm from this other company and we're really glad to be here because this is an issue that means a lot to us. And I'm like, oh no person three don't do it, don't do it. And of course he did. This means a lot to us. Finally, the last person who spoke, told a story, a personal story. I'm really glad to be here on behalf of my company because this issue is personal to me because a family member, blah, blah, blah, this is what happened and that's why I am so grateful to work for a company that cares about the community and cares about issues like this and wants to step up and I hope y'all have a great conference. I think I gave him a standing ovation. If you are in a position where you get to speak on behalf of your company, first of all, find out what the event is like. If you are in that situation, one of five sponsors, you gotta know that everybody's gonna say the same thing, if they haven't listened to this podcast. So find, or even if you're the only person speaking from a company or a sponsor like that, find something personal to relate to. Don't just make it be, Hi, I'm here and I'm checking off the box to make my boss know that I'm a team player. So have a nice conference. Nobody cares. And nobody frankly, much cares that company A is sponsoring the conference. What they really wanna know is why is this important to you? It's important enough for me to take three days out of my life to be here. And if you wanna connect with me, if your company wants to connect with me, you gotta tell me that it's important to you too. So I think that addressed both parts of your question.
It did. And it's... Kind of to me, what I hear, one of the things that I hear, not the only thing, but is, we remember stories and we connect through the stories. And the last person that went and had a story, even if it was a short story and it doesn't feel like lip service, listen, even if it is lip service, it doesn't feel like lip service when there's a story attached to it. When it's just, I'm really happy to be here 'cause this matters to me. There's no personal connection to what you're saying and therefore your audience doesn't connect to what you're saying in all cases. And that storytelling aspect of communicating in any way, shape or form, I think cannot be over emphasized. Again, it's gonna sound a little bit anain because I say that and I know 80% of people might be rolling their eyes and going, obviously storytelling matters Celine, but how many people actually work it into their talks or their presentations or their trainings or their coaching or whatever they're doing with other people, very, very few people do.
Yeah. And if it's a story that comes straight from your experience, nobody else is gonna tell the same story. Nobody's gonna be able to tell the same story. When I was working on my TEDx speech that I gave, you can find it on my website, I thought about... So the theme of the conference was changing the paradigm. And I was like, okay, so what in my life has really changed the way I think about something. And I remembered a book I'd read, literally 30 years ago about presidential speech writing. It was written by two women academics, whose name I will not be able to come up with right now, but it's in my speech. And there was something about that book. There was one thing that they did, one tiny little thing that stuck with me and that changed the way I thought about presidents, from that day on.
Interesting.
And so I structured my speech around that one little thing. Now lots of people have read this book. It actually was one of the best books in the category for a long time. But I don't think I've ever seen anybody talk about this one little aspect. Because it resonated for me, I was able to build a speech around it and tell a story. One of the things, I have a program where I work with people who wanna give TEDx talks and we help them. my business partner, Marie and Contrera and I help them find their idea, hone their idea, learn how to get themselves booked. But one of the things in finding the idea is somebody will come and say, well, I really wanna talk about personal wellbeing. I'm like great. Google TEDx talks about personal wellbeing and you will find a thousand of them. So why should anybody have you talk about personal wellbeing? Well, for that, you have to dig down, why is this important to you? What problem did it solve in your life? What crisis did it avert in your life? How does it affect you on a cellular level? Then you'll be able to tell a story that nobody else can tell and that other people can relate to. So yeah, stories and if you talk about stories on every podcast episode, you're probably still not talking about storytelling enough because it is that important. It's the only thing that will separate you from someone else. And if you want people to remember you and your ideas, you have to phrase them, you have to deliver your ideas in a medium that people will take in. And that medium is story.
Yes, amen. All of that. Let's bold, double click on it, whatever all the sayings are. I could not agree more. A few years ago I put together a training for a company, went and recorded it and for wherever it was. And the person who was their head of training, who was collecting different people to do trainings on what they were specializing in, at the end of it was like, can I hire you to help the other people up their game when it comes to training because you are the only person who has told stories as part of the training which is what engage... She was like, I was engaged. Normally I shut down for these. Listen, I was like very structured in my approach, 'cause it was a long training and I was trying to make it simple, but it was like a, whatever, whatever story. Whatever, whatever, like very consistently and I would just put stories in. She's like, no one else has done this. It was the simplest, smallest. And I'm not a great storyteller. This is not my thing. But even at that point, I was like, this is what people are gonna remember. They're not gonna remember what I'm talking about, here's the three ways you control your emotions. They're gonna remember the story you tell, whatever it is. So I say that because there's still, to your point, there's still not enough people doing it. They're just aren't and we cannot emphasize that enough and you never know how you're gonna connect or what people are gonna remember when you move stories and roll stories into everything that you do.
There's a story I read in 'Either Made to Stick", which is a great book by the Heath Brothers or in a book called "Slide:ology", which is by a woman who focuses on presentations. And I can't remember her last name. Her first name is Nancy, but the book is called "Slide:ology". And basically there was a company that had a conference and they hired someone to go to all of the sessions and distill each session down to the main teachings from each session. And so the writer did this and sent it back to the company and all of the people who had presented were furious because they had had all of these data points and slides with numbers and graphs and she ignored all of that and just wrote the stories that they told. They're like, but that's not the important part of our presentation. We're scientists. So she's like, that is the important part of your presentation. That's what people will take away.
Yes. 100% to that. So before we wrap up, I always ask the question, is there anything... We talked about stories, so...
Are there any stories I wanna tell you?
Well, I know. I was gonna say, is there anything that we didn't get to, that you wanna get to, or that you wanna emphasize for the listeners before we wrap this up? And I was saying, we just talked about stories, which for me is always like, can we emphasize that enough? 'Cause I'm gonna emphasize stories, but this is your podcast. So is there anything that we didn't get to, or that you wanna emphasize before we wrap this up?
I think that creativity gets short shrift in business communications. And that's one reason people don't tell stories too much because they don't wanna be too creative, but it is what gets remember. So I always advise people to take five minutes a day or better 15 minutes a day to be creative. Whether that's writing something or doodling something or writing a silly poem. It's really important to give your mind that space because in that space, you'll get ideas. The ideas you need and the ideas you want do not come when you're hunkered down over the keyboard and I was like, I've got, get an idea. It come when you're thinking about something else. Oh, that's the thing I need to say. So find... We're all type A people, business, row, row, row, row, move, do it, but find some quiet, find five minutes where you can turn that part of your brain off and listen to the other part of your brain.
I think that is a fantastic advice for everyone. I appreciate your time, Elaine. This was fascinating, really interesting and so many great takeaways for people. So thank you for sharing so openly and I look forward to seeing you again sometime soon.
Well, that will be lovely. Thank you, Celine.
Thanks for joining me today on the Leading Through Crisis Podcast. If you enjoyed this conversation, please take a minute to rate and review us on your podcast app. If you're interested in learning more about any of our guests, you can find us online at www.leadingthroughcrisis.ca.