As we sit in 2023, and another squirrely year of disruption and economic uncertainty, many are feeling enough is enough, and next year is THE year we have to get things right. This would seem easy if we didn’t face the reality that no matter the company size, business leaders in every industry are forced to reimagine success while being asked to do more with fewer resources.
We’ve heard from many of our clients that they’ve been in survival mode for the past few years and are just now coming up for air. This period of uncertainty and instability has shed light on how critical people are to the resilience and success of any operation. Understanding how each person contributes to the business, including their talents and transferable skills, is now table stakes as next year’s success will require agility, collaboration, and the ability to make faster (and smarter) decisions.
Let’s admit it… now more than ever, it’s become a business imperative to squeeze every dollar you can out of your learning budgets and leverage training to develop skill-building that can flex and adapt to the hard-to-predict needs of business moving forward. And just as important? Developing a skill set that gives everyone a chance to be seen and heard – no matter their role or function (hint: give your DEI efforts a boost).
So, if you had to make one training bet going into 2024… where do you want to be a year from now? Here’s a tip: think about what it would mean to unite your teams with a common language and framework to communicate their strategy, ideas, and data with clarity.
After all, when people aren’t rowing in the same direction, it leads to disorganization, lack of productivity, and rework of messages. It can halt decision-making and hinder your team’s ability to demonstrate their value to the business. Ultimately, these missed opportunities to influence means missed opportunities to elevate your team’s reputation and become trusted advisors or change agents.
One critical skill that’s increasingly being recognized as essential for capabilities fluency is storytelling. Storytelling can help teams stay on message and in control of the conversation, all while keeping their audience’s needs front and center. It’s a skill that anyone can learn and use every day as they progress in their career. If budgets are tight going into next year, storytelling training might be the secret sauce to help amplify and synergize your teams across ALL their other training and L&D efforts.
And the best part? Storytelling can help teams who have been newly thrust into the leadership spotlight find their footing and build confidence to communicate effectively with key business stakeholders. What better way to establish trust and credibility within the business while also building up your team’s reputation?
Need some proof?
At the start of the pandemic in 2020, a new leadership team at Kraft Heinz, the world’s fifth-largest food and beverage company, set its focus on developing talent and critical expertise in their Customer Development Organization (CDO). The team is tasked with providing a deep understanding of the marketplace to Kraft Heinz retail partners who crave insights into their customers’ rapidly evolving and changing purchase behaviors.
To arm the team with communication skills, Kraft Heinz realized they needed to tell a more compelling story to ensure conversations with retail partners were both timely and relevant. The Presentation Company (TPC)’s Crafting Strategic Visual Stories provided the storytelling framework to enable the team to share compelling insights, and Presenting Data Visually complemented the storytelling skills to teach key principles of how to share data with actionable insights and meaningful takeaways. More recently, Kraft Heinz piloted TPC’s newly reimagined Influencing with Visuals workshop to complete their storytelling learning journey.
After delivering successful workshop pilots to the CDO, the Kraft Heinz Transformation Office requested a rollout of TPC’s storytelling workshops to the entire U.S. sales organization.
The training has been so successful that Kraft Heinz executive leadership has infused TPC’s storytelling concepts and approach into everything they do, and the entire organization is now held accountable for using these core competencies.
Get skills that lead to impactful organizational change
If you’re ready to make a bet on your people in 2024, consider storytelling training. We’ve created the ultimate 3-part learning journey that addresses today’s most critical business challenges and provides teams with a common language and framework to communicate their strategy, ideas, and data with clarity. We also ground everyone in a new mindset: Story first, visuals second. Our curriculum is designed to flow from one workshop to the next… with skills, tools, and coaching that build upon each other and travel with you on the journey.