I’m a firm believer that compelling storytelling is the key to outstanding talent acquisition. While there is an increased focus on content marketing in our I sector, I fear we are a long way behind other industries.
Time for some outside help
I am delighted to have Shane Snow as this week’s guest on the show. Shane is a global best selling author who has written for publications which include Wired, Forbes, Fast Company and The New Yorker. He is also a business storytelling genius and founder of content marketing platform Contently.
Shane shares his thoughts on how we can improve storytelling for recruiting. We also discuss his new book Dream Teams which already has my vote for business book of the year.
In the interview we discuss:
• How business storytelling works and why it is so important
• Using stories to attract great talent
• The power of emotions
• The four elements of great storytelling
• Sharing stories in the recruitment process
• Dream teams and how to build them
• The power of cognitive friction
Shane also reveals which is his favourite Dream Teams story.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Smart Recruiters, the hiring success Company Smart Recruiters is an enterprise grade talent acquisition suite designed for hiring success. Move beyond applicant tracking with a modern platform that provides everything you need to attract, select and hire the best talent. From candidate relationship management, sourcing and recruitment marketing to screening, selection and offer management experience. A talent acquisition suite with a user experience that candidates, hiring managers and recruiters all love. Companies from Kelly Services to Visa to Bosch leverage Smart recruiters to achieve hiring success and expand their business. Visit smart recruiters@www.smartrecruiters.com to find out why companies across the globe consider them the number one ATS replacement.
Matt Alder [00:01:14]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 141 of the Recruiting Future podcast. I’m a strong believer that effective storytelling is the key to outstanding talent acquisition. Whilst there’s an increased focus on content marketing in our sector, I fear we’re a long way behind other industries. Time for some outside help. I’m delighted to have Shane Snow as this week’s guest. Shane is a global best selling author who’s written for publications which include Wired, Forbes, Fast Company, and the New Yorker. He’s also a business storytelling genius and founder of content marketing platform Contently. In the interview, Shane shares his thoughts on how he can improve storytelling for recruiting. We also discuss his new book Dream Teams, which already has my vote for Business Book of the year. Enjoy. Hi Shane and welcome to the podcast.
Shane Snow [00:02:17]:
Thank you for having me. I’m happy to be here, so it’s.
Matt Alder [00:02:20]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Shane Snow [00:02:26]:
Yes. My name’s Shane Snow. I’m originally from a small town in Idaho in the Western U.S. and now I live in New York City. And what I do, the way I’ve been describing it lately is my dad’s an engineer and I grew up taking apart car engines and other various things and learning how they work and putting them back together. So a lot of fixing cars and fixing plumbing and all sorts of things and and when I decided that I wanted to be a journalist, I kind of decided that that’s what I was going to do, but with topics about life and I’ve mostly focused on business and science journalism and increasingly those have converged where I’m really interested in picking apart how human behavior works and how that can make us better in business or in life. In the meantime, I’ve started a couple of businesses. One that’s been pretty successful. It’s called Contently, and that’s been running the last eight years with a couple of partners of mine. And I have used journalism and the same kind of take things apart and put them back together thing as an excuse to become a better businessman. And I’ve written a few books out of that. So what I love is exploring things, understanding how they work, and then teaching people about them. I like bringing people along the journey with me and. Yeah, that’s how I describe it.
Matt Alder [00:03:50]:
Fantastic. And I want to come back and talk about your latest book a little bit later because I think it’s very relevant to everyone listening. But before I do, I just wanted to explore the theme of business storytelling a little bit further. I think it’s something that we’re talking about a little bit in the recruitment space, but perhaps not as much as in other areas of business. What is business storytelling? And. And why is it so powerful?
Shane Snow [00:04:16]:
So this is the subject of my second book. It’s called the Storytelling Edge. And the fundamental premise is that human beings have built into their brains this capacity to imagine and to dream and to use stories as a way to remember things and to care about things. And it’s built into our brains. And there’s all sorts of really fascinating things that go on. When you hear a story or you watch a story or you experience a story, your brain lights up at five times the rate of a chart or some statistic or some information. If that information is presented in the form of a story, what your brain is doing is it’s filling in all these details. It’s imagining that you’re there, and that helps you remember things. So anything that’s presented to you in the form of a story, you’re just going to remember better. But there’s something else that’s. That’s really interesting, which is that there’s this little neurochemical that not terribly long ago, in the last decade or so, neuroscientists discovered has something to do with storytelling. This neurochemical is called oxytocin. And basically it’s the thing that your brain synthesizes when someone shows you a kindness or gives you a hug or you have a child, or it’s your brain telling you that you should care about someone. It’s an empathy chemical. And what they discovered when they put people, they scan their brains and have them watch movies or advertisements, is that a good story that kind of plays at your emotions, will generate this Oxytocin chemical also. And the upshot is that great stories make you care about things and care about people in ways that you wouldn’t if you just encounter someone. And this has a lot of ramifications for society in general. There’s all these great studies about, you know, we’re naturally nervous around people that are different than us. You know, xenophobia is the fear of strangers. It’s sort of built into our brains because back when we were surviving in tribes, the tribe that didn’t look and act and talk like you was a threat. And so your brain, you know, was cautious around them. But that doesn’t serve us very well today, where, you know, we have the Internet and we live on top of each other, and we need to work with people who are not exactly like us if we want to make progress. It turns out that study after study shows that learning someone’s story, getting to know someone, and using stories as a vehicle to get to know them is a great way for your brain to overcome that natural sort of xenophobic tendency, a great way for you to reduce fear. And so all of this as it has to do with business becomes really interesting, because the line that I always use is, great stories build relationships, and they make people care. That’s what all this science shows us. And you see it in history, and you see it in the data on everything from super bowl commercials that have great stories in them to literature, to these studies about xenophobia. But businesses want to build relationships and make people care. Marketers over the last decade or so have really grabbed onto this idea that stories are a way to get people to care about your brand. But there’s also the only people that you care about are not customers and people. From a marketing perspective, if you’re running a business, you care about your employees, you care about attracting great talent, you care about people caring about your company. Storytelling has become this tool that some smart companies have started using as a way to get their employees to engage with each other in better ways and to get people actually care enough to seek out employment at companies. It turns your company into a place where. Where there’s relationships and where people care. So that’s the whole storytelling for business thing. There’s all sorts of ways that stories. If you’re about building relationships and making people care, there’s all sorts of places where that can be advantageous. Just regular presentations and sales and all that. But really, marketing and recruiting and retention are the areas where I’ve done a particular amount of work in studying Just how much a good habit of telling great stories and opening up using stories can help make things better?
Matt Alder [00:08:25]:
And what can companies do to improve their storytelling? Is there a formula or an essence that would make these stories more powerful and help them achieve their objectives?
Shane Snow [00:08:35]:
So there’s the elements of what make a normal story into a great story. And I can talk about those. There’s also kind of the underlying thing is that the more that you can identify emotions that you have felt before that you share, the more you’ll be able to make that connection. Storytelling is very much about getting your brain to fire in all the cylinders, and emotion is one of them. What I like to talk about is what makes for a good story is four things. The first is relatability. Stories that have something that you can grab onto that, hey, I identify with this, or. Or I see what’s happening here, or this isn’t a place of familiarity. That’s important to get people to care at all. So that has to do with stories about people and characters and people you can identify with in some way tend to be a good starting point. The second is novelty. A good story is taking you somewhere you haven’t been before or showing you something that you haven’t seen before. And that balance of familiarity and novelty is really where a lot of great creativity comes from. So having that in mind, there’s. The next one that I talk about is fluency, which is sort of this underrated thing that I think, if nothing else, when you’re telling a story, if you think about this, it will help sort of whether you’re writing or speaking or whatever. Fluency is about making it easy on the audience to understand. So we tend to say that or think that great writers use big words and great storytellers have really complex narratives. And turns out that the most popular stories tend to be at lower reading levels, and they tend to be easier to get through. I always talk about Star Wars. Star wars, in part, was so great because it moved so quickly. And, you know, at a time when movies sort of took their time between cuts and scenes, Star wars pulled you through, and you felt like, you know, you’re experiencing this and you don’t have to think about things. And so writing that has sort of difficult to understand vocabulary or sentence structure or anything like that, it’s sort of getting complex because that’s what we think is good writing that actually tends to be harder to get through. You’re focusing on the mechanics, not on the story. That’s fluency. And then the final thing that really makes the difference between a good story and an amazing story is tension. This is something that Aristotle talked about. That tension in a story is the gap between what is and what could be. And the storyteller, your job is to sort of establish that here’s what could be and here’s what is. And in between, that is the adventure that the storyteller goes on. Whether you’re talking about a business case study, we want to do this and we need to figure it out, or you’re talking about Star wars or the Odyssey or Romeo and Juliet, what they want is so far away from where they are. And the story in between is what keeps you hooked and makes you care. So those are kind of elements of stories. And in a business context, a lot of times, you know, you’re. You’re not telling the most dramatic stories, but. And that’s where you know, the relatability and the emotion comes in. I would say, to really answer your question, there’s little ways where I think just using a story instead of what we’re used to doing can help. And an example I’ll use is in job interviews. As an interviewer, I would rather not do this guessing game of do they have the right answer to all of the checklist things? I would rather dig into someone’s story. I’d rather get to know who they are and how they think and how they tick at a certain point. And also for me, by the time someone’s interviewing with me, they’ve checked enough boxes that we know they can probably do the job. But I like asking questions in interviews that get people to open up and share a story. So when was a time in your life when you changed your mind about something difficult or what’s something that you know how to do that most people don’t know how to do? And how did you learn how to do it? Things like that or I love actually, what do you read? What did you love reading growing up? Things that get people to start to tell their story. And this does a few things. One, it helps you to understand a little bit of how they think and get at what’s underneath the resume. But it also. It helps you to like the person. And it gives them a little bit of implicit permission when they walk in the door on the first day of work to kind of bring their whole self, like you’re telling them through this process that what you care about is who they are, and you want them to bring that. You don’t want them to fit into some conformist thing. You actually Appreciating the fact that they have something unique to bring. So that’s one example. You know, another example would be if you’re on the other side of that, if you’re. You’re doing. You’re being interviewed and they ask you, you know, well, you know, how do you do X, Y or Z? Instead of just answering the question, answer it in the form of a story of how you learned it or how you did it or how you observed it. Because one, they’ll remember that better, and two, you’re actually showing a more sort of deep understanding of what they’re talking about than just if you have the exact right answers to the questions. Another context would be you’re giving a presentation to your company about some internal thing, goals or values or whatever it is. Start the presentation with a story, sort of force yourself to do that. One, you’re going to get people’s attention. Two, they’re going to remember. And three, especially if it’s a personal story, you might just get people to start caring a little bit more about what you have to say. These are the kind of things where even if you don’t have to think too much about, oh, is there enough tension? Is there enough, you know, novelty or whatever? As long as you’re starting in the place where a story is the vehicle through which you can share an idea, that will also get people to care and to develop empathy. Just having that in mind as you’re engaging throughout the, you know, the business week, that becomes really powerful as a habit over time.
Matt Alder [00:14:37]:
So your latest book, Dream Teams, was published a couple of months ago. I’ve just finished reading it, and I have to say it’s absolutely fantastic. But far be it from me to tell everyone what it’s about. Could you give us a sense of what Dream Teams is about and why you wrote it?
Shane Snow [00:14:54]:
Sure. And there’s a tie in to the storytelling stuff here, too. A couple of them. I wrote this book in part because I saw my role in the company that I had co founded. I saw my role change from someone who’s doing a lot of work. I’m making decisions, I’m being creative. I’m doing things to someone whose job is primarily about picking people and helping them to do things. Basically, I was turning into a manager, into a leader, and I was feeling anxious about this. I wanted to understand what makes the difference between a team leader that can get the most out of their team and someone who can’t, and what are the right kinds of people to put on the team and how does a group of people solve problems better together rather than on their own? And I started examining some of the common advice and wisdom and myths we have around human collaboration and teamwork. It sort of got out of hand, and I was suddenly looking at not just business teams. I was looking at collaborations throughout history, from buddy cops in the 1800s to social movements in the 20th century and everything in between. Gangs of pirates teaming up with American Indians to save the city of New Orleans. These awesome stories of underdog collaborators adding up to more of the sum of their parts. And I examined the psychology and the new science that we know now about human interaction and collaboration, and I wanted to kind of pick apart that engine, so to speak. And so what the book turned into is this exploration of incredible teams and what makes them tick and what makes the difference between a team that breaks through and a team that breaks down. It turns out that most of the time, when you put two heads together, they’re not better than one. They’re just as smart as the smartest one or the most dominant or powerful head. But sometimes two heads can be better than one. And the secret is those two heads have to be different enough that they can add up to something more and not just be only as smart as the smartest one. And they have to engage in the right ways. They need what’s called cognitive friction. You need to be able to smash ideas together, and then you need to also be able to adapt and change because of that cognitive friction. That’s sort of the underlying framework. And then I explore all these different kinds of teams in and out of business and all sorts of industries and the little things that make them work. And the capstone, speaking of the storytelling thing is the chapter on social movements and how if you need a lot, if you’re trying to solve a problem where you need a lot of people to get on board and you need a lot of people to collaborate. What is the thing that can get people to care? What can help get you the people that you need in order to do something big and important? And I get into the storytelling stuff, sort of in addition to my other book about how it’s not the statistics about injustice that get people to link their arms in March and risk their physical harm and their lives for a cause. It’s the story of a woman who won’t give her seat up on the bus that gets people to actually do the things that are hard and actually come together. I explored that from a psychology perspective and how that actually you see really smart businesses using this as a vehicle to get people to care about things that are important and to actually depressurize the discomfort or the intensity that happens when you do have a lot of people who are very different who come together. An example I’ll use is BlackRock, the big investment firm. They’ve won all of these awards for diversity recruiting, for recruiting lots of demographically diverse people and helping diversify their workforce in terms of all the different dimensions of diversity that the corporate world tends to talk about. But they’ve done a particularly good job of not having that go to waste because they lean into the truth, which is that different people who think differently are going to have conflict, and that actually that conflict can be good as long as it stays about ideas and doesn’t become personal. And they use storytelling interventions essentially to get people to get to know each other personally, to understand each other, and to build empathy so they can have the hard debates, so they can have the difficult conversations and not be afraid of speaking up, which is super cool. So that ends up being a capstone. I’m totally monologuing here, but I’ve been fascinated by all the things that we can learn from this new science that can help us work together better and harness the potential that’s between our different ways of thinking.
Matt Alder [00:19:49]:
Absolutely. No, no, please, monologue away. It’s. It’s fascinating stuff. Just a couple. Couple more questions about that. You mentioned cognitive friction, which I think is a really interesting theme of the book. So, so basically what you’re saying is that a dream team is performing when people are rubbing up against each other and they have different views, and there’s a kind of a friction and a kind of tension. How does a business manage that and actually harness it rather than it tearing the team apart?
Shane Snow [00:20:20]:
So the first thing is understanding that this is where energy comes from. The analogy I use at one point in the book is a rubber band has no potential energy if it’s just laying on the table. But as soon as you stretch it, you add tension to it, you pull it from two directions, then it has all this potential energy. It can go flying if you let go of one end. But at a certain point, you pull too hard and the rubber band snaps, right? And then it has no energy again. And so the job of a leader or the job of a good team is to keep the sort of the discussions around problem solving in this zone where you’re stretching the rubber band but it’s not breaking. So you’re in this zone of possibility where basically, coming back to that, you Know you’re not going to see further than the person who sees the furthest unless you actually combine your different ways of seeing things. And that is naturally going to create that tension, or cognitive friction, as I call it. So understanding that that’s where energy comes from is the starting point. That if you avoid it because you’re afraid of the rubber band snapping, you’re going to lose out on potential. That’s the first step. And inviting different points of view, inviting dissent, becomes really important. And once you start to see it as valuable, you invite it. It hurts less when someone has a different idea than you. But that stuff comes naturally when you have different people. And so you want to manage that thing. But it’s not just about fighting or conflict. It’s about the idea that if you want to solve problems better, you need a diversity of inputs. And those things are going to naturally not line up. And you’re going to need to. To kind of look at them from different angles so that you can see what else is out there. And this can take the form of debate, but it can also. Well, let me start there. Actually, there’s two kinds of arguments, I think. There’s the kind of argument where you’re trying to convince people that you’re right. And either the person you’re arguing with or whoever’s around you think of, like presidential debates, you’re trying to convince people that your way of how you see things is the right way. The other kind of argument is where you’re all trying to find the best outcome. It’s not about who’s right. In fact, ideally you find a different outcome than any one person has thought of. It’s the sort of Hamiltonian ideal of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson go into a room together with very different viewpoints. They come out with a third option. That kind of argument is really interesting and really powerful. So making any kinds of discussion around how should we solve a problem, how should we do this thing better, framing it around this idea that the debate is going to yield the best thing, it’s not going to yield a winner. And then there’s all the little things that you need to do in order to make that happen is moderate the debate so that it’s about ideas, so it doesn’t veer personal, so it stays out of logical fallacy. And also make it so that people’s individual success, their pay, their promotion, their status in the group is not dependent on them being right. It’s dependent on them participating and helping push that ball forward together. Easier said than Done. But there’s also, you know, it’s not always debate, I think, of a good improv comedy troupe where the job is, you know, you’re making up a funny story on the fly. So someone throws something out there, and then everyone has to grab that and twist it and run with it in a way that makes sense. And so you all have different ideas around how you’re going to take this game. If you’ve ever seen Whose Line Is It Anyway? Or any of those improv shows. So someone throws something out there, and then your teammate is supposed to take that and adapt on it. Say, the thing they say is yes. And so you say, whatever it is, oh, Johnny is dead. And you say, yes, and we’re still having his birthday party. And then, well, that’s silly. So someone says, and then we’re going to do this. And it’s sort of building on each other’s ideas. In comedy, it’s really easy because you’re just trying to find jokes. But at work in business, we often say, no, that’s not how things are done, or, no, that’s wrong. But if we start saying, well, what if we explored this. Well, what if we said this idea that seems, on the face of it, out of left field or crazy or not the way that we do things, what if you said, well, for the sake of it, let’s explore this. Let’s say, yes, this is true. What else can we get out of this? And on that journey of exploring, you discover things that actually are useful. So all of that is sort of pulling on the rubber band without it breaking. But it does break. It breaks down when we start to get scared that if we pull that, we might get kicked out of the group. And so we don’t speak up, or if we don’t have the same opinion or we don’t fit sort of the cultural mold, then we’ll be kicked out of the group. Or if we aren’t right, then it’s going to be a problem. Or if someone else is right, then that’s going to be a problem. And so we need to destroy them. All of those things get you out of that mode of pulling together. And so, again, easier said than done. But that’s kind of what the book is about, is about different ways of reinforcing that idea and sort of some strategies for doing that. And how when you really look at history and the science around all this and the math around synergy is backed up by all of our favorite stories of great teams adding up to more and doing the impossible Final question.
Matt Alder [00:25:55]:
There’s obviously lots and lots of stories about great teams in the book. Which is your favorite?
Shane Snow [00:26:00]:
Oh, it’s a hard question. I think that I fell in love with in the very first chapter after the introduction is about buddy cops. And I fell in love with this character in history who I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who read it, so I’ll try and speak a little bit vaguely, but is someone who history has forgotten about, but that the not only was the term private eye coined after her after something she did, but she basically kicked off the private detective industry in the way that we know it. And she was instrumental in saving a life that actually ended up basically saving America. And it’s just this fantastic story of this woman who was brought onto a team of detectives and became the key collaborator in this sort of dream team of crime fighters that then led to this awesome sort of change in the way we think about detective work. I loved this story because it illustrated a few things that I then dug into in a more modern context about the advantages that we get when we start to include people who are outside of who we normally include in our work. In this case, in police work and detective work, it was all men. When they started bringing in women to help solve cases, things got better. The men got smarter, the men got better. And it turns out that that cognitive diversity was really important. But I loved this story that I’m talking about that’s just at the book. If you go to the store, you just want to just read the first few pages of chapter one. You don’t even have to buy it. I think the story is really important, but I don’t want to ruin. There’s sort of a surprise ending.
Matt Alder [00:27:51]:
No, I think you’ve left enough tension and mystery there to make people want to go and do just that. Where can people find you and your books online?
Shane Snow [00:27:59]:
So my name is Shane Snow and that’s my website. Also shanesnow.com and any airport bookstore, Amazon or Barnes and Noble has Dream Teams and my other books you can find on my website.
Matt Alder [00:28:11]:
Shane, thank you very much for talking to me.
Shane Snow [00:28:13]:
Matt, thank you so much.
Matt Alder [00:28:15]:
My thanks to Shane Snow. You can subscribe to this podcast in itunes or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for Recruiting Future in your app store. If you’re a Spotify user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com. on that site, you can also subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about Working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
