Client Challenge

Stony Brook Medicine’s Chief Marketing Officer had a common challenge among those who serve internal ‘customers’: having customer meetings in which the Marketing staff didn’t feel their recommendations came through as hoped, and their recommendations were often questioned or deferred rather than approved. He was interested in training and coaching towards the goal of creating more impactful presentations to help speed understanding and approvals among their diverse stakeholders including health system senior leadership, service line leads, and site administrators.

He faced another common challenge: building a shared understanding of gaps prior to training. Naturally it’s helpful if all participants entered training and coaching with a similar perspective on where gains could be made to increase participation and learning uptake.

Our Approach

Our first step was to assess the proficiency of the current staff using our proprietary assessment tool. Each participating leader submitted a recent presentation meant to drive a decision to our team for review. After extensive individual review we prepared and delivered an assessment report to the leaders and staff members identifying specific areas of proficiency and development opportunities.

The assessment is a very useful way to motivate students before the start of our training program; it serves as a detailed explanation of the skills we develop, and is often helpful in illustrating they have opportunities to learn and grow by leaning in on the training. Finally, the assessment language is carefully designed to be specific, actionable, and respectful in tone so that students arrive for training curious and open to learning.

Our Business Storytelling training workshop can be adjusted from 6.5 to 8 hours, and is more easily accomplished over 2 days to provide the necessary rest to incorporate the learning, but also balance training with daily work responsibilities.

The first half of the workshop started by building an understanding of the importance of being a trusted advisor: looking for business insights and perspectives that make the presentation more valuable to the audience (especially executives). We continued with an explanation of the value of story arcs in keeping the attention of the audience. We moved to the techniques of sequencing insights and narrative beats together over the story arc, and how to express all of these building blocks in a storyboard.

For the 2nd half of the workshop we discussed how to turn the storyboard into a presentation deck, incorporating good visual design and data proof points.  An important part of this section is establishing a framework for workflow: building future storyboards and decks in an efficient, collaborative process with the minimum amount of work necessary to have great results.

Finally we discussed how to use storytelling techniques in project management and story-powered stakeholder listening sessions.

Throughout the 2 days we wove small group activities and games to keep the energy flowing and to make sure the students enjoyed themselves.

The Impact

The Chief Marketing Officer, our client, received strong positive feedback from his staff. “This is not what I thought this was going to be at all,” said one of his leaders. “This is valuable to anyone, and I can easily see how this will help me.”

Stony Brook continues to use the Storytelling Help Desk coaching sessions to work with us on their presentations.