Show financial leadership via the art of storytelling

Think about people who have captured your attention with a great story. How did the narrative influence your connection to that person and help you understand the wisdom and insights they were sharing with you?

When most people hear the word “storytelling,” they think about movies, novels, theater and folklore. But storytelling has many practical applications for accountants. As financial professionals, we can use storytelling to connect financial data to real-world scenarios, customer needs, and industry trends. By doing so, those connections become more vivid for the listener and easier to understand. Our profession is so used to talking in numbers that we sometimes forget to explain the story that those numbers are telling us. As a financial leader, you can use storytelling to engage and inform your audience on a deeper level and become a better business partner for your clients.

When an organization veers off track, accountants must become truth-tellers who hold the organization accountable to its mission. That means setting reasonable guidelines. It also means throwing out the script and not letting an unnecessary process kill creativity. By the way, a firm’s best storytellers are often not in the executive suite. They are often the employees closest to the action and on the front lines of service. 

In my new book, Green Shades: Accountants Aren’t Supposed To Die This Way, the protagonist Dex McCord is a masterful storytelling CPA who solves problems in unique ways. He is confident without being arrogant. He has a gift for building relationships and gaining the trust of all kinds of people wherever he goes in the world. McCord has learned how to use storytelling to tap into people’s emotional side to get his points across in a way that just running the numbers cannot. 

7 storytelling hints

As an accountant, how do you tell a compelling story? Here are a seven storytelling hints:

1. Know your audience. This first step is crucial. It helps you determine how long the story should be and which topics they can relate to.
2. Make them care about the characters in your story.
3. Set the scene with visuals that they can almost feel.
4. Know your punchline or point that you need to make.
5. Engage your audience with energy. Let them see how passionate you are about a topic.
6. Use tension, conflict and discourse to demonstrate the need for urgency.
7. End with a heartfelt and impactive conclusion.

During one of my IPO roadshows in the late 1990s, the CEO of my employer at the time was a great communicator who mastered the seven story-telling tactics above. He told a great “story” to potential investors about the dangers of Y2K and the risks of a catastrophic technology meltdown due to the quickly approaching Year 2000 changeover from 1999. He would tell potential investors that several Fortune 500 chief technology officers were scrambling to find talent to correct the Y2K problem but faced a significant shortage of IT professionals in the U.S. due to work visa issues.

Our company in Barbados had a new near-shore IT staffing solution with over 700 software engineers from India at a cost-effective price. Those engineers would save the day for many of our CEO’s chief technology officer friends. I got to see firsthand how sharing compelling stories with your audience makes it easier for people to relate to you. As a result, you can form better working relationships and secure significant investor capital.

Likewise, in my book Green Shade$, I try to grab the reader’s attention right from Page One with a compelling story: “A public accounting audit partner was being pulled by his feet behind a new Aquariva Super, an Italian speedboat capable of 41 knots. The ski rope was taut. His hands were tied behind his back and his head was bouncing off the water” (see excerpt of Chapter 1 at www.CPA-Author.com). The reader naturally wants to know who the audit partner is, and why he’s being dragged behind a speedboat. Is he a thrill-seeker or just being tortured? If he’s being tortured, then why? Did this incident have something to do with his job? My hope as an author and storyteller is that most readers will stay engaged long enough to find out. 

Storytelling builds trust

Storytelling is also about building trust. As accountants, how can we expect people to trust us and be influenced by us when we don’t let them know who we are? We should create stories that demonstrate our trustworthiness in different situations by adding personal characteristics that prove our trustworthiness. For example, we can share a story about previous stakeholders who trusted us and who had success. Or we can share personal volunteer experiences that demonstrate our willingness to serve others. It’s imperative that you make the connection with your personal story before trying to earn trust.

CPAs, accountants and auditors often need to drive qualitative and quantitative outcomes by using data to tell their story. It’s common that finance mavens use storytelling to guide their associates to the “why’s” and “benefits” of an idea. Your story should start with a vision or principal change. From that vision, you can create components that can be used to move the audience toward a movement. The goal is to make people feel more comfortable and committed about a decision or process based on numbers and dollars. One good storytelling method taught by my employer, the American Management Association, to finance organizations around the world is SPAR:

• Situation: Identify a situation that will be the central theme for the story.
• Problem: Link a problem that is associated or resulted from a situation. 
• Action: Add the solution and actions that you took to remedy the problem, keep it clear and concise.
• Results: Find the return on investment, which speaks to your organization’s focus on solving a problem.

The SPAR model enables accountants to tell the truth first and then allow objections to be aired later in an organic manner. 

Good storytelling is everyone’s responsibility and co-creating stories are among a company’s greatest assets. So go ahead, create an energetic story that galvanizes your fellow employees to action and motivates them to get on board with a vision. As Franklin Roosevelt said, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”