Share Your Story at Work. Seriously.
“So, tell us your second greatest fear.”
This question was asked during a staff off-site retreat when I was sharing a personal story about my life journey. Part of our time of story sharing included a “hot seat,” when others could ask questions about yourself and your journey. When Daniel asked about my second greatest fear, everyone laughed--we were all a bit baffled and wondered why he would ask about the second greatest instead of the greatest fear. He said, “I want to get personal and vulnerable, but not too personal and vulnerable.”
I appreciated his forethought in not asking about my greatest fear (it has a bit to do with disappointing others and existential despair…you know what? I won’t get into it), but I did share my second greatest fear of tropical centipedes (they come straight up from hell). Once we started sharing our stories and answering hot seat questions, we genuinely began bonding as a team, and understanding each other in ways it would be impossible to during task-oriented meetings and poring over spreadsheets together.
The tendency in most organizations is to use an off-site or corporate retreat for planning purposes, maybe long-term goal setting or vision casting, which is certainly a valuable use of time and resources. Sometimes, even, there will be a few hours set aside for personality assessments like Strengthsfinder, DISC, and Enneagram, which can offer insights about how people work and provide understanding of co-workers. However, too often there is lip service paid to exploring who people are and no real thorough sharing to facilitate greater understanding and a depth of relationship. While taking time to share stories and get to know one another might feel like a waste of time or even incredibly scary, it can be invaluable to any team. Gaining insight about co-workers will increase collaboration and team unity as well as helping individuals understand why others do what they do.
Unfortunately, in the workplace, we rarely share what’s going on beneath the surface. The unspoken expectation is that you park everything at the door, put on your game face and keep things light and professional. But leaving part of yourself behind when arriving at work comes at a cost, including to productivity. The more preoccupied we are with what we can’t bring to work, the less focused we’ll be at work (even when we think we’re good at hiding it…emotions always find a way to leak out).
People who work together need to know and understand one another, and very often this means sharing more about who we are and how we feel, including feelings that might create some vulnerability. Taking time to hear and know one another’s story pays dividends down the road in working relationships because the work place can become a safe place where strong emotions are able to be expressed. When strong feelings can’t be expressed, they fester and are acted out, often in unhealthy ways. Committing company time to giving people the opportunity to simply talk openly about themselves can improve communication, decrease misunderstanding and free up positive energy—it might even be fun! Give me one good reason why you wouldn’t want that in your workplace. Just one. I’ll wait. Okay, fine, I’ll give you one, because it might be too awesome!
Beyond providing people with a safe space to share about themselves, a time of hearing and sharing stories can also open doors to help develop a much greater understanding and compassion for others. Bea Chestnut writes in The 9 Types of Leadership, “When we have more insight into and empathy for the worldviews of the people we work with, we can more easily accept them as they are and manage our expectations and responses to them. Truly understanding the struggles of the worldviews of others makes it easier to feel empathy for them, and to hold their value, even when they interpret the world very differently than we do.”
It isn’t easy work to share who we are with our co-workers because acknowledging any level of vulnerability is challenging. Back when I was working with my previous staff, by the end of our time sharing stories we all felt drained, but also excited that we had truly learned so much about one another. The goal was not to push us to a place of feeling uncomfortable, but to invite us to learn—about ourselves and each other. We discovered tremendous rewards to creating safety and understanding among any workplace team, including developing emotional skills critical to performance like empathy and resilience, and the crucial realization that we’re all in this together.
Tropical centipede. So scary, right?
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