It’s not often I talk with a guest who was the agent for a world-class athlete. That makes Parker Lee very interested in high performance – he discovered that it’s the brain, not the way you train, that makes a difference.
Parker is now the Global Managing Partner at Territory, a strategy, innovation, transformation and story consultancy.
Teams that work in hybrid ways can have a lot more difficulty connecting when working remotely, but this conversation brought powerful tools for leaders.
We talked a lot about the power of storytelling to effect change, and to help teams engage.
Parker kindly shared three types of story we can tap into in hybrid workplace leadership – the ecosystem, process and comparison story types. For example, the ecosystem story is about ‘Where am I and what is happening here?’ The process story is about how: ‘How do I solve a problem, or navigate a situation?’ And the comparison story is an important one for convincing people – for example by comparing pain and gain.
We also chatted about the Work Forward movement, which is a global collective of hundreds of people who have been exploring how work can be done better. Work Forward has published a set of tools and articles that team leaders will find useful for helping their teams re-set their collaboration and the way they work.
This podcast will interest any leader looking for ideas on how to work better in the hybrid world of work.
“A message sent is not a message received.” Parker Lee
Key moments
1:12 – How Parker moved from being a sports and entertainment agent to storytelling
4:52 – Parker’s pioneering role in social media engagement
7:24 – Discovering the impact of storytelling with Obama
8:08 – Misconceptions about storytelling
10:49 – The premise of “Work forward”
14:06 – What workplaces need in order to become high-performing
17:25 – How having organisation-wide clarity of the vision is imperative to employee performance
19:16 – Why messages don’t resonate despite leadership’s best efforts
22:43 – Shortcuts to making communications most effective for transformation and change management
28:29 – The wider picture of storytelling
33:22 – Parker’s book as a playbook for growth and innovation
Connect with Parker
To discover Parker’s book, visit Amazon and search The Art of Opportunity: How to Build Growth and Ventures Through Strategic Innovation and Visual Thinking or use this direct link (which is not an affiliate link)
Or find out more about Territory
Resources mentioned in the show
Carol Dweck – The Power of Believing That You Can Improve
To access the Hybrid Collaboration tools and other tools, articles and the foundation of the Work Forward movement go to https://www.workforward.co/ and click ‘Resources’
Workplace Makers – the podcast about people building workplaces that attract a crowd
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