American View: Which Stories Are Most Effective at Teaching Important Lessons?

Human Resources27 Jun 2024

It’s summer intern season again! WOO-HOO! If you’re fortunate enough to get one, congratulations! Training an intern can be a richly fulfilling experience for both of you. Offering a bright-eyed and inexperienced university student a hand up into the working world is good for your soul. I like to think of intern training as “fast-forwarding” their first ten years of white-collar epiphanies. Bypass the humiliating failures of your naïve 20s and move on to your more mature, thoughtful, and cynical 30s. Wish I’d had someone to do that for me as a junior paper pusher…

Anyway, when teaching my fellow corpos how to train and mentor their summer interns, I stress how essential storytelling is for making important lessons “stick.” We’re a storytelling species; our ancestors shared myths and anecdotes around the campfire; we do the same, except we do it around the coffee machine and in “collaboration rooms” before meetings start. Our young protégés will remember the stories we shared with them more clearly than the core messages that our stories were meant to impart … but those messages will remain through the positive emotional resonance of the story that explained them.

I recommend that trainers focus on personal stories, especially ones that describe mistakes rather than triumphs. These are the “no *#&4 there I was …” tales that squaddies traditionally share on the smoke deck behind the barracks after last formation. Stories that produce sympathetic laughter and humanize the teller. Stories that get passed on like folklore from old timers to “new guys” long after the original subject of the tale has moved on.

As an example of this sort of story, one of my favourites illustrates why a worker shouldn’t attempt to do everything on their own. It’s better to swallow one’s pride and ask for help to ensure the job gets done without unnecessary drama. Trying to do everything yourself can end in ignominy.

In this story, the “no *#&4 there I was …” setup takes us to a small town in Germany. My father was teaching his physical therapy program to a school in the rural northwest and had invited the entire extended family to come along. I’d never been to Germany so I wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity.

Of course, we couldn’t participate in my father’s program, as access was limited to the educational staff who’d paid for the seminar. So, each family spent each workday playing tourist. On the day when my tale took place, I’d driven my immediately family up to Wilhelmshaven to visit the Deutsches Marinemuseum. Recommended stop if you get the chance and like warships.

I’ve always wondered how my life would’ve played out differently if the Navy recruiter hadn’t taken the day off when I went to enlist.

Anyway, on the long drive back to our lodging we decided to stop at a grocer to get fixings for dinner. I couldn’t tell you exactly where we were; around an hour outside of the community we were staying in. My wife spotted an Aldi so we stopped … and only then noticed that our boys were sound asleep in the back. Since I’d been driving, I desperately wanted to get out and stretch so I volunteered to do the shopping while she watched the kids.

If you’re thinking “this sounds like the most pedestrian experience ever,” yeah. Sure was. There aren’t any homicidal clowns or bloviating terrorists in this story. No exploding blimps. No dogfighting jets. Just … grocery shopping. In fact, it wasn’t the shopping itself that created the problem. That came about when a very hungry narrator insisted on getting too many interesting items. Around three times as much stuff as I’d intended. Don’t shop when you’re hungry, y’all.

Despite not speaking German, the purchase itself was efficient and drama-free. It wasn’t until I tried to carry the dozen or so overstuffed plastic shopping bags back to our hire car that everything went to hell. I had 4-5 bags in each hand and was hugging the last few bags to my ample torso. I was sure I could get everything to the car in one sortie.

I’d barely made it outside when a bag of easily breakable items began to slip. Hands full, I couldn’t grab hold of it. I tried leaning backwards to keep the misbehaving bag in place. That got us another 4-5 paces. Then the contents of the bag started to wiggle their way out individually. I twisted to the side, hoping gravity would assist; I assumed the escaping groceries would slide back into the bag and stay put. I was wrong.

Slowly – horrifyingly – my “family sized” bag of paprika crisps ^[1] started to slither down my torso like a prisoner low-crawling to freedom. I turned, twisted, and bent backwards like I was having a seizure, but no matter what I did that bloody bag kept slinking earthwards. I watched in horror as my treasured snack prepared to hurl itself against the asphalt as if to end its misery.

If I’d been smart, I would’ve consolidated all those standard shopping bags into one huge bag for safer hauling. Alas …

I was irrationally desperate to stop this from happening. The key word here is “irrationally.” Realistically, the worst that could’ve happened was that a bunch of crisps would’ve broken. They bag wouldn’t have exploded, and the crisps wouldn’t be ruined. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. Nonetheless, I’d promised my wife that I could handle the shopping alone and didn’t want to appear ineffectual. I could see her watching me from the car, so I doubled down on my commitment to complete the haul in one go.

Then, horror of horrors, my beloved paprika crisps made their move! They bounced off my inner arm and used the momentum to slide over some still-bagged jars of pasta sauce. As they shot downward, freefalling towards crisp oblivion, I made the only move I thought I had left: I put all my energy into a tight and low right hook. I was determined to pin the top of the crisp bag against my body.

The manoeuvre worked! In less than two seconds I’d successfully pinned the bag …

…

… against my groin.

…

[sigh]

…

I had saved the bag, but in the process managed to clobber my own testicles. Dead on. Confirmed critical hit. Couldn’t have done it better if I were Chuck Norris starring in “Rogue Genital Death Match.” Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever thrown a more effective punch in my life. My world exploded in pain, and I doubled over, gasping and nearly blacking out. I wanted to curl up in a foetal position and die.

“TELL ME YOU CAPTURED THAT ON CCTV!”

While I did manage to transfer the crisp bag to my teeth for the remainder of the journey ^[2] the pain only got worse. Somehow I managed to waddle the rest of the way across the car park without faceplanting.

My wife triggered the electric tailgate, allowing me to bask in my entire family’s raucous laughter as they took obscene delight in my *#&-up. We all cried together as a family;, coming together in a profoundly educational moment. That is to say, three people howling with amusement and one of us was grimly trying to not vomit from the pain. Good times …

Just for the record, my wife and kids have never let me forget this event. The car park sack tap episode became one of the (if not the) most-enjoyed highlights of our trip. It’s come up in every holiday story. My kids made sure that everyone in their lives heard the story. To this day, if I bring a bag of barbeque crisps home from the grocers my family will remind me to carry it with both hands and to treat it like it wants to murder me. ^[3]

The leadership lesson here should be obvious: don’t try to do everything yourself. Learn to ask for and to accept help. Don’t be too proud to delegate. Plan for contingencies and know your limitations. More importantly, be aware that your instinctual reactions are often counterproductive. Our urge to act, now can be just as bad for a project as the prompting issue itself, especially when we act before we understand the risks involved.

This is project management 101 stuff, yeah; remember, though, that your interns probably don’t have any corpo experience. Everything that we take for granted as “common sense” knowledge in the business world is new to them. They need to learn the basics, but it would be far better to learn them through shared stories than to learn them by making humiliating preventable mistakes. Our job as trainers and mentors is to impart those lessons clearly and early.

Are personal stories like the car park sack tap episode embarrassing? Of course they are! The natural embarrassment from retelling the tale is more than made up by by the fact that it’s hilarious. More importantly, the funniest stories are the ones that will stick with your interns long after they’ve forgotten the strictly academic lessons that they learned from us. We’re a storytelling people. Those stories that demand to be re-told carry with them lessons that will stick around long after the initial telling is over and will spread far beyond our immediate circle of influence.

^[1] I became addicted to German paprika crisps on this trip. They stuck me as 90% identical to American barbeque crisps, but just different enough to delight. Not that I should be munching huge gobs of crisps but … well … they’re better for you than most normal American vices.
^[2] Mostly to keep myself from screaming.
^[3] See previous, re: SIGH.

Human Resources