At Facebook, Don Faul and his team faced one of the more goliath tasks anyone in tech has ever faced. It was his job, as VP of Online Operations, to ensure a good experience for the site’s hundreds of millions of users — including responding to reports of abuse, flagged content, and other bad experiences. This boiled down to supporting his intrepid team members — sometimes spending entire days dealing with the toughest of human issues — to do their best work and stay motivated against overwhelming odds. The skill that made the critical difference: Being able to tell good stories.
Advice is Cheap — Context is Priceless
It’s not something that came naturally to him either. He had spent the first five years of his career as a Platoon Commander in the U.S. Marine Corps. — an environment that didn’t exactly encourage emotional vulnerability. It was only through his work at Google and then especially Facebook where the importance of empathy and admitting failure took hold, and he poured hours of practice into relaying his experiences to inspire others.
“Whenever I meet with new leaders, I always talk about their responsibility to inspire people — to tap into that intrinsic motivation to be there and work hard,” says Faul. “We’re fortunate to work in an industry where meaningful work is getting done, and people badly want their work to be meaningful. Stories connect the two. It’s the skill every leader needs to learn.”
In this exclusive article, Faul shares the nuts and bolts tactics of influential storytelling he’s learned at Google, Facebook and as Head of Operations at Pinterest (he’s the first to admit he’s still learning) — and the three types of stories every manager and startup founder should be able to tell fluently.