Research has found that 70% of workplace mistakes are due to poor communication. As a business leader, you must be able to communicate in ways that people easily understand.

Kevin Rudd, the former Australian PM, was ousted out of his position before he went to the polls due to his poor attempts at communicating with everyday Australians. In this day and age, leaders with poor communicative skills no longer get tolerated.

Sometimes communicating the essence of a story is difficult. Good communicators use stories, metaphors and other figurative language to help everyone understand.

Like a Metaphor

Metaphors provide a way of understanding one thing by getting people to think of another. We learn faster and retain more information when information is related to something interesting and familiar. They also tend to capture people's imagination.

An example of probably the best metaphor writer "in the world" is Jeremy Clarkson from the BBC television show Top Gear. One delightful example is his comment: "It's like driving through Sudan with a suit made of food" (when talking about driving a very stunning looking car that everyone stops to look at).

Communicate in Stories

Our right brain prefers stories and analogies. We remember stories better than if we were just told facts. They provide an emotional connection to information.

To use stories and metaphors effectively, leaders must learn to see the relationships between one thing and another.

Stories can also be used to provide examples of the impact of an employees' actions on others. They are very powerful at changing inappropriate work behaviour.

According to US author and management consultant, Joseph Grenny, a study found that by showing video footage of a child picking up and eating food that had been spilt on a restaurant floor, lazy fast food employees became motivated to clean up the floor immediately after a spill.

Other consequence of employee actions that can be shown in a story format include interviews with gastroenteritis victims who received the illness after contracting it from food made with unwashed hands.

In addition to using stories to explain consequences, they can also be used for real-life examples of staff who have exhibited the right behaviour. Use stories to align staff with the behaviour that you want.

Get Employees to Write Stories

According to "The Wise Leader" an article that featured in Harvard Business Review in May 2011 written by Ikujiro Nomake and Hirotaka Takeuchi, at Mitsui, story-telling is an important criteria during performance reviews. All employees have to tell a story at their annual review about why a goal was important to them and the company, and how it aligned with their values as well as the company's and what good it would do them and the company in the future.

The process of creating, telling and sharing stories has been instrumental in changing Mitsui's culture. It led employees to sell their ideas more persuasively and made them think about the quality of the work they would do before calculating the profits.

While at Canon, the chairman would get everyone to submit their annual business plan by writing a story about how the company could achieve the numerical goals that they had established. Everyone at Canon had to back up the numbers with a narrative.

And at Nordstrom, who are renowned for their customer service, employees learn to adhere to the strong customer service focus by writing stories about how other staff members have managed to serve a customer extremely well.

According to Robert Cialdini in "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion", writing a story and then signing it is a very effective method of getting people to change their attitudes. During the Korean War, many captured Americans found themselves in prisoner of war (POWs) camps run by Chinese communists.

At the end of the war, the returning POWs war-related beliefs had been substantially shifted. In the camps, essay competitions would be undertaken that would encourage Americans to write essays that generally supported the USA but also included a couple of lines that bowed to the Chinese view. By getting POWs to write essays that were slightly pro-Chinese and sign their name to them, it created a subtle mind shift.

Social psychologists believe that it is all to do with commitment. Once a stand is taken, there is a natural tendency to to behave in ways that are stubbornly consistent with that belief. The more public the stand, the more stubbornly the new belief is held onto.

There are two morals to this story, I mean article. The first one is to use stories when you need to get staff to align with the right behaviour. Ensure you mention consequences when the right behaviour isn't undertaken. Where possible, show photos or video content of the consequences of inappropriate behaviours.

The second is getting staff to write their own stories that align with the company goals, values and safety culture. By getting them to write stories that exhibit the correct behaviour and then asking them to sign it (and make the article publicly available), they will stubbornly start practising that new belief.