Can you think of a story that has shaped your approach to business?

CRE Success Principle: When you take a moment to tell a story – to provide the context – you build a connection and help people to understand why it is that they should be listening to you.

When you share a short story that reveals why something matters to you, it builds connection and credibility.

It helps people not only resonate with your message, but also to truly understand and remember what you’ve said.

Case in point: I recently delivered a keynote on prospecting, with content that I’ve presented before.

However, this time I prefaced my prepared remarks with an off-the-cuff story about why the topic is important to me.

This took the level of engagement with, and appreciation from, the audience to the next level.

But you don’t have to be delivering a presentation on stage to leverage this principle. 

It also helps to share stories when communicating what matters or when you want to gently persuade.

Can you think of a story that has shaped your approach to business?

To find out how storytelling helps you cut through the noise, join me for episode 199 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership.

And if you, or someone you know, needs an engaging speaker for a commercial real estate audience in 2025, click here to find out if we are a good match!

Episode transcript:

Alright, quick pop quiz.

If I asked you right now to name your top three values, the values that you live your life by that you'd like to see reflected in your business, that you would like your clients to understand in terms of their dealings with you and that you want the people that you work with to also resonate with and to uphold, what would those values be?

If you don't know what those values are, then you need to find out what they are and then start communicating them with your people.

Let's discuss.

Hello and welcome to episode 199 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. I'm your host, Darren Krakowiak.

Thanks a lot for joining us for another episode of the show. We're D minus 1 for our 200th episode.

I better think of something special to come up with for that episode. I've just created some more work for myself. That's okay. Excited about episode 200.

If you're a commercial real estate principal and you want to grow your business by having the right people in your team serving ideal clients inside a business that just works, make sure you pay a visit to our Instagram page.

Our profile or our handle is @cresuccess

And if you go there, make sure you do also send us a DM the word “GROW” in it, and that will tell me that you'd like to have a private and confidential chat about your business.

We can talk about your plans for 2025, how you want to get there, and maybe the roadblocks that are stopping you from achieving your goals to help you set up yourself for a big, better, exciting 2025.

Well, in today's episode, I mentioned at the top, we want to talk about the importance of values and really knowing what your values are.

So, as I said, if you don't know what your values are, I think that's important.

And when you've got clarity on your values, it helps you invite the right people into your business.

You can use that as a filter when you're hiring, but it's also something that you can talk to your team about regularly to make sure that they're behaving in a way which is consistent with your values.

Because your people are a reflection of you and everything that goes on in your business is a reflection of you.

So, if you want people to act in accordance with your values, then you need to take the time to communicate them.

So, if you haven't gone through an exercise to find out what your values are, a simple one that I've been doing with a few of my clients recently is just to print out a long list of values that would be ones that you might want to see reflected inside a commercial real estate business.

And just to circle the ones that resonate most with you. And then to maybe go through that filter and say, “Well, what are the top 3 to 5 that are really important to me?”

That's probably the first step to creating a values statement.

So, values are really important to communicate with your team, and they're also really important to communicate with potential hires.

Because as I said, they can act as a filter.

The other thing that values do when you speak about them clearly during the recruitment process, is that it allows you to have a really clear conversation with somebody who you bring on and then you discover in the first maybe 3 months that they're not a good fit.

Because if you've spoken about what's important to you and the values that you want to see reflected in your business, and then they've acted in a way which is clearly contravening those values, then you can have a very clear conversation without guilt on your side because you took the time to explain what your values were.

And hopefully you've used some stories. And I'll talk about stories in a moment to help them connect with the value and help them understand why it's important to you.

And then if they still haven't been able to grab onto that, then that's their responsibility.

And I think you have a right as a business owner to make sure that the values that are important to you are reflected in your organization.

And that people that deal with the business, feel like those values are being upheld.

Because when we think about culture, what is culture?

Culture is the way things are done and how it feels to be at a place or to do business with an organization.

And part of the way that culture is reflected is through the values that exist.

And yes, there is the saying that culture is caught, not taught.

As in, we don't just say what our culture is or what our values are. We need to make sure that we act in accordance with them.

But the first step to having people act in accordance with them, particularly if you haven't yet defined what they are for yourself is to talk to people about what those values are, to use stories to connect people to what those values are, and to talk about them a lot.

So, I would recommend that you use your team meetings as opportunities to call out behaviors that are consistent with your values.

To really put them up in lights and to help people remember what those values are.

When you get sick of talking about them, that's when people might just start hearing them. So, repetition works.

And if you want to see these values really reflected in the business, you've got to be willing to talk about them and talk about them a lot.

So, we call that in public when people are acting in a way which is consistent with their values and we also address in private situations where we believe that people are not acting in accordance with our values.

And when people have a set of values that can guide their behaviors, it means that you don't have to be there all the time.

Because they start to get an understanding based on the values of what they're expected to do in the absence of you telling them or when there isn't maybe a policy or procedure that is available to tell them exactly what to do.

So, the other lesson that I learned recently is the importance of storytelling.

I've talked before about using examples of people's behavior and linking them back to the values that you want.

But I think if you can talk more about yourself and why this is important to you, that's going to make what you've got to say really resonate more with the people who you're talking to.

It's going to connect why it is important to you with the audience and what you're talking about.

And it's going to help people understand that it's also a bit of a credibility builder, it's how you create connection.

And I learned this recently just a couple of weeks ago, I was on the Gold Coast and I was speaking to a commercial conference for a client that I've spoken to a few times.

And this particular session went a lot better than past sessions.

I think the past sessions went well as well, because they've invited me back.

But this one I think went better again. And I was prepared for the session, and certainly I knew the topic, it was about prospecting, was one that I'm really comfortable speaking about.

But one thing I did differently that I hadn't previously done when I've delivered this topic is I just took a couple of minutes to talk about why this is a topic that's near and dear to my heart.

And it was actually a last-minute decision because I'd sent the slides to the client about a week before, and I didn't have a slide about this.

So just on the welcome slide, I decided just to talk about it because it was a decision I made two days before that, “Hey, maybe I should talk about why this is important and tell that story.”

I'm not sure why it came to me like that, but I decided to do it.

And it was a great decision because the session went better, I believe, because I took the time to explain why prospecting matters to me.

I talked about how for the first few years of my career in commercial real estate, I wasn't working in agency.

I was doing research and consulting, and then I was sent to Korea by JLL or I sort of took that opportunity.

And about a year after I got there, I started helping out in tenant rep, and that was mainly to be a foreigner to welcome foreign clients into the business and to support the team with inspections.

There wasn't a lot of prospecting or client facing fulfillment to do. It was more just supporting the relationship.

And then the global financial crisis hit. And the country head who was overseeing tenant rep at the time was let go.

And it meant that I was there basically handling tenant rep on my own.

And what I soon realized was that I needed to start prospecting.

Because in 2009, there wasn't a lot of deals to go around. And all of that prospecting work led to some great results by 2010.

Now, I used storytelling to explain this.

I also did it in a way which was a little bit humble because I mentioned that I was partly in the right place at the right time.

In Korea in 2009, it was about 10 years after the Asian financial crisis reforms had opened up Korea, so there was a lot of multinational companies and foreign investors coming into the market, so there was already this demand that was going up.

I don't think Korea was that impacted by the 2008 recession as other countries were.

And the other advantage I had as a foreigner, was that, I guess I stood out more.

And also, in Korean society at the time, it probably wasn't really the ‘done’ thing to just prospect people ‘cold’, whereas I was willing to do that.

By 2020, I had a lot of runs on the board based on all the hard work that I did in 2009.

And I talked about how that led to other opportunities and promotions and being poached and so on and so forth.

So, I really used my story as a way to communicate the benefits for everyone that can come from prospecting.

And I think the opportunity exists for you as a leader to use storytelling to talk about what you believe is important for people to know and to do in your business.

Because that gives you more credibility to be sharing that information. It provides context around why it's important.

And people are more likely to remember stories that they can connect with as opposed to just being told how to do things or in the case of this prospecting skills drill that I delivered.

If I just started talking about prospecting, there's still that unanswered question that exists in people's mind, which is, “Well, why should I listen to you? What do you really know about prospecting?”

When you take a moment to tell the story, to provide the context, you build that connection and you help people understand why it is that they should be listening to you.

So, in terms of how you can take action from what we've talked about in today's episode, if you don't already have a clear set of values that you want people to understand, I think that's the first step.

If you have those values defined, but not everyone in your organization can actually name them.

And some of my clients who have the values, I sometimes say, “Give me the five values, give me the 3 values.”

And they sometimes have to think. You've got to know them off the top of your head because you want to be talking about them relatively consistently.

And also, you want them understood throughout the organization.

And one way to ensure that people understand them is to use storytelling to help people connect with why it's important, and also to help them understand why it matters to you.

That is our episode for today. Thank you so much for listening, and I will speak to you soon.