Both its employees and its customers are loyal to the firm. The voice is as distinctive as our fingerprint. The voice carries us with it, the unedited version of what is inside of us. It conveys more than the words, it conveys the spirit of the person speaking, and therefore carries with it the meaning in the words being said. In a world of faster and faster transfer of information, meaning becomes a fleeting luxury.
Leaders can only convey the real meaning of their work with the voice.
William Miller reported on the research of the leader of the labs at Hewlett Packard, Frank Carrubba. When he took over the labs in 1987, Carrubba conducted a study of the most significant differences between teams that failed to achieve their objectives, teams that were successful, and teams that produced extraordinary results. When he compared marginally successful teams with consistently superior teams, he concluded that they were reasonably equal in terms of talent, motivation and at the ability to create realistic goals. They contend that both clarity and depth are required for trust to develop. And they conclude, as I do, that trust is not established through statistics alone, but rather through myth, through live storytelling.