Tell your story p1 - Military Transition - Military Times EDGE

The difference between landing a spot at the perfect company and a polite rejection may not be a gleaming résumé, razor-sharp professional attire or a confident handshake. It could be a skill troops have been practicing around campfires, in barracks and over drinks for centuries.

Storytelling can be an applicant’s secret weapon when it comes time to wow an interview board, says Esther Choy, a consultant who is teaming with veterans groups in Chicago to help vets hone their narrative skills in a series of workshops called Leadership Story Labs.

“If you think about what makes a good interview experience, and what makes you a good interviewee, it boils down to being a good storyteller and being able to conceptualize your leadership experience,” Choy explained. “It’s being able to package it in a way that’s compelling to people.”

But it takes more than the knack to spin a good yarn to impress interviewers. Her workshops teach veterans how to find the right story, and tell it in a way that it shows off their abilities and achievements.

What is leadership?

To find the perfect story, veterans sometimes need to recalibrate their idea of leadership, Choy said. After serving in a chain of command, where rank is a reliable shorthand for leadership opportunities, veterans typically have a rigid, structurally based sense of leadership. In that rank-and-file context, some enlisted service members think they don’t have enough experience from which to draw a story. They’re not thinking broadly enough.

Human resource officers and admissions counselors don’t want to hear about giving orders; they want examples of when applicants took the initiative to put their problem-solving and critical thinking skills to use.

“Think about leadership as a time of responsibility, a time when you made any material impact on a situation or on other people,” Choy said. “You want to move away from being confined by how you’re being defined by your rank and your title, to a time when you actually played a critical role in a situation that lent itself to positive results.”

Start a story

After veterans have brainstormed examples of those situations, developing them into a concise, memorable narrative takes a little work. Relating a leadership story to an interviewer isn’t the same as recounting a backpacking trip. It needs to be precisely structured to hold listeners’ attention while highlighting the teller’s attributes.

Choy knows the sort of story that grabs interviewers’ ears; as an admissions officer at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business’ MBA program for three years, she sat through her share of memorable — and utterly forgettable — interviews. Drawing from her experience on the interview board and storytelling methods taught by career counselors, she developed a five-step technique called START.

• Situation: Set the scene. Introduce the challenge you faced and how it came about. Without resorting to hyperbole, make it clear that this was an important event rather than simply a day-to-day occurrence. “The more you tend to put a sense of urgency in that situation, the more you can grab the attention of the listener. Try to avoid talking about day-to-day things,” Choy said.

• Task: Describe the necessary tasks that arose because of your situation. If the story is about leading a group that was lost, describe securing shelter, calming nerves and trying to determine your position. It’s also a good time to introduce other players. “You want to avoid coming across as a Lone Ranger, white knight riding in to save the world,” Choy said. “This is a good time in the storytelling process to talk about other people, perhaps other units you have to coordinate, perhaps other situations where people are present.”

• Actions: Show off how you harnessed your leadership skills to ensure tasks were completed. Describe how you found shelter, called in your position and calmed those around you. “Although the task may be obvious, these are some of the critical thinking skills, some of the decisive actions that you have taken that really begin to illuminate your character, your leadership style,” Choy said.

• Results: Showcase the payoff and draw conclusions between your actions and a positive outcome. “It’s a way to applaud yourself without directly doing so,” Choy said. “As a consequence of your direct actions, the situation, the urgency, has been diverted and you brought about a positive result.”

• Takeaways: Don’t stop with the story. Describe what you learned about yourself as a leader, your strengths and what areas you’re still working to improve. Use this section of your story to make your merits as a leader impossible for interviewers to miss. “The more you can go the extra mile to translate that experience for the recruiters and the interviewers, then the more you can come out ahead,” Choy said.

Helping civilians understand

Choy’s START technique is even more crucial for veterans because of the gap between their military experience and the civilian world. Her story structure helps veterans describe their leadership skills in a way that grabs civilians’ attention, and the process of brainstorming leadership roles and situations teaches them to approach storytelling from the perspective of what interviewers want to hear. It’s often a sharp change in tactics from their instinctual approach.

“I basically blew stuff up. No one really liked that. It didn’t help out in the civilian world,” said former Marine Sgt. Ben Papale, who attended a Leadership Storytelling Lab for vets in February, after returning from back-to-back tours of Iraq as a military policeman.

Since attending the workshop, “I’m able to take other aspects of my military experience and show that to a civilian employer,” he said.

Papale recently interviewed for sales positions at an insurance firm and a data processing firm. Although he didn’t tap his military experience for his leadership story, Papale applied the START technique to frame a story about teaching music and organizing music classes that impressed his interviewers. He received offers for both positions.

Every service member enters the civilian work force armed with valuable skills and experience. Storytelling, modernized specifically for the job market, can help the civilian world, understand that value.

“For veterans, the more they translate that experience to hiring managers or admissions committees, than the further they’re ahead in terms of getting where they want to be,” Choy said.