Leading Through Story:
What Every Bank Needs to Know about Narrative & Influence
Why Women Innovate:
3 Common Experiences that Create Remarkable Leaders
Hundreds of bank websites house a page labeled “Our Story”, but only a fraction of those pages actually tell a story.
Instead of a narrative, they typically provide a fact or two about the bank's founding, some information about how many branches or employees the institution has, and a cursory mention of the values the bank wants to uphold.
There’s nothing wrong with this collection of facts, per se. But it’s a huge missed opportunity.
If these pages contained actual stories, they’d have the power to shape people’s feelings toward the bank — and their actions. That’s because our biology is designed to respond to narrative structure.
The best leaders intuitively understand that stories can transport us out of the minutiae of everyday life and shape our frameworks for viewing the world. The storyteller gets to craft that framework.
A well told story gives its teller the ability to rally employees, inspire confidence in stakeholders, and win customers. This report will show you how.
A significant body of research supports the idea that there’s a correlation between women leaders and innovation.
When women rise into senior leadership ranks, banks get better at innovating — and they perform better financially as a result.
This didn't surprise us. We've seen it play out within the membership of the Alloy Labs Alliance — a consortium of innovative banks that are led by women CEOs at twice the rate of the companies in the Fortune 500.
But we wanted to know why this correlation exists. What factors influence women's propensity to lead through innovation? And what can we learn from those conditions to propagate similar results throughout an organization?
To find out, we interviewed the women leading some of the nation's most innovative banks. Those discussions revealed three major areas where women’s experiences differ significantly from their male counterparts in ways that spur innovation.
These experiences are unique to women today. But the lessons leaders learn from them can be used to increase diversity on all fronts, making their institutions stronger and more equitable in the process.