You can read the new, improved edition of Tell Me About Yourself by buying the book.

You can read the first edition of Tell Me About Yourself on this blog, as follows (Follow each chapter sequentially through the dates after the opening entries for each chapter):

Introduction: Why Use Story in the Job Search?

CHAPTER 1: Telling Stories about Change

CHAPTER 2: The Quintessential You Story

CHAPTER 3: How to Develop Career-Propelling Stories

CHAPTER 4: Networking as Storytelling

CHAPTER 5: Resumes that Tell a Story

CHAPTER 6: Cover Letters That Tell a Story

CHAPTER 7: Portfolios that Tell a Story

CHAPTER 8: Interviews That Tell a Story

CHAPTER 9: Personal Branding as Storytelling

CHAPTER 10: Propel Your Career Through On-the-Job Storytelling

Epilogue

OR

You can read the first edition, page by page, here.

---

Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling that Propels Careers, Quintessential Careers Press, ISBN-10: 1-934689-00-9. Find out the ways you can own the entire book.

My goal in this book has been to examine career stories to discover how they can apply to individuals’ efforts to enter organizations and to interact with these organizations in a fruitful way upon gaining entry.

Through detailed descriptions and many sample stories, I hope you’ve discovered the promise of incorporating tales of career accomplishment, especially your successful interaction with organizational change, into powerful communication that influences hiring managers. The evidence is clear that storytelling then propels your career by also enabling you to promote yourself, lead and communicate change, and interact successfully with change in your new workplace.

I hope you’ve begun to compose stories about yourself as you’ve read the book. Now is the time to take charge of your story and let your career story unfold.

I invite readers to contact me to share stories and ask questions about storytelling and careers. E-mail me. Please also visit the parent blog of this blog, A Storied Career, and the Career Storytelling section of Quintessential Careers.

---

Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling that Propels Careers, Quintessential Careers Press, ISBN-10: 1-934689-00-9. Find out the ways you can own the entire book.

Brown, D. W. (2002). Organization Smarts. New York: AMACOM.

Callahan, S. (2006, April 30). How to use stories to size up a situation

Callahan, S., Rixon, A, & Schenk, M. (2005, December). Avoiding change management failure using business narrative

Clark, E. (2004. June 22). Storytelling for leaders (free registration at MarketingProfs site required).

Denning, S. (2001). The Springboard. Burlington, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann.

Denning, S. (2004). Squirrel Inc.: A Fable of Leadership through Storytelling. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Denning, S. (2005). The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Denning, S. (2007). The Secret Language of Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Gargiulo, T. L. (2002). Making Stories: A Practical Guide for Organizational Leaders and Human Resource Specialists. Westport, CT: Quorum.

Gargiulo, T. L. (2005). The Strategic Use of Stories in Organizational Communication and Learning. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.

Gargiulo, T. L. (2006, January). Tell us a story<. American Executive

Gargiulo, T. L. (2006). Stories at Work. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Goman, C. K. (2005, Aug.). 12 questions for change communicators. Link&Learn eNewsletter

Goman, C. K. (2006, Jan. 9). What’s changed about change management? Communtelligence newsletter

Johnson, S. (2002). Who Moved My Cheese? New York: Putnam.

Kahan, S. (2004). Every professional has stories to tell.

Kotter, J. (2006, April 12). The Power of Stories. Forbes.

Maguire, J. (1998). The Power of Personal Storytelling. New York: Tarcher/Putnam.

McKay, H. (1998, June). Using story as strategy: Interview with David Barry, Ph.D.

Neuhauser, P. C. (1993). Corporate Legends & Lore: The Power of Storytelling as a Management Tool. Austin, TX: PCN Associates.

Peck, D. (2004, Aug. 23). Changing your story

Pink, D. (2006). A whole new mind: Why right-brainers will rule the future. New York: Riverhead Books.

Quintessential Careers: Real World Section. New graduates tell stories of the change from being a college student to being a worker and describe positives and negatives of their first jobs.

Richards, D. (2004). The Art of Winning Commitment: 10 Ways Leaders Can Engage Minds, Hearts, and Spirits. New York: Amacom.

Silverman, Lori. (2006). Wake Me When the Data Is Over. (2006). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Simmons, A. (2006). The Story Factor: Inspiration, Influence, and Persuasion through Storytelling. Cambridge. MA: Basic Books.

---

Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling that Propels Careers, Quintessential Careers Press, ISBN-10: 1-934689-00-9. Find out the ways you can own the entire book.

I’ll end this chapter with my own story of how change has affected my career:

Most of the organizations of which I’ve been a working member have grappled with change. The magazine publishing firm where I held my first corporate job was threatened with a movement to unionize workers. To show its benevolence, presumably in the hope that employees would shun the union effort, the company initiated the rather peculiar practice of delivering a piece of fruit to workers every afternoon. After the company began firing those who were most vocal about unionizing, the fruit no longer tasted as sweet. I then worked as an editor at a startup magazine, where the constant struggle to stay afloat was the catalyst for organizational change. Eventually the owners lost the struggle and sold the magazine. The new owners moved it to another city, leaving the staff without jobs. Next stop was an ad agency, where winning and losing accounts drove constant change.

I then joined the staff of the independent newspaper that served a large university community. There, a new batch of student staffers arrived with each academic year, and elections of top editors regularly changed the face of newsroom management. From there I joined another newspaper in a highly competitive metropolitan market. The newsroom was constantly abuzz over the ambitious plans of our chief rival paper and how these plans prodded change at our paper. Suddenly, the competitor bought our paper with plans to merge it with its own newspaper. I moved on to the executive editorship of a group of weekly papers and soon learned that the first thing the publisher wanted me to do was fire the two highest paid editors.

Leaving publishing to try public relations, I worked at a controversial reproductive-health organization that opened a new clinic, fought for continued government funding, and initiated testing for HIV and AIDS during my tenure. Next I became the speechwriter to an elected official, a position in which partisan politics spurred change. Nearly the last stop was a private university. Budget crises, enrollment challenges, and the drive for accreditation propelled change.

Overlapping my most recent jobs within organizations has been my effort to help people enter organizations, especially through written and spoken communication. As I have looked back at all the changing organizations I’ve been part of, I have to ask myself what I’ve learned. What have I discovered about driving, communicating, and coping with change that could help others? What could I have done differently to capitalize on organizational change? In what ways was I successful and proactive in encountering organizational change? What can my story and the telling of it communicate? How might I use my story to advance my career and guide others in employing story to advance their careers?

I then think about the career-management communication tools I have helped job-seekers prepare for a number of years. This book has been the realization of my contention that storytelling should be part of networking, resumes, cover letters, job interviews, portfolios, and personal branding. These story elements can influence hiring managers. Most important, continued storytelling helps advance your career once you are on the job.

---

Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling that Propels Careers, Quintessential Careers Press, ISBN-10: 1-934689-00-9. Find out the ways you can own the entire book.

I used to not handle change very well. I’m a very routine person. Everything had to be routine for me. The second something got thrown off, it threw off my routine. At the theme park where I work, I was moved to a completely different location with a different environment. I was at a stadium location, with a 14-member staff and a very controlled, outlined, and specific setting. Then I was shifted over to the park’s rides area with a staff of 100 people. Everything was always changing. The volume was higher, and there were more people to deal with. I was forced to really have to change. I didn’t know how to change and hoped to just assimilate. That change really did throw off my whole routine. When management finally sat me down to explain that I had to change, they broke it down into a process that I was able to understand. I could mentally build the steps in the process - build a picture to make the adjustment. Otherwise, I would’ve never really adjusted. I probably wouldn’t even still be there if I hadn’t. All the changing roles I’ve had have helped me develop a different perspective on dealing with the change. And now you can change me on a whim at work. I can make the adjustment quickly and move forward without having to sit down and analyze how the change fits into my routine.

---

Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling that Propels Careers, Quintessential Careers Press, ISBN-10: 1-934689-00-9. Find out the ways you can own the entire book.

Much of human resources requires influencing others to make changes. An excellent example is the way in which I’ve persuaded managers and supervisors to conduct annual performance evaluations, which wasn’t the case when I was hired. I talked with supervisors and managers regarding the value of this responsibility, convened a task force, and designed an evaluation tool for the staff that has consistent criteria, is tied to the organizational goals and values, and is easy to use. I provided training and led conversations with the executive committee to foster support company-wide. The result is that all continuing employees and many temporary employees have received annual performance appraisals for several years.

---

To bring attention to the growing social problems in my region during a time of high unemployment, I proposed that we do what many of the participants in my temporary employment program were doing to deal with the stress, which was to have a party. A number of other service groups participated, and with our combined effort we had a daylong celebration that included a parade and activities and entertainment throughout the day at a civic park. A union group organized a parade, and another built the staging locations in the park. Through the media, I put out requests for donations to make the party work, and I received a donation of two tons of potatoes, which we used to make potato soup. Other organizations, such as church groups, began joining in, and soon we had a large group of volunteers, and the party served more than 7,000 people. It was a success in that it drew attention to the plight of the residents and acknowledged the “elephant in the room” known as unemployment and economic hardships while it gave us a well-needed reason to blow off steam.

---

During a time of change in our company, we had various situations where processes/ways of thinking needed to be changed. I had five managers reporting to me. During a meeting, I laid out what the company was trying to accomplish and then asked for opinions/feedback from each of them. During this meeting I also described the goal so the staff could understand the whole picture. They had questions/concerns, but once we talked through them, they were able to understand our challenge and came on board with the direction we were going in.

---

Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling that Propels Careers, Quintessential Careers Press, ISBN-10: 1-934689-00-9. Find out the ways you can own the entire book.

Mistakes and failures comprise, of course, just one kind of organizational change, but the concept of people, whether executives or anyone else in the organization, including you, telling stories to cope with the stress of change, is the same concept.

Guided by a storytelling activity in a group setting designed by Darl Kolb of the University of Auckland, New Zealand, long-time employees of an organization about to undergo change shared stories of previous changes with less-senior employees. All the workers subsequently expressed lower than expected levels of anxiety and apprehension and less resistance to change. The looming change didn’t seem as radical when compared with those changes described by some of the old-timers.

Research shows that stories help workers make sense of change and undergo a shift in their own understanding of the need for change, how the change will happen, and what the future will look like once the change is accomplished. The process of reviewing the organization’s old stories and creating new ones helps organization members learn to adapt to change.

Smart organization members who understand David Fleming’s assertion in an article on using narrative for leadership that “a thriving organization sees its mission as an ever-emerging story with all the necessary twists and turns” will tell stories like the following to make sense of change and learn to cope and adapt:

On a project I was working on, I needed the help of an analyst in evaluating a work process I was trying to change. The analyst could not understand why incoming pieces of mail in my work area were not being scanned as electronic documents, which is standard practice across the organization. He assumed I hadn’t had proper training and was mismanaging the process, but in actuality, the process was new and foreign for the satellite office I was working in. In an email to the analyst, I described the background and rationale for why the processes were different, explaining that priorities, resources, management style, and availability of resources were very different in the satellite offices. The way I wrote the email had to be non-offensive, neutral, and objective because the analyst had responded to me in a dismissive manner. Ultimately, I convinced the analyst that I needed more of his attention and dedication to address the work process.

---

Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling that Propels Careers, Quintessential Careers Press, ISBN-10: 1-934689-00-9. Find out the ways you can own the entire book.