It comes across as an obvious thing to say, but nonetheless true, that any country can close the talent gap if companies invest in more training. It’s not going to be the solution to your problems tomorrow, but it will solve them eventually.

This advice comes from Pete Engardio, a senior writer for Business Week, who was cited in a recent report on China called ‘Using Stories to Develop Future Leaders in China’. The report tackles the issue of the inevitable skills gap in such a fast growing economy.

Specifically, they look to a perfect storm of talent shortages, educational gaps, and inexperienced leaders in China. These three issues, the authors believe, are seriously slowing the development of the workforce here, and the solution is not forthcoming from anywhere external to your organisation. This is a problem you have to solve yourself.

The solution they propose is to use storytelling as a tool to speed up the competency development of your inexperienced managers. Clearly they are suggesting a very long-term and time intensive process. After reviewing it they seem to be on to something, and for anyone who has ever done an MBA, the technique evokes some aspects of the case study method.

But there is much more here. This is a typical example:

Two individuals in the same company have each hired employees into mid-level management positions. The first individual welcomes the new managers at their orientation session by saying, “You have joined a great company and if you work hard and remember to make our customers and employees a priority, you will succeed. Happy customers and happy employees are your responsibility.” Debrief after first story:
What do you think the new managers learned from this statement?

The second individual welcomes the new managers at their orientation session with a story. (Trainer reads queen bee story) Debrief after second story:
What do you think the new managers in the second situation learned? How might this lesson affect the way in which they manage others?
Which approach was likely to drive learning and insight? Why?

The final objective of the storytelling is not to arrive at a conclusion, but to stimulate thought and exercise critical functions. This is a great way of getting beyond the traditional sit-down training programs that no one has any time for anymore.

There are many ways to introduce storytelling into your business model, but the basic suggestion is to put into as many aspects of the business as possible, and make it part of the fabric of your operations. The objective is the journey, and the learning that comes with it.

The failure to develop a company culture in China could be effectively solved using this technique because it evokes the power of the old man sitting at the well telling his son stories about ‘the old days’. He passes on the collected wisdom of his society to the next generation, and this works because it doesn’t appear to be any form of schooling to his son.

In the business context we would equate this to communicating business missions, examining strategies that have worked, discussing objectives that must be reached to judge performance effective, learning from the lessons of failures, and so on. This is where business managers in China are severely lacking because they have been trained purely to implement, not to consider the whys and the wherefores. ‘How’ is the relevant question in China, not why.

This solution is a break with regular thinking and does require a long term approach. But the mechanism is easy: storytelling. Success using this method will be in the details of the implementation.