How The three Cs of Storytelling Can Unite Your Industry and Support Your Business - The Second "C": Competency
In the last edition of Robservations, we introduced you to How The three Cs of Storytelling Can Unite Your Industry and Support Your Business, starting with the first C, Connection. In this edition of Robservations, I’ll cover the second C, Competency. According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, Competency is defined by “possession of sufficient knowledge or skill”. As a business, if you shift your paradigm to share your knowledge and skill for everyone’s benefit instead of just your customers, your entire industry reaps the rewards by keeping key stakeholders engaged for the long-term.
What does Competency look like?
In the first C, Connection, I shared how People Power creates Connection. In Competency, if a business or an organization focuses on giving its knowledge and expertise for the benefit of everyone, an entire industry wins—again, including the very entity that produces the knowledge-sharing content in the first place. If you’d like to learn more about the power of people in business storytelling, I have a full chapter on People Power in Storytelling for Business, The Art and Science of Creating Connection in the Digital Age.
As shared in the first feature (the first C – Connection), I’ll stay with my boating experience as a method to demonstrate how the three Cs support business storytelling. As a relatively new boater, one time out on the water, my depth-finder (see image to the left) went dark, and it had no battery power. A depth-finder uses sonar technology to show you how deep the water is underneath your boat and it can also provide lake charts using GPS technology to guide you from crashing into rocks.
Needless to say, without this device on the open water, it’s not a good position to be in.
Thankfully, I went to YouTube using my mobile phone and found a quick video tutorial that explained how to quickly and easily replace the fuse that directs power from my battery to my depth finder. Now, thanks to a marina somewhere in the USA that produced this video, sharing their knowledge, I continued with a great day on the water, distinct from having to get potentially towed back to shore, sullying my experience as a boater, and worse still, sharing that experience with others who could be negatively influenced to not get into boating.
And how did I even know to have spare fuses in my boat’s onboard toolkit? Another marina somewhere in Canada shared its competency via a YouTube video that was accessible to me and thousands of others.
Restating, the entire boating industry benefits when individual businesses contribute to sharing their knowledge and expertise for the greater good of others to enjoy boating for the long-term. When those marinas shared their competency in the YouTube videos, they were not “selling”, it was about being of service helping boaters continue to enjoy boating for the long term. Telling your stories unites your industry and supports your business.
