Challenge
Align sorytelling with leadership culture
APi Group is a family of construction, safety, and service companies operating in over 20 countries with more than 25,000 team members. What unites them all isn’t just a shared business model. It’s a commitment to building great leaders.
Leadership is embedded in APi Group’s identity. They promote it across departments, levels, and geographies. And they view communication as one of the clearest markers of effective leadership.
But here’s the challenge: Not everyone naturally speaks like a leader.
Even top performers sometimes struggle to communicate direction, impact, and purpose, especially under pressure or in unfamiliar formats.
To support their leadership culture and sharpen communications company-wide, APi brought in Echo for custom storytelling training.
The goal? To give their people practical, repeatable tools for communicating clearly, confidently, and with a leader’s voice.
Solution
Custom training for real-world leadership
We began by studying APi Group’s Building Great Leaders framework. It was clear that leadership at APi wasn’t a title. It was a way of showing up.
Our job was to teach people how to show up more powerfully in their communications.
We designed a storytelling training program grounded in real-world use cases:
- Leading high-stakes meetings
- Giving performance feedback
- Communicating vision
- Delivering safety updates
- Presenting to clients or leadership
- Onboarding or mentoring team members
The curriculum focused on the mindset and mechanics of story:
- Where to find powerful story moments
- How to build a simple, memorable structure
- How to connect personal experience with business relevance
- And how to lead with values, not just data
We facilitated a series of 100-person live and in-person interactive workshops with APi leaders and emerging talent across business units — reinforcing story as a tool for trust, clarity, and alignment.
Participants walked away with reusable frameworks, fresh confidence, and a deeper understanding of what it means to lead out loud.
Result
Stronger stories, Stronger leadership.
Post-training, APi leaders began applying storytelling tools right away in all kinds of settings.
We heard about changes in:
- Sales conversations
- Project kickoff meetings
- Leadership retreats
- Career development check-ins
- Town halls and onboarding moments
People weren’t just learning story. They were using it to lead with clarity, empathy, and purpose.
The training helped solidify storytelling as a key lever in APi’s leadership development strategy. It also reinforced what APi Group already believes: that great leadership can come from anywhere, and that communication is one of its core strengths.
One more cool thing...
Honouring veterans through story
APi Group is known for its commitment to hiring and promoting military veterans, and it shows up in their leadership culture.
One of our proudest moments came during a workshop exercise, when a veteran shared a story that reframed a routine safety briefing into a lesson about courage and care.
It landed.
And in that moment, everyone in the room saw what storytelling can do: Give voice to lived experience, honour service, and build stronger teams.
Want your people to lead with clarity and purpose?
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