The business landscape is changing rapidly – change is the new constant. Organizational structures are becoming complicated and reporting lines are getting complex. Employees and clients are working around the world and adjusting to a hybrid work culture, driven by the post pandemic work cultural shift. As a leader, you must meet all these requirements whilst influencing and persuading others.
Storytelling is a powerful tool that can significantly help leaders to influence, persuade, and drive consistent growth across the organization. Leadership Stories can help leaders to inspire employees to excel at work, align themselves with clients or investors and perform effectively to drive business growth. Creating trustworthy, convincing, purpose-driven stories are important for leaders. Powerful, results driving stories often have numerous core features- they can intrigue and motivate listeners, compel them to feel a sense of unity with the mission and vision of the organization, and encourage listeners to actively participate in growing the business.
In fact, storytelling has been proven to be twelve times more effective vs. other forms of communication to influence, inspire, and leave a memorable impression in the hearts and minds of your listeners.
In today's business-minded environment, every leader is hungry for leadership storytelling skills.
Let's understand why storytelling is important for leaders
Great storytellers have the capability to recruit and hire the best candidates for the organization, promote a consistent corporate image with the press and media, and convince teams and leaders to invest in the business. Moreover, leaders with storytelling abilities can find partners quickly.
A Quick Look at the Key Benefits of Storytelling
● Storytelling can equip leaders to effectively highlight best in class team behaviours and cultural traits to elevate the team’s performance
● Storytelling makes technical information memorable
● Storytelling engages the audience on a deeper level
● Storytelling significantly boosts the impact of your message
● Storytelling persuades and motivates others to align themselves with the organization’s vision and key goals
● Storytelling inspires others to take action
What Makes a Great Story?
Here Are a Few Actionable Tips to Communicate a Great Story: -
Set the foundation with accurate, necessary, and relevant facts - Your story should deliver appropriate information with personality – it needs to communicate the facts with energy, enthusiasm, and passion, whilst ensuring that you never lose track of your story.
Engage- An engaging story has the power to connect with the heart, mind, and gut, of the audience. A leader must have the potential to leave a great impact on the listeners, clients, and employees. If the story is not engaging, people will forget it in a few minutes.
Inspire- Aspire to inspire. Your story should have elements, emotions and the power to inspire others. If it is about convincing an employee to do a specific job or function, then the story must have the potential to inspire the employee to give it their very best within the role/job/function.
Focus On Meaning and Lessons Learnt
The power of storytelling lies in discovering the true meaning of the moment. Communicating the deeper meaning behind the story and offering up clear, tangible, actionable lessons (the “so what”), will leave a long lasting, positive impact in the hearts and minds of your audience.
The Best Stories Revolve Around Mistakes and Failures
Bravely and authentically speak about the mistakes and failures along the way as you boldly persevered to accomplish your goals. Great stories always talk about the obstacles that the storyteller had to overcame. Talk about stories on recovering from poor product sales or losing customers and winning them back once again. Mistakes, failures, or disasters are the elements that add to the tension within your story. Tension enables you to connect emotionally with your listeners and encourages them to eagerly listen to the section within your story where you overcame the odds and prevailed.
Approaching a Storytelling Coach
For every successful business, a leader needs to be a good storyteller. Executives can communicate their vision through storytelling with the help of a professional storytelling coach. A coach will guide you in shaping your story for maximum impact and enable you to convey your message in a more meaningful way.
George, Chief Storytelling Officer, at The Next Dimension Story can help to combine vision and storytelling to lead teams and businesses. You will get great opportunities to touch the hearts and minds of employees, stakeholders, and customers by using the power of images and metaphors. You can book a 1 to 1 storytelling session that is tailored to your unique needs as a business leader. Click here to learn more about the storytelling sessions or, schedule a call to discuss your business goals and leadership needs.