Why should leaders and managers be good storytellers?

Effective communication is the key to success in leadership roles. As such, storytelling provides a powerful medium of communication for leaders and managers to convey the vision, values, and strategic direction of a project or an organization in a compelling and relatable way. Stories engage and inspire team members, helping them understand complex situations and foster a sense of unity and purpose. Stories also play a crucial role in presenting information about one’s offering and services to clients.

Effective storytelling makes leaders more approachable and relatable to their teams. By weaving impactful narratives into their communication, managers and leaders can build trust, motivate their team, and drive positive change within the organization. For centuries, stories have been known to connect, inspire, motivate and influence people and as such, storytelling becomes a powerful tool in the hands of managers to drive change in the desired direction within an organization. It also makes your dialogue with clients more fruitful and engaging.

In this blog, we will understand what effective storytelling is and how managers can use it for collective benefits across an organization.

Components of An Effective Story

Donald Miller in his book, “Building a StoryBrand” provides a 7-part framework for effective storytelling, which has now become immensely popular for simplifying messaging with audiences by placing customers at the center of the journey. The 7 parts are as follows:

Character

In the first part of the framework, you will identify your ideal customer as the hero of your story and define what they want. In the B2B space, this character should be a generalization of an ideal company you want to work with.

Has A Problem

Identify the challenges your hero is facing and clearly articulate the problems your product or service will solve. Problems are of varying degrees, each with their own implications. Miller lists out two types of problems your customer faces to better understand their motivations-

• External: These are tangible, obvious and real-world problems that your customers face.
• Internal: These are problems rooted in your customers’ emotional understanding, for which they seek external solutions. By nature, these problems are not clearly or fully expressed and need deeper understanding and empathy to become visibly obvious.

Meets a Guide

This is you. The business that will provide solutions to their hero’s problems and walk with them to navigate it to the end. The key is to remember that only by projecting your business or support in the form of a guide can you win customers’ trust and not by going too overboard to make this story your own.

Who Gives Them A Plan

Having gained the trust of your customers, the story also needs to give them a plan of action to gain their confidence about how you will solve their problems. This should be a strategic and measured approach that conveys the steps you will take to reach your customers’ goals and assure them of your ability to navigate their problems.

And Calls Them To Action

There must be a clear call to action for customers to proceed to the next steps. Missing out on providing this crucial, but often overlooked need results in customers getting confused and abandoning the entire engagement. A clear call to action will compel them to engage deeper with your offering, be it a scheduled call, newsletter sign up or demo request. It is important to understand that not every customer will be ready to make a purchase, so the call to action must be tailored to their specific needs.

To Help Them Avoid Failure

The story cannot exist without anything being at stake. This part of the story should convey what the customer avoids by doing business with you. This is the core advantage you provide to your customer by preventing any drastic outcomes in their business (as far as a B2B space is concerned).

And End in Success

You must clearly articulate the achievement for your customer for them to understand what your product or service will solve for them. This will ensure that they know exactly what they get out of the engagement with you and comply with the plan towards this success.

Note: While this framework is commonly used for brand marketing, it is based on a theme that humanity has known since its inception – that storytelling can be used to convey truths which would otherwise be passed on as bare facts without any major impact. From my experience, the idea of implementing this framework is to understand your listeners’ motivations and put them at the center of the narrative. This could be your team members, employees, clients or any other stakeholders that you work with.

Tips For Effective Storytelling

Some people are natural storytellers while others have to work at it. Here are some tips from my experience that will help you convey your vision using powerful stories:

Speak from experience

The whole purpose of telling a story is narrating experiences contextually for them to have a lasting impact. Your listeners, be it your team members, clients, or any other stakeholders, value nothing more than authenticity of a lived experience narrated to them to strike the chord of understanding or relatability.

Seek Feedback

It always helps to learn more about how your stories impact your listeners. Do they convey your core message? Do they seem relevant? Are they simple enough for every listener to understand? Do they need greater personalization to make them accessible to a diverse audience?

Answers to these questions will lead you to craft your stories in a way that they function as powerful cultural tools of driving desired action and behavior. And these are best elicited from the people who listen to your stories and engage with them continually.

Industry Knowledge

Staying well informed about the trends in your industry is key to crafting narratives that will influence your stakeholders. Not only will this awareness make your stories relatable, but it will also improve the overall benefits of collaborative dialogue. Reading industry blogs, business books, and engaging with people in your industry network will give you a wider perspective of the latest developments in your industry, which you can use to enrich your stories.

Leveraging Common Sources of Knowledge

It is practically impossible to have experience for any situation that comes your way. In such cases, it is helpful to narrate stories of how others navigated similar situations. These may be stories from the past, or celebrated figures in your industry, or even your competitors.

Benefits of Storytelling

As a tool for effective communication, storytelling ensures that the inner motivations, fears, doubts and hopes of every listener are adequately expressed. Mentioned below are some of its advantages that I have seen from my experience-

Effective Communication

Storytelling enables managers to convey messages, strategies, and ideas in a more engaging and memorable way, ensuring that their communication is well-received and understood by their teams. It also helps create a space for exchanging dialogues and giving feedback, once all members are aligned with your vision.

Inspiration and Motivation

Well-crafted stories can inspire and motivate employees, making them more enthusiastic and committed to their work, while also reinforcing the company’s mission and goals. The compelling narrative of a story usually accounts for both moments of weakness and strength and this inspires your team members to work towards a common goal.

Building Trust

Sharing personal and relatable stories can humanize managers, fostering trust and making them more approachable. It allows managers to connect with their teams on a more personal level and understand each of the members’ motivations to address them accordingly.

Sharing Knowledge

Stories are an excellent means of passing on experiences and sharing knowledge, helping employees learn from their managers’ experiences and navigate their own challenges more effectively. They also create a space for passing down institutional expertise acquired through years of work experience.

Cultural Reinforcement

Storytelling can be used to reinforce an organization’s culture and values, encouraging employees to align with and embody these values in their work. They are powerful tools in conveying what needs to be done to reach from where the organization stands in the present to where it aspires to be in the future.

Final Thoughts

Being a people’s person in my seven year long and ongoing career as a project delivery manager, I have come to understand that perhaps one of the most challenging aspects of working with a diverse group of individuals is making an impact on them through your words, so that they are aligned with the vision of the organization or project. Storytelling is one of the most powerful mediums in such a scenario, be it for team members or clients, as it addresses emotions that can easily go unnoticed in huge piles of data and bare facts, and thus, make your communication less impactful.