“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
– Phillip Pullman
Since ancient times, telling stories has been a vital part of what it means to be human. We all use stories to make sense of the world, define our identity, and share information, ideas and knowledge.
The ability to tell an engaging story is just as important in business as it is in the rest of our lives. We may live in a data-driven world, but figures and facts alone won’t inspire, engage, or convince people. It is the stories we tell that turn dry data into action and motivation.
Storytelling is one of the soft skills that managers and leaders should make a priority. Leaders who master this art find it easier to motivate their teams, engage stakeholders, and persuade others.
In this article, we’ll look in more detail at the power of storytelling and how it can help you become a more effective leader. We’ll also suggest some ways you can tell more compelling stories.
How Stories Make Us More Effective Leaders
Being a successful leader means being able to persuade, motivate, and inspire the people around you. Your direct reports need to believe in your leadership and feel motivated to give you their best work. Meanwhile, customers, other leaders, and company stakeholders need to find your proposals and reports convincing and engaging.
At their heart, these skills are all about good communication — sharing your ideas and knowledge in a way that is understandable, meaningful, and memorable. Mastering the art of telling an enthralling story can help you communicate better in many ways. Here are a few of them.
1. Make New Information Memorable
We’ve all suffered through presentations heavily packed with charts and data, only to quickly forget what the whole thing was about. Dry facts might be difficult to argue with, but they are also hard to remember.
Stories, on the other hand, can help us absorb new information and give us a better chance of remembering it later. In their book, Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath explored why some ideas are more memorable than others.
As part of their research, the Heaths challenged students at Stanford University to give a short presentation on non-violent crime. Ten minutes later, they asked the audience to recall details from the speeches. Only 5% could remember any statistics, but 63% remembered the stories.
Similarly, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania looked at the role of storytelling in helping doctors remembers new guidelines. Half the group were given a summary, while the other half were given a narrative version. An hour later, the group who had read the narrative remembered more of the details and were less likely to remember the guidelines incorrectly.
What does this mean for us as leaders? When we have new ideas or initiatives to share with our teams, taking a story-based approach to passing on the information makes it easier for people to learn and remember.
Storytelling can also help us share important information with other leaders. If you’re reporting back on your team’s work, using stories can get your message heard more effectively.
2. Inspire and Engage
Keeping your team motivated and on task is one of the most important responsibilities of any manager. But motivation can be a tricky equation to get right. While extrinsic motivators can go some way to inspiring action, the best and most consistent results come when our employees are motivated by something within them.
We all know the power of a good story to inspire and motivate us. Throughout history, leaders have used storytelling to build the emotional involvement of their audiences, boosting morale and rousing people to action.
It is no wonder that Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech is so well-known. Luther King painted a compelling word picture of the future he was campaigning for — a story rich enough to carry his audience along with him.
While rousing speeches might not always be appropriate in the workplace, leaders can still use the power of storytelling to inspire their teams. Unlike data and facts, stories speak to our emotional brains. Indeed, a great story can create measurable changes in our levels of oxytocin — the hormone associated with trust, empathy, and relationship-building.
3. Persuade and Convince
Inspiring your team is important, but it is only part of being a great leader. As well as being able to motivate your own direct reports, you’ll need the ability to craft a persuasive argument if you want to be successful in a management role.
Being able to persuade others of your point of view is vital in almost every aspect of management. If you are in a customer-facing role, you’ll need to be able to convince clients that your product or service is the right one for them. And every leader, regardless of role, must play an active part in decision-making if they want to prove their worth and continue to progress.
Storytelling is a compelling way of sharing ideas and making sense of facts. However, its persuasive benefits don’t stop there.
Studies show that when we hear about actions in a story, it activates the same areas of the brain that we use when we perform or imagine ourselves doing the same action. In other words, we experience stories as though they are our own first-hand experiences.
If you want to persuade someone of your point of view, stories help to take your ideas and make them part of your audience’s internal landscape. While hard data might satisfy the logical brain’s need for evidence, stories do the heavy lifting of activating the emotional brain and convincing your audience on a deeper level.
4. Define Company Culture
Creating a strong company culture has many benefits. It helps to bond people together with a common set of behaviors, beliefs, and values. It supports decision-making and determines a company’s direction. Done right, it can result in loyal, motivated, and purpose-filled employees.
We’ve already seen how stories can be used to build an emotional connection and encourage stronger relationships. Organizational stories can work just as well as situational ones to inspire and engage staff members, bringing everyone together on the same page.
Great storytelling can help you communicate your company’s values and vision in a relatable way. Most crucially, stories are a vehicle for embedding the wider company culture into the sub-culture of your individual team or department.
People work best when they have a sense of purpose in their jobs. Building a strong company story helps them to find that purpose and integrate it into their own stories about who they are and what they believe in.
Leaders play an essential role in communicating the organization’s culture to their team members. Learning to tell the company’s story in a way that relates to your own employees and their work makes it easier to create a cohesive, loyal, and motivated team.
How to Tell Better Stories
We’ve looked at why storytelling is an important skill for leaders, but how do you go about telling better stories?
The good news is that no one expects you to turn into the next Shakespeare. Telling stories in the workplace doesn’t mean spinning a long, complicated yarn or breaking out the thesaurus.
However, there are some simple tips leaders can use to improve their storytelling skills.
1. Make it Human Scale
One of the reasons we find it hard to remember statistics or engage with charts is that they are divorced from human emotions and reality. When telling stories, start by bringing things back to a human scale — what does this information mean from the point of view of actual people?
2. Consider Your Audience
Before you tell a story, think about your audience. What stories do they already have in their heads about this situation? How can you best speak to their values and emotions so that the story you tell integrates with their own?
3. Use Vibrant Language
You don’t have to be a poet, but a compelling story is much more of a list of events. Use adjectives, action words, and emotive phrases to bring your story to life. However, bear in mind that long or overly detailed stories can lose your audience. Make it vibrant but keep it short too.
4. Create Tension
All great stories have a believable antagonist to create tension and increase people’s investment in the outcome. In the workplace, you can introduce this tension by presenting possible issues and barriers, then show how action on behalf of your audience will overcome these problems.
5. Be Authentic
Stories are a powerful tool in the workplace, but they shouldn’t be works of fiction. Draw on facts, data, and the real-life experiences of your staff and customers to craft your stories. Don’t hesitate to include your personal experiences too — these can bring your stories to life and help you build trust with your audience.
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The ability to craft a compelling story is one of the most important soft skills a leader can have. Stories connect, inspire, and convince your listeners, making it easier to communicate new ideas, motivate your team members, and persuade your audience.