Storytelling for Leaders

Summary

Storytelling is at the heart of building and maintaining a leader’s skillset. Stories make your messages more memorable, contagious, and inspirational, and can help advance your career at every stage in your professional life. Although it can be easy for a leader to learn how to tell stories—answering technical questions about structure or detail—the first and most important question to answer is, “Which stories do I need to tell?”

You’ll be forgiven if you tell the right story imperfectly in the workplace, because you’re not an actor or a professional speaker. But if you tell a boring, irrelevant story, you’ll never be forgiven for wasting your audience’s time.

The problem is that we often lose sight of what matters most in telling our stories. This course covers the most important ideas that leaders should have an opinion about. You’ll leave the course with a collection of your own stories that you can implement immediately in your professional life. These are the kinds of stories that, by their nature, won’t need to change often. Your time is well spent in getting these stories right, because you’ll get the most out of them again and again. You’ll find these stories useful for exerting influence in organizations, and for creating and sustaining your most important professional messages across functional disciplines, whether in general management, marketing, sales, finance, human resources, IT, R&D, etc.

Learning Outcomes

• How and when to use stories (and when not to use them)

• Understand the principles of effective storytelling for leaders

• Best practices from leaders across a variety of sectors

• How to craft and deliver effective stories that engage and inspire

• Using storytelling to facilitate teamwork, collaboration, and problem-solving within a team or organization

• Develop the skills to craft and deliver engaging stories

• Practice using storytelling to communicate, motivate, and influence others

• The role of storytelling in leadership and its impact on organizational culture

• Identify the elements of an effective story

• Incorporating sensory details and emotions

• Preparing to tell a story

• Handling questions and feedback after telling a story

• Communicating your story with clarity, concision, and conviction

• How to choose and include meaningful details for different audiences

• Ethical considerations of storytelling, including the potential for misuse or manipulation

• Exploring different types of stories, including personal stories, team stories, and organizational stories, and learn how to effectively use each type to achieve specific goals

• Practicing stories to communicate complex ideas and concepts in a way that is accessible and engaging to a diverse audience