Leadership Storytelling: The Key to Connecting and Inspiring Your Team

We’ve all been there. Lost in the grip of a great story, we fast forward to the next episode of our favorite show, repeatedly flip the pages of a gripping novel from a beloved author, or get swept away in the details of a friend’s dramatic event.

This is the power of the art and craft of storytelling, a reliable force for capturing the hearts and minds of humans since the beginning of time. Yet somehow, when it comes to business settings, we often devalue the strength of great storytelling in leadership, turning instead to the PowerPoint slide, charts and graphs, or corporate speak that does little to grab anyone’s attention, let alone inspire them to action.

Yet research – and the experience of great leaders – is increasingly pointing to storytelling for leaders as a pivotal and underused tool for influencing, teaching, and inspiring people to take action.

What is Leadership Storytelling?

Leadership storytelling is a special skill leaders use to incorporate emotion and meaning into their communication through the simple power of a great story.

Stories can be used to share a vision and to communicate a leader’s “why” or core motivation for being part of a company, project, or transformation. Leadership stories can also help employees connect to a leader on a personal level, which builds connections and inspires a team.

After all, employees don’t want to follow leaders they don’t know and understand. Leaders can’t get anywhere with their team if the team doesn’t see the leader as a real person who’s not perfect, but who has a real vision for the company. One of the key ways to help people get to know you is by sharing stories and connecting with employees personally.

Where’s the Evidence? Why is Leadership Storytelling Important?

Psychological studies have frequently found that facts are far more memorable when told in a story. Further, organizational psychologist Peg Neuhauser found that learning that stems from a well-told story is remembered more accurately, and for far longer, than learning derived from facts and figures.

In a frequently-cited article on business storytelling for the Harvard Business Review, an HBR senior editor interviewed highly regarded screenwriting lecturer and director, Robert McKee, on why storytelling is so important for business leaders. Here’s part of what he shared:

“A big part of a CEO’s job is to motivate people to reach certain goals. To do that, he or she must engage their emotions, and the key to their hearts is story,” McKee said. “… it demands vivid insight and storytelling skill to present an idea that packs enough emotional power to be memorable. If you can harness imagination and the principles of a well-told story, then you get people rising to their feet amid thunderous applause instead of yawning and ignoring you.”

McKee said that while PowerPoint presentations are the lifeblood of business today, they often miss the mark in truly engaging the audiences. While such presentations will undoubtedly still have their place in storytelling for leadership in business, leaders should find new ways to build in stories in order to build trust and genuine connections with their employees, McKee said. “Stories are how we remember; we tend to forget lists and bullet points,” he said.

Storytelling for Leaders: 3 Best Practices

1. Demonstrate authenticity in your storytelling

I’ve written a lot about authenticity in leadership, and for good reason. Since employees are bombarded with so much information today, they are starved for meaning and genuineness from leadership. When they feel their leaders are being real with them – and not giving them corporate speak or a line – that’s when real trust can develop, which is the heart of any outstanding company culture.

“When we’re in charge, we often go to great lengths to look composed and confident. But to lead with authenticity and empathy, it’s important to show that we’re human, too,” said Simon Sinek, the well-known author of Start with Why, who emphasizes the beauty of authenticity from leaders.

Leaders can use storytelling to share a lot about their vision and what inspires them. For instance, a story might help demonstrate why the vision means so much to them personally. For example, a medical doctor who is now CEO of a pharmaceutical company shares why the new medicines advance his dream of changing people’s lives in an even bigger way. The restaurant chain owner shares what it means to bring people joy, not only through great food, but by being a pillar in the community, etc.

The stories also don’t need to be about the leader’s own personal experience. The leader might also share something they saw that impressed them. For instance, a hospital director might point out how inspired he was by a nurse who went out of her way to help a patient who wasn’t on her watch find their way to her room, then sat with her for a moment because she was nervous about an upcoming procedure. This could be a simple story about going out of the way to show compassion for patients while also helping the full group of employees feel gratified that team members are being recognized for being exceptional.

2. Answer the “So what?” question

Stories need a moral to be meaningful. For instance, if a company transformation is about to be launched, employees need to understand why the change is needed and how it might make their work experience – and their future with the company – more meaningful and rewarding. If it just feels like a lot more work for no reward, the story of the transformation will obviously fall flat for employees.

We often refer to this important aspect as the “What’s in it for me?” question, which is often the top question on any employee’s mind when it comes to change. All the storytelling in the world won’t motivate employees if the story doesn’t somehow address that question meaningfully for employees.

3. Invite employees to do some storytelling, too

Storytelling isn’t just a powerful tool for leaders. It also works great for teams. For instance, simply having employees on a new team interview each other and introduce each other to the rest of the team can be a great way to build a connection and rapport among the team from the start.

When team members start to learn each other’s story, personally and professionally, they begin to build bonds that carry over to the work project and are much more likely to develop work practices that incorporate respect for each other’s work product, time, and other needs.

Storytelling can also invite employees to share perspectives on a project, a new product they launched, or great experiences serving new customers, clients, or patients. This gives employees a chance to be spotlighted while also sharing best practices for the entire team to learn from.

Characteristics of Storytelling in Leadership

When creating a story, you want it to inspire and engage audiences, helping them gain new perspectives and create connections that assign meaning to circumstances or information. Whatever your end goal, an effective story should be:

• Simple, easy to tell, and easy to remember – we want to engage quickly and break through the noise.
• Short and to the point – with so many information sources bombarding us at any given time, the average person’s attention span is only about eight seconds. This doesn’t mean your stories need to be told in under 10 seconds, but instead, is a good reminder to keep your stories succinct to hold your listeners’ attention.
• Purposeful and honest – tie the story to the end result you want to achieve by positioning problems in the foreground and showing how they were overcome.
• Repeated – to broaden the audience and the reach of the message, you want to keep telling your story and have others inspired to repeat it.

A Template for Outstanding Storytelling in Leadership

So, how are stories we use in the workplace different from those we tell at a backyard BBQ? The main distinction is that the workplace story has a moral or a purpose. It has a punch line that helps employees know what’s important and links the story to a desired behavior or outcome.

When composing a story to help reinforce a workplace goal, we suggest using a standard formula:

Context + Characters + Conflict + Moral = Your Story

See if you can find these key elements in this sample story:

“My wife and I are working on a home remodeling project that involves a house that we thought had great potential. After we bought it, we soon realized that it involved more work than we thought. In fact, we needed to tear it down to the studs and rebuild it. The whole experience reminds me of our work in the consumer-focused business. It’s like a house that needs remodeling, that was wonderful in its prime and now suffers from some deferred maintenance. But when we’re done, we know it will be profitable and, equally important, we’ll feel good about the work we did together. The key is that we’re all in this together.”

• The context: Having a home project that needs more work than you realized – is relatable to the audience on a personal level as well as a work one.
• The characters: The speaker and his/her wife.
• The conflict: The characters face having to do more than they anticipated to get the job done.
• The moral or lesson learned that applies to the employee audience is that the extra work will lead to positive results and “we’re all in this together.”

What Employees Want to Know About Their Leaders

Leaders use stories to advance various goals in their organizations, from helping employees connect to strategy and understand what success looks like with a real-life example to explaining their future vision for a company transformation and building trust by sharing their personal challenges and experiences.

In fact, we recommend that leaders develop a library of brief stories based on their own experiences that they can use to emphasize key messages, explain values, or reinforce key behaviors.

One of our clients inspires her employees with stories about “the value of hard work” (a lesson learned in her formative years), “the importance of embracing differences” (a personal value developed while living in different countries), and “the power of focus and alignment” (an attribute of the company culture that she believes is instrumental to their success).

Consider using this approach to develop your own library of great stories with morals, which can be integrated into your communications.

As you develop stories that resonate and advance your goals, it’s helpful to consider and incorporate answers to the most common questions employees have for their leaders. I’ve outlined a few topics and questions below to help get you started.

Questions about you:

It’s not all about the organization. People want to know who you are, what’s important to you, and how that might affect them, and have questions such as:

• How did you get to where you are?
• How do you want people to know you? What makes you tick? 
• What are your expectations of employees?
• What should they expect of you?
• On what do you want to put a stake in the ground?

Questions about the organization and its goals:

Leaders are the key source of information about the organization, its goals, and how employees connect to the big picture. Creating stories that resonate can help drive employees’ understanding of questions such as:

• What is your vision? What should various audiences believe in you and the vision?
• Who are we, and what do we do?
• What are our business goals and strategies?
• What initiatives will drive the business today? In the future?
• What new behaviors do you expect employees to perform successfully to achieve your results? How will we get the results needed?
• What does success look like?
• How will we measure success?
• What needs to change to make this happen?

How Storytelling Gets Woven into the Overall Messaging

What stories leaders share are often part of a larger internal communications effort that’s based on the company’s overall company strategy. When outlining an organization’s strategy or a leader’s vision in a messaging platform, for example, we develop messages and supporting points to advance the desired audience perception and the overall strategy. When this critical information is defined and confirmed, then the stories that make the messages personal and compelling are created and weaved into the mix.

I often enjoy listening to commencement speeches for ideas on how leaders can successfully share personal anecdotes to inspire a team. One of my favorites was from former Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, who spoke years ago to nearly 2,000 graduates of the City Colleges of Chicago.

One key to Sandberg’s speech was that it was full of stories, not boring statistics and data points. At the same time, all the narratives had a point that directly connected to her City College audience, which included many minorities, immigrants, and older students with their own families.

Specifically, Sandberg shared accounts of her immigrant ancestors looking to build a new life in the U.S. She spoke of her grandfather’s graduation from the City College of New York and how that opened up new opportunities for future generations, including Sandberg herself. She was also willing to be truly honest and vulnerable. She talked about mistakes on the job and lessons learned. She shared her insecurities growing up and the feelings of inadequacy she needed to conquer to succeed. These anecdotes prompt interesting questions for corporate leaders, too:

• Which of your life experiences can serve as inspiration for your employees?
• What can you share that makes you vulnerable and relatable? For example, what was your first career experience?
• What mistakes have you made that helped you become a better leader?
• What can you share that personally connects you to your company’s vision and your team?

How The Grossman Group Can Help

Our team specializes in helping leaders tell strategic and compelling stories that inspire their teams. We do that in a variety of ways: creating leader message platforms and story libraries, writing speeches, crafting presentations, training managers to share stories with their teams, preparing town hall remarks, planning extraordinary meetings that get people more engaged in the company strategy, and more.

A core tool that’s been especially helpful for leaders is our “leadercommunicator platform,” which keeps a leader’s key messages in one place, includes key business goals and the case for change for specific audiences, and shares great stories that create an emotional and personalized connection. For many leaders, we’ve also helped develop a story “library,” which includes key stories leaders can share with their audience at pivotal moments in the business cycle.

To learn more about the impact we help leaders make through storytelling, check out this story of how we helped a Fortune 50 CEO see major gains in her communications scores.

You can learn more about our leadership and storytelling communication services and how we help leaders become better storytellers here.

Closing Thought

There’s a lot of buzz about leadership through storytelling today, and I believe it’s been a long time coming. With so much information coming at our employees today – facts, figures, presentations, slides, you name it – the one most powerful tool we have remaining is stories.

Think back on the best presentations you’ve attended in recent months or even years. My guess is it stands out because a leader or speaker shared a story that sticks with you today. This does not mean our presentations need to be full of stories. It does mean that we need to continue looking for ways to bring the narrative to life in all that we communicate if we truly want to move our teams to action.

What are some of the best traits of great leader storytellers?

—David Grossman

For a quick reference guide on how to stand out as a leader, download our eBook, Top 11 Attributes of Exceptional Leaders and Communicators. Or, share with a leader or colleague you know is looking to elevate their leadership impact.