January 9, 2025
Who are your favorite leaders, speakers, teachers, or mentors in your life? These are the people you will take time to listen to, and you will feel you connect with them no matter the topic, who they are, or what they are presenting. Your attention and retention of the information increases, especially when the information is involved in any shared story. I bet that they are great storytellers; their stories grab you and are powerful. Stories are influential for many reasons.
All of us have many stories. Our lives are an evolving, changing story, with many interconnected stories recounting life’s ups and downs and learning. We all have a story of our own lives. This story influences our choices and actions in many ways. All leaders have a leadership story in them. A leadership story is a powerful, personal message that leaders can build and share with those they lead and serve. A powerfully built leadership can shape the culture of any organization. Organizations are, after all, human enterprises, and stories are a pivotal element in all relationships and enterprises. Each organization and even the departments in a large organization have a story.
Stories are powerful influencers in our lives. Our stories create a narrative that can be used to connect with others in one’s leadership practice. Stories create a common ground. The best public speakers, teachers, and trainers use personal stories to communicate effectively and connect with their audiences. Leaders have used stories and their stories for centuries. In a 2023 LinkedIn article
Leadership and Storytelling: How to Connect, engage, inspire, and Influence author Dr. Karen Marie Wagner-Clarke writes, “Storytelling is a vivid description of ideas, beliefs, personal experiences, and life lessons through stories or narratives that evoke powerful emotions and insights.”
Storytelling is an ancient art that has existed for thousands of years in various forms—pictures, drawings, images, songs, poems, plays, verbal and written stories, and movies. It is a method of weaving language into a concrete narrative to create rich, believable experiences. Storytellers tie together characters and plots to accomplish this feat, resulting in stories that act as metaphors for the human experience. In other words, storytellers do not merely relay facts; they use words, so the audience gets involved in the story as though they had a first-hand experience. Additionally, great storytellers share insights, invoke emotions, capture attention, engage the listeners, and leave the audience with information and new knowledge to absorb.
“We are all storytellers. We all live in a network of stories. There isn‘t a stronger connection between people than storytelling.”
Jimmy Neil
Storytelling is, and has always been, a highly effective medium to deliver a message or relay information. It is the reason why the art of compelling and impactful storytelling is an essential leadership tool. The Bible has over 150 stories; Jesus used over 50 stories or parables in the New Testament to build an unlikely leadership team and change the world. Howard Gardner, who created the term multiple s, said, “Stories are the single most powerful tool in a leader’s toolkit.”W. Edwards Denning, who revolutionized quality control, posited, “The age-old practice of storytelling is one of the most effective tools leaders can use.” Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, often said “Steve Jobs once said, “The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller,” highlighting the significant impact that well-crafted narratives can have on leadership effectiveness. Storytelling leaders can emotionally connect with their stakeholders, build engagement, convey vital information, set strategic visions, and inspire action. After all, storytelling is about experiences, connecting, and overcoming. When a leader shares a story, they relive an experience and invite others to share that experience. Thereby connecting and engaging with the listeners and delivering the intended message(s) through a story.
Storytelling expert Kendra Hall, in The Story Edge: How Leaders Harness the Power of Stories to Win in Business
, notes that stories create connection and are an advantage for leaders to master. Jimmy Neil, Director of the International Storytelling Center, declares, “We are all storytellers. We all live in a network of stories. There isn’t a stronger connection between people than storytelling.”
Storytelling is an essential skill for any leader in today’s ledes’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world. In a Forbes article, From Chaos To Clarity: Leadership Strategies For 2025, Dr. Richard Osibanjo writes that in today’s chaotic environment, it is natural to adopt a wait-and-see mindset during uncertain times. But great leaders don’t stand on the sidelines—they enter the arena, bring clarity to chaos, and make bold decisions. Their greatest weapon is reflection, allowing them to transform challenges into a sense of purpose and uncertainty into opportunity. He then recommends a strategy of
The 5 Ds framework. They are —Dream, Drive, Dare, Develop, and Deliver, which leaders can use to create a path leaders can leverage to navigate complexity and inspire action. These five elements are parts of a well-crafted leadership story.
This Thursday, leadership Insight is the first of a two-part series on a leader’s story and sharing it. This first article addresses the power and five benefits for a leader of crafting and sharing their leadership story.
In the realm of leadership, storytelling is a powerful tool that can inspire, motivate, and connect people to a shared vision. A well-crafted leadership story showcases your journey and resonates with your audience, creating a lasting impact in many ways.
Five Benefits of Crafting a LeadershipStory are ;,
1. A well-crafted leadership story provides clarity. Clarity of who you are as a leader and where you got to where you are in your leadership practice. It also provides clarity for those you lead and your organization of who you are as a leader and how you developed in your leadership journey.
2. A well-crafted leadership story creates connection and a model of personal transparency, trust, and authenticity in communication with your team and organization. The example of calm, open communication amongst leaders by Alan Mullay built a leadership story of calm, steady, and resilient leadership that saved Ford from bankruptcy. This connection enhances trust and credibility: Sharing personal experiences and vulnerabilities helps humanize you as a leader, fostering trust among your team. According to Gallup, “When employees strongly agree that they trust the leadership of their organization, they are 4x as likely to be engaged.”
2. A well-crafted leadership story creates connection and a model of personal transparency, trust, and authenticity in communication with your team and organization. The example of calm, open communication amongst leaders by Alan Mullay built a leadership story of calm, steady, and resilient leadership that saved Ford from bankruptcy. This connection enhances trust and credibility: Sharing personal experiences and vulnerabilities helps humanize you as a leader, fostering trust among your team. According to Gallup, “When employees strongly agree that they trust the leadership of their organization, they are 4x as likely to be engaged.”
3.. A well -crafted leadership story clearly communicates what your team and organization can expect of you, your purpose, passion, and values when well built. Manoel Amorim writes in The Secret of Culture Change: How to Build Authentic Stories That Transform Your Organization about how he, as CEO, disrupted a top-down hierarchical leadership model in a Brazillian telecommunications company. He asked the call support center staff to attend executive leadership meetings to share their common trouble center calls. Their recommendations became a model to transform customer service and spread throughout the organization. This story spread throughout the organization and encouraged others to share input with leadership. He refers to this phenomenon as “Story Cascading” and credits it with the culture change that led to the company’s financial turnaround
4. A well-crafted leadership story inspires and motivates those you lead and the leader by developing a story that becomes part of the vision of the organization.: A well-told story can ignite passion and drive in your team, aligning them with your vision. This is especially crucial in today’s changing economic, political, and social climate. I recently attended a leadership conference for Mary Kay Cosmetics. Several video clips were aired of the founder, the late Mary Kay Ash, reminding leaders present that although product lines and methods of working with customers will change the business plan and core beliefs, the priorities of God Family Business, the golden rule, and of enriching Women’s lives would never change. To reinforce the Mary Kay story, current Mary Kay leaders described in video or person that no matter the generation of leaders was speaking, they emphasized that the Mary Kay way was never changing in their current success stories. To further reinforce the point of the Mary Kay story, panels of Mary Kay leaders, who were mothers and daughters, shared their stories.
5. A well-crafted leadership story can be used to foster a culture of connection and learning to build and support sustainable and resilient team leadership for the future growth of the organization. A well-crafted leadership story gives a clear and mutual understanding of the leader’s expectations of how purpose, values, and actions will create a new future. A leader’s authentic story can be a guide for cultural change to address the unforeseen challenges of the future. In their book The Secret of Culture Change: How to Build Authentic Stories That Transform Your Organization, authors Jay Barney, Manoel Amorim, and Carlos Julio write, “If you want to change your organization’s culture, start with building stories.” They cite fifty stories of how leaders have built leadership stories to start cultural change. The effect of a well-crafted leadership story is that it will be a model and guide for other leaders in the organization to craft their own leadership stories to strengthen the organization’s culture and sustainability.
Bonus benefit: A well-crafted leadership story provides a pathway for cultural growth and builds the brand of the leader and the organization. As Greg Cagle states in The 4 Dimensions of Culture: And the Leaders Who Shape Them, a well-crafted leadership story will guide who we are and how we think, act, and interact in the culture.
Crafting an excellent leadership story offers the leader and their organization five significant benefits. It is a great start to develop clarity for the leader and organization. A well-crafted leadership story will build human connections and relationships in the team or organization. This story gives the leader a very public measure of how your story matches your actions. This story allows a benchmark for the leader to reflect on and adjust as needed. Crafting and sharing one’s leadership story creates a vision moving forward. A well-crafted leadership story creates a defined culture that can adapt to challenges. A well-crafted leadership story will help others follow a leader’s example and develop their own leadership story. Story cascading will lead to creating the story for the team and organization, a brand and a standard,
The leadership question for you then is :
1. Knowing the benefits listed below, what is keeping you from asking? What is your leadership story
Next week’s article will provide the guidelines for story building and the specific framework for an excellent leadership story.
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