The Five Leadership Stories that Every Leader Needs Now
Why Leadership Storytelling Matters
We’re twenty five years into the Internet, and leadership storytelling is still only just starting to get its due. Even today, in a world of LinkedIn and TikTok, too many leaders still think that the data points and features and benefits should speak for themselves.
The reality is that the stories we tell—as well as our approach to telling those stories—can radically improve how we can paint a picture in someone’s mind, engaging and inspiring them to get on board with our ideas and our message.
“You’ve got to think about how to wrap your data in the right story,” says Tom Kelley, the founder of the Design Thinking consultancy, IDEO. “Stories can bring your work to life.”
The Five Leadership Stories that Every Leader Needs Now
Most of us have heard about some common leadership stories in business: elevator pitches, sales pitches, missions, visions, and values and more. Those kinds of stories have been around for a long time, and they still have some usefulness.
But today, when things are changing so much and there are so many different avenues for leadership storytelling, it’s important that we look outside the box, so we can reimagine and reinvent.
There are new leadership stories that we can start telling now.
Leadership Story #1: Origin Story
The idea sounds simple: how did you and your ideas get here? Where did they come from? Why do they matter?
Practically, though, most leadership storytellers end up in a tried and true pattern of chronological storytelling.
Chronological storytelling, of course, are stories that progress in a straight line through time. They sound something like this:
Well, first, I graduated from business school. I worked my first job for a couple of years in my twenties. Then I got promoted. Then I move cities, and companies. Then a few more years (or decades) passed. And now, I’m here.
That story is probably true, but it’s also really boring.
What makes a great origin story is the storytelling idea of setting the scene. Maybe, for example, you want to take us—your audience—into the moment when the magic happened.
Where were you precisely when lightning struck? We all know the famous story of Einstein walking on the beach when he had his Eureka moment.
Alternatively, perhaps you want to take us intimately into your pain point. In one of the most famous TED talks of all time, The Power of Vulnerability, author Brene Brown tells us about a transformational therapy session with her therapist that helped her understand just why vulnerability is so important.
Her story is powerful—and, it’s also strategic, because it helps us relate to her. By relating to her, we trust her more. We understand where she’s coming from, and we decide whether or not we want to go on the journey with her.
As humans, we already think in story—so you can transform yourself from a faceless leader into a real person, with real experiences, pains, sorrows and dreams.
Take us into your origin story, don’t just tell us the history.
Leadership Story #2: Vision Story
Once upon a time, in business, a leader’s goals were relatively straightforward. Basically, your goals were to make as much money as you could while hurting as few people as possible.
If you did that and only that, you could probably count on a long career, and a gold-plated Rolex when you retired.
Now, of course, we live in a much more complicated world, with much more complex and uncertain leadership problems. Yes, revenue is still important. But what about your sustainability? The happiness of your people? The sense of belonging in your culture? How resilient and adaptable are you?
Once upon a time, in business, it was easy to say that your corporate vision was “to be the best”. But, today, leaders are responsible for transmitting more nuance in their visionary stories.
A vision story tells us how to define success, so we can know when we finally arrive.
Google’s vision is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Tesla’s vision is “to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.”
These are two big companies with visions that might just be much grander than yours or mine. But the power in their vision is that they give us a clear idea of what success looks like, so we can know when we get there.
An even more powerful aspect of these visions is that they are open-ended. For example, right now, the world generates more than 300 terabytes of data every day. That’s a lot of new information being created that Google needs to make universally accessible and useful. The vision isn’t “to be the best”—it’s about focusing our attention on the end goal… even if that goal is way, way, way on the distant horizon.
What’s your vision? Are you focused on a metric you want your team to achieve by the end of the year? Can you expand that metric to get into the heart of your why?
What does the metric represent? Why is it meaningful? How can we recognize it once we arrive?
Leadership Story #3: So What? Story
Tesla wants to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy. So what? Why should I care?
Answering this question is the purpose of the So What? story. It’s the So What? story that you will take to your market.
So What stories can be very difficult for leaders who live and breathe their story every day. Of course we know why it’s important. It’s important because… well, it’s obviously important because…
The reason it can be so hard to say why it’s important is that we need to challenge ourselves to hear our story from our audience’s perspective. This shift, this ability to understand our audience is perhaps the most important skill that a leadership storyteller can develop.
One of the tools I use in my storytelling workshops and storytelling training is called an Empathy Map. An Empathy Map is a quick, digestible way to illustrate the attitudes and behaviors of my intended audience.
An empathy map is divided into four quadrants. The idea is to answer these questions from my audience’s perspective.
Says and Does. What are her behaviors and how does she conduct herself? What is her attitude and what does she say?
Seeing. What is she encountering in her daily experiences? (People, activities, or things.) What are the people around her doing? What is she watching, reading, and exposed to in her environment or the marketplace that could influence her?
Thinking and Feeling. What matters to her? What are her positive and negative thoughts? What does she worry about or what keeps her up at night?
Hearing. What does she hear and how is it influencing her?
Questions like these force me to put myself in my audience’s perspective. They let me second guess my tone, the images I might use, the titles of my blog posts… They might also affect the anecdotes I tell—or don’t tell—to my in-person audiences.
An empathy map is a very rudimentary tool—it’s a stand-in for really deep and highly developed emotional intelligence. But it’s an excellent first step.
As you refine your understanding of your audience, you can naturally uncover the So What stories that make them care.
Leadership Story #4: Purpose Story
“A purpose statement describes your reason for existing in a snappy, concise way,” says Charla Vall at Junxion Strategy. “It helps leaders assess or evaluate strategies, alliances and collaborations they could develop to ‘accelerate’ towards their societal goal.”
Charla goes on to list 5 Characteristics of a Good Purpose Statement:
Overlaps your Passion, your Power and a relevant societal Problem
It addresses a significant societal problem
It must be outcome-oriented
Your Purpose statement should reflect a long-term, aspirational quest
It should be clear and concise
Purpose stories can apply to external audiences as well as internal audiences. But unlike So What stories, a purpose story is much more about why we should care. Why are we putting our hard work, blood, sweat, tears into this particular project? What’s in it for us?
Great purpose stories are intrinsically linked to motivation.
One excellent model for Purpose Stories is called the Public Narrative framework. Public Narrative was invented by Marshall Ganz, a senior lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and used prominently as part of the campaign to elect President Obama back in 2008.
Public Narrative is based on three interrelated stories:
A Story of Self. Who are you and why have you been drawn to this purpose? (In other words, your Origin Story.)
A Story of Us. How does your experience as an individual leader connect to our experience as a community?
A Story of Now. What action or next step are you asking us to take?
This framework can help take the Purpose statement, as outlined above, to a new level of emotional resonance and engagement. Here’s an example from TED speaker Mark Bezos. Can you see all three elements of his Purpose Story? Did it resonate with you?
Leadership Story #5: Visual Story
We’ve all heard the old story: a picture says 1000 words. In this media environment, that’s more true than ever.
What’s the image that you can use to summarize your message or argument in an evocative, compelling and clear manner?
Here’s one I love from Dropbox. This was back in 2007, when Dropbox was trying to raise venture capital:
Isn’t that great? The whole pitch in four words and one photo.
These are just a handful of the infinite examples of the 5 essential of stories that leaders need to tell today.
I know it’s easy for me to show you these polished examples. It’s much, much harder to create these for yourself.
Well, guess what! I can help! I’m a leadership storytelling consultant who excels in helping leaders like you find, design, develop and deliver your story in a more compelling way.
Why don’t you reach out, and we can set up a chat?
