Leadership storytelling bears a significant impact in the organizational context. But does it bring a change in business deliverables?
In fact, Leadership Storytelling can improve revenues and increase operational efficiencies. There are several opportunities for leadership storytelling when it comes to delivering an impact.
Storytelling in Knowledge Transfer
Your team will have an effective orientation if the narrative is based on leadership storytelling. Let’s take a salesperson’s case, for example. The sales team is extremely well aware of the product/service features, and we can bet that they would have mastered the “a’s” and “ifs” in the user manual. When a new employee joins the sales team, the knowledge transfer happens through an information dump format. Instead, it would be more effective if a story is crafted that highlights the product’s strengths and narrates those from the user’s perspective. It is a win-win, internally for better knowledge retention and externally in increased opportunities for sales.
“Your product/service story differentiates your brand from your competitors.”
Leadership Stories to Gain Competitive Advantage
Exhibiting your brand personality through leadership communication in narratives is crucial to set the bar for competitive advantage. Having a more relatable story and more concerned about the need of the user tends to stand out. Ask your top management these questions before drafting the go-to-market strategy,
- “Would our brand story make a difference?”
- “Would it motivate our audience”
- “Is it simple to understand?”
- “Would it be a catalyst to reinforce our relationship?”
Leadership Storytelling Enabling OCB
Organisational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB) is exhibited among employees when motivated to work for the company and take pride in working for the organization. The trick is to tell a story that is strategically sequenced and not chronologically. The story should persuade your employees to stay motivated in the place they work—craft stories to build trust and relationships amongst employees.
Leadership Storytelling in Strategic Goal Setting
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are statements that are framed after analyzing benchmark metrics. Leadership storytelling enables inspirational push to reach newer milestones. Leadership storytelling propels the credibility of ideas put forward, thereby strengthening trust amongst executives.
Crafting a compelling story for the audience and internal and external stakeholders, builds engagement and enables higher credibility to you as an organization. An exciting story has the power to win your clients and influence your executives.
Challenge in Leadership Storytelling – Over-Reliance on Data
In one of the business cases we had, the client pitch deck was loaded with data and charts. The company is a hardcore tech platform that enables user testing at a quicker turnaround time. Now the challenge in pitching for the client was that the board consisted of the CTO and the CEO, the CMO, and other salespeople. The first draft of the company’s sales deck was a book-long slide list consisting of numbers, charts, and rows of numbers again.
We overcame this by crafting a story by understanding the client’s pain points. We spoke with a very similar sales team to understand the actual user pain points and the feedback statements to position the sales deck to make it more relatable. We combined user pain points with hardcore numbers to derive maximum value for the deck through business storytelling. The client realized the importance of the offering, and all thanks to leadership storytelling, they increased their trust.
Takeaways on Leadership Storytelling
- Be audience-specific – Know what challenges your audience encounters and try to address them.
- Have a coherent narrative – Various mailers focusing on different touchpoints and not connected with each other would make the audience feel lost. Have a narrative throughout.
- Give life to your story – Humanize the story with personal anecdotes and put forward your perspective effectively.
Let us help your brand author the leadership story. The story would inspire, lead and take action. The story that would make your team feel one with the system.
Connect with us for more on leadership storytelling.