Crafting Your Leadership Story
Crafting Your Leadership Story
Are you the kind of leader that people want to follow? If you’re in charge of a team, a department, a division, or an entire organization—you’ve probably spent some time thinking about this question. The answers you come up with might be positive, negative, or neutral. There’s always room to improve. Crafting your leadership story is an effective way to strengthen bonds with your people.
Why is it important to have a leadership story? You have degrees and a resume. You’ve got experiences, insights, and vision. Those elements make up who you are as a leader. But data doesn’t have the power to inspire on its own. It can’t explain that where you’ve been and what you’ve done is building toward something. It won’t tell your people where they fit in and why they want to be part of your team.
Does Your Story Make You the Flagship of the Fleet?
It doesn’t matter whether you are a young professional who is just starting the journey toward your vision or a seasoned leader working on the capstone of your career. It doesn’t matter what you’re working toward or how you plan on getting there. If it is something worth doing, it’s bigger than what you can do on your own. To get there, you’ll need to inspire others to follow you
The 5 W’s (and 1 H) of Crafting Your Leadership Story
If you’re starting to see the value of having a leadership story, you might also be wondering what you need to do to craft your own. While it’s true that telling your leadership story is, on a certain level, just talking about yourself—it pays to invest the time and effort to think strategically and prepare the best version.
The best time to start working on your leadership story is right now. As you read through the rest of this article, think about the version of your story that aligns your biography with your vision. Will it inspire others to dedicate themselves to the work of bringing that vision to life?
Who Needs A Leadership Story?
Anyone who is or wants to become a leader needs to spend time thinking about, organizing, and revising the story they will tell to inspire others. If you want to accomplish something you won’t be able to do it alone. You’ll need to enlist the support and enthusiasm of people who can help you make it happen.
We’ve all experienced the feeling that you get when you think of the perfect thing to say a few minutes or hours after the opportunity to say it has passed. When it happens after a friendly debate, we just shake our heads and say “oh well”. None of us wants to feel like we missed a golden opportunity to take a huge step forward on the mission that defines us.
Crafting your leadership story now means that you’ll always have easy access to it when opportunities present themselves. The story will change over time and how you tell it will vary depending on the circumstances. But if you don’t have it ready, you’ll have to make it up on the spot. You don’t want to give anyone the impression that you haven’t thought about why you’re the leader they should choose.
What Does a Good Leadership Story Need?
The most important thing to remember about your leadership story is that it is YOUR leadership story. It should be authentic to your history, experiences, and aspirations. It should be humble and vulnerable in ways that extend an invitation to connect. It should be optimistic about the present and the future.
Beyond that, you should focus on elements that help your story accomplish certain goals. You should be telling a story that:
Makes Connections
Humanizes the Big Picture
Engages Listeners on a Deeper Level
Focuses on Values
Persuades and Motivates
Inspires
Tell a Story That Will Make Connections
How do you connect with your audience in ways that will inspire them to follow your lead? You can build or strengthen interpersonal connections with pieces of your leadership story that work to lead by example or allow them to learn from your mistakes. What you say about yourself gives your audience a chance to see themselves as part of your story.
“Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tell a Story That Humanizes the Big Picture
Storytelling is the best way to turn data points into living breathing things. Your audience will remember the impact of what you’ve accomplished more clearly through individual examples than through aggregated numbers on charts.
“Leadership is not about titles, positions, or flow charts. It is about one life influencing another.”
- John C. Maxwell
Tell a Story That Will Engage on a Deeper Level
Your leadership story is an opportunity to take off the masks or armor that you’ve used to maintain a professional veneer. It’s doesn’t just allow you to let the audience see what’s behind the curtain, it demands that you do. A story that is courageous and vulnerable in equal parts will resonate with your audience. Don’t miss the opportunity to get real if you want real results.
“No guts, no story.”
- Chris Brady
Tell a Story That Focuses on Values
Any good story will include elements that address the how, the what, and the when of the events. A good leadership story is one that uses those elements to focus the audience’s attention on the “Who” (You!) and the “Why” (Your Passion).
“Show me the [man] that you honor and I will know what kind of [man] you are.”
- Thomas John Carlisle
Tell a Story That Will Persuade and Motivate
Any good salesperson knows that people make decisions based on emotion and then they look for evidence and logic to support the decision they’ve made. You should remember this when you’re crafting your leadership story. After all, you’re asking the audience to buy into your vision and mission. Lead with your passion but provide evidence that lets them know you can make it happen.
“Leadership is an action, not a position.”
- Donald McGannon
Tell a Story That Will Inspire
Whether you’re telling your story to employees, volunteers, business partners, clients, or some other group that has a role to play in your mission—you can’t go wrong with a story that delivers the message: “Together we can . . .”
“Remember, teamwork begins by building trust. And the only way to do that is to overcome our need for invulnerability.”
- Patrick Lencioni
Telling a story that connects isn’t 3-dimensional chess . . .
Where To Tell A Leadership Story
Your leadership story is the centerpiece of your personal brand. That means that you should find ways to tell all or part of it on every platform that you use as part of your business tool kit. From LinkedIn and other social media platforms to your organization’s bio page on the website, there are countless ways to weave your leadership story into evergreen content.
Some people are uncomfortable with the idea of promoting their brand or telling their leadership story. They think of it as bragging or self-promotion. But when you’re telling your story the right way, it isn’t really about “you” at all. It’s about all of the connections you have made, all the ones you want to make, and all of the things you hope to accomplish.
An elevator-version of your leadership story is something you should work on for professional conferences, client meetings, and departmental meetings. The full-version is something that you should be able to tell from memory without notes. The point of telling the story is to make connections and you can’t do that if you’re busy reading or remembering the “right” way to tell the story.
When Do Leaders Tell Their Stories?
Any time that you need to inspire your audience or remind them of the shared commitment that has brought you together, you can use your leadership story as part of your plan. A good leadership story is a tool that is flexible enough to be adapted to a wide range of situations. But learning to use that tool effectively is a process.
An apprentice carpenter will probably smack their thumb a few times as they learn to use a hammer. A novice musician will probably get lost in improvisation from time to time. A leader who is learning to use their leadership story as part of their personal brand will have to accept the fact that it’s a learning process.
The first step in the process is crafting the story. Once you’ve done that, you should find it easy to remember the story well enough that you can try to use it in different settings. After all, if you can’t remember your leadership story—your audience probably won’t remember it either.
Do you take new team members out to lunch during orientation? Are you doing more virtual onboarding and team-building due to the pandemic? Is your team launching a new project? Is morale starting to wane on a project you’ve been working on? These are just some of the scenarios where a well-crafted leadership story will help you establish or reaffirm your team’s shared purpose.
Why a Leadership Story Works
When you present an audience with a narrative that connects a problem with a solution by way of the journey that you are on, you invite them to join you for the rest of the journey. A story can have multiple effects on an audience. You can inform them, engage them on an emotional level, and inspire them to take actions that will make the solution you envision a reality.
Stories resonate with audiences. That means that your audience will feel your passion and remember your mission. Each audience member will have a personal relationship with your story. They will find in it the things that speak directly to them. They will retell your story as they explain why they’re a part of your team. They will use your story to invite others to join or support the mission.
How Do You Craft A Story Worth Telling?
You’re probably beginning to appreciate the difference between the type of strategic storytelling that makes for a good leadership story and more casual approaches to telling a story that you use in your everyday life. If you use strategy to craft your story, you can learn to use it as a tool in ways that will make the delivery seem casual to your audience.
A good leadership story will align your personal brand with the organization you are a part of. Your organization’s brand should be aligned with a cause that is central to its mission. If your leadership story situates you within the relationship between the organization and the cause, you’ll focus attention on the common “Why” that brings everyone together.
A good story does more than just focus attention in the right place. It reinforces a shared meaning by way of changes in the past that have shaped the present and the future. Stories that share lessons learned or reveal vulnerabilities through examples of mistakes or failures are a great way to humanize the mission and assert the importance of the help you get from your team and other supporters.
Does your story show that you’ve got your ducks in a row?
Craft Your Leadership Story
This article has been dedicated to helping you understand what a leadership story is and why it’s important for you to have one as part of your professional toolkit. Beyond that, it’s given you some tips on where to discover your own leadership story and how to think strategically about where, when, and how to tell it.
If you’re ready to get to work on your own leadership story, there are a lot of high-quality resources that you can use to guide the process. Think of this article as the starting point of your journey. Check out some of these online tools to help you make progress along the path toward becoming a polished storyteller in support of your brand and your mission.
Online Courses
There are free and inexpensive courses that you can take through Udemy, Coursera, and SkillShare.
Check out these links to see what they have to offer:
· Storytelling for Business | Udemy
· Leadership Communication for Maximum Impact: Storytelling | Coursera
· Storytelling for Leaders: How to Craft Stories That Matter | Keith Yamashita | Skillshare
Books and More
Storytelling has become such a central part of business communication that it is worth your time to check out some of the most authoritative voices on the subject.
· StoryBrand – Clarify Your Message
· The Science of WHY | Simon Sinek
Argonaut Productions Can Help You Tell a Story That Resonates
At Argonaut, storytelling is what we do. We work with non-profits organizations and socially conscious corporations to amplify their messages. It’s how we make sure that our work contributes to something bigger than we can do alone.
If you or your organization need help to discover, design, or deliver your message—we’re here to help. Give us a call or visit our website to learn more about how we work and who we work with. Then let us know what we can do for you.
