A few months after becoming head of personalisation and advertising at Yahoo, I had to get onstage at the sales conference in Las Vegas in front of over 2,000 sales employees, all hungry for me to bring to them things to sell. I was supposed to tell them about the implications and future of merging personalisation and advertising. During the rehearsal with my public speaking coach, I started narrating the presentation I had prepared by talking about the ideas I wanted to pass on to the audience, only to be quickly interrupted by the coach in order to tell me that it was boring, aseptic, and that these sales people would forget about me and all the work my team was doing within minutes. Instead she told me to make it personal, to make the presentation about my personal story. So instead of telling them about personalisation and advertising, I told them about how I had to put my twins to sleep every night through storytelling, customising the stories to each of them, but at the same time blending them since they slept in the same room. Even though this was a very poor attempt at storytelling, I then learnt that I had to become better at storytelling, and even more, I touched the exciting power of personal storytelling. Over time I learnt to tell stories about things that had happened to me whether at work or in my private life in a coherent way to convey my guidance and leadership.
The thing is that in reality everybody, everybody, even the skeptic, has meaningful stories to tell. We just don’t do it often enough to practice. Even this very article you are now reading uses the same technique: it’s not about me telling you the rules of storytelling and the code for how to become a leader, I am telling you my personal story of how I perform as a leader through telling stories. Anecdotically, if you like watching TED, you’ll notice it’s not about the findings of the speakers, it’s about the speakers themselves, their journey. That’s what effective leaders do, they use personal storytelling to win an audience and convey a message.
Being a leader is about representing the needs of the people, whether at work, in government, or the local association. Leaders listen, structure, amplify, and provide solutions that resonate with employees. As a leader you need to win people’s brain, but most importantly, heart. Language always lives in a context, and stories are always told with a purpose in context, and context is always vague and vastly emotional. When my grandad would tell me stories about wolves and lambs in his youth, he was impressing in me a style of life and a perception of what mattered to him. He did not tell me what mattered to him explicitly, which would had been boring for a 5 year old, instead he gave me stories of what things he had done which reflected what mattered to him.
Well told stories and words have an amazing power to win people’s hearts and emotions. A book provides an opportunity for our brains to imagine and fill in the gaps. A book is a way to dream, with the writer leaving us a trail of thoughts that we can fill in ourselves and adapt to our lives and experiences. We can be somewhat lazy and just let the writer or the director drive us through their world. This helps us attach ourselves emotionally to stories and pass on knowledge, morals, law, code, …
This leadership via storytelling is far from being a recent thing of the XX century. All the Abrahamic religions are built on a tradition of tales and storytelling, finally codified into the holy books (Torah, Bible, Quran), which are passed on from generation to generation. There is always a corollary to the story, the moral message, but the reason we find it so appealing is because of the practice, magic and art of storytelling. We remember the work required to gather all animals in a boat, or the impossibility of feeding so many with little bread and almost no wine. These once-upon-a-time stories, of something that “happened” to our predecessors, don’t tell explicitly the ethical and moral messages we should follow, they instead paint us a world where we fill in with details, and derive our personalised interpretations, a place where we come up with our own ethical and moral messages, those we believe by ourselves, from the inside, and not ones imposed on us from the outside. Storytelling makes us believe in “the right thing” like it was “our own thing”. We do not believe “thou shalt not kill” because somebody told us, we somehow believe it from the bottom of our hearts, we absolutely believe that “killing is not right” is like a law of nature, and we unconsciously get to that conclusion through an accumulation of stories.
An effective leader needs to become extremely comfortable in storytelling. In fact, I would argue that out of all the skills and tools a leader must master, storytelling is probably the most important one in order to have a lasting deep impact. Corporate culture is just like general culture, the leader is supposed to represent the needs of the employees, who all joined the company because they believed in the vision and mission. The leader is then supposed to arm employees with beliefs, ethics, and morals that help each them, individually, codify corporate culture in their own individual way. A slide listing out the three ethical values of the company is good intellectually, and it certainly touches our brains, but it has short lasting effects. The personal storytelling of leaders, the where and how these values were used in the past by us, what effect they had, what worked and what did not, has a much more genuine, believable, profound and easy to assimilate impact.
As humans we love stories. Since little, as children we love listening to our parents’ voices reading us stories, only to later be replaced by television and tablets. This love for the story does not change as we get older, we always love good stories and keep going to movie theatres. Telling good stories is an art, and one that the leader needs to cultivate and practice. Life teaches us lessons all the time, and by being aware and alert, by noticing and observing these lessons as they happen, capturing them, synthesising them and then narrating them, we become a better leader with a more powerful toolchain. There is nothing wrong with repeating stories either. Children love to listen to the same stories night after night, or watch the same movies hundreds of times. A well told story, a genuine contribution of something we learned as leaders and that is now applicable to our employees never gets old. Every time we hear a good story we keep picking up new things. As a speaker, we keep tuning the story to the message we want to convey and the context and the audience we are addressing. Good stories are alive for decades or even centuries.
Whether you are a seasoned leader or a young aspiring leader, I urge you to start doing your own personal storytelling. Everybody has stories to tell, we are just not all good naturally at identifying them and feeding them. It does require practice. Find out what stories you have worth telling by looking at what happened to you in the past that helped you come up with your beliefs and morals, and guide you in acting as a leader. Everything you do today as a manager or as a leader I guarantee you that happened in the context of a story. Learn how to lead telling those stories, rather than codifying rules in slides, presentations and empty corporate memos.
Now go tell your story today.
The End