Storytelling for me is like a good cup of coffee, it warms and awakens.

When I do is a “storytelling operation”:

I listen to the public

I build the great plot necessary for them

I take care of the different media platforms in which the stories will incarnate.

To make a connection with their audiences – whether customers, investors, shareholders, peers or partners – business leaders need to have a variety of specific stories in their back pockets. For a rich trove of possible stories, look at your most successful customers. Then systematically collect, document and practice telling them.

A big part of my message to leadership storytellers is that “telling” is only part of your activity… and not even the most important part of the transaction. As a leader, after you tell a story, change happens when we invite the team into a conversation about the story; and then when we invite team members to tell their stories as well. The idea is to create a storytelling culture, or an interpretive community, that builds the organization’s capacity for meaning-making and co-creation.

Thus, I would argue that story listening is an even more potent leadership skill than story telling. Leaders should be the role models for this. I like the fact that this is a surprising message, because it does sound counter-intuitive to storytelling. But this is the shift I like to challenge leaders to make.

So even though you are creating an article about “telling” steps, I think it is absolutely appropriate to say to challenge the leader’s mental model and shift them to the side of listening and meaning making. My book, “Circle of the 9 Muses,” is loaded with actionable ideas that leaders can use to invite their teams (and customers, and partners) into this critical meaning-making, story-creating conversation.

The most important mindset for effective storytelling in business is thinking about your audience first. The most powerful story is not about your business or service, it’s about your customers and knowing your audience will help narrow down how to most effectively deliver that content. A clear distinction in our digital world is whether you want to develop a passive or active audience with storytelling. There are numerous platforms, tools, design and visual components, content types and messaging to build stories so your customers not only see the stories but engage and interact with the content. In the end, it’s not enough to create great stories; you need to create great stories that spread, morph and multiply.

The most critical element of storytelling in business is authenticity.  The listeners know when someone has “manufactured” a story to influence them in some way.  Change or buy-in happens from a personal decision made in the 18 inches between the head and the heart.  Stories tell the facts in an emotional context.  The facts must be accurate and the emotional context must be authentic.  Listeners read the emotion from not only the words but from every element of the teller’s body language.  Don’t fudge the facts and if you are a leader and you have not experienced an emotional connection to the story being told, don’t tell it.

Leaders are effective storytellers when they tell stories that have influenced them to change, to see differently, to learn a valuable lesson or illustrate a principle played out beautifully.  Listeners sense authenticity and if they don’t see it, they will reject the story and the teller.  The leader’s rejected story will become fodder for the powerful “water cooler” stories and will work against the leader’s efforts.

I think a critical skill that all business leaders need to have is an ability to paint a compelling vision of the company, where it’s going and how the company staff can help to achieve that vision.

A powerful technique that many leaders use is through storytelling. This is not about telling ‘tall’ tales or outlining fictional stories but bringing the companies challenges to life by showing analog situations and allowing people to draw conclusions from that. In my book titled ‘ Creative Business – the creation of addictive content’, my co-founder and I use analogies from the TV, Film and book publishing industries as examples of compelling and ‘addictive’ stories.

A good technique to identify the drama (a company is trying to break traditional business models), the good guys (the company and its staff), the bad guys (regulators, competitors etc) and then paint a picture of how the good guys will win. In film, the good guys always win!

My favourite practical technique for telling stories on behalf of my clients, is what I call the Why technique.

If you can answer the question why your business exists, then it is easy to get to the What (you do) and How (you do it). Most business stories answer the What and How first, but that is not what the prospective client is looking for.

If you can tell the prospective client why you exist, they will understand better what you do and accept how you do it.

Most companies confuse advertising and storytelling. Leaders need to understand that advertising is not storytelling. While companies need to develop solid stories about their work and mission, the expression of those stories needs to be diverse.

Storytelling is a part of that. Storytelling can only be done live and person to person, CEO’s to reps, reps to customers, customers to other customers and other such connections. Various forms of story-expression, such as video, social media graphics and testimonials, aren’t storytelling. Yes, they are great tools, but only storytelling is storytelling.

If your “C”-suite team doesn’t know that and then model and practice it, I think you should quit using the romanticized word “storytelling” and just call it advertising or marketing. You are hurting yourself otherwise. There’s nothing wrong with creating good advertising with your stories.

When telling stories remember this simple formula.

1. What was the world like before, give a brief background to lay the foundation.

2. What was the conflict or struggle to overcome.

3. What was the result? How was the problem solved? 

Too often business leaders want to “pump up the troops” and they give presentations that are all positive.  That’s not what real life is like. We have ups and downs and stories should too. Without the natural arc the audience becomes suspicious, thinking they are listening to some wild fairy tale.

If you’re a leader, you probably achieved your position by having your own ideas and opinions–then by getting others to believe in them and carry them out. Congratulations! When you’re telling business stories, your audience doesn’t have to listen to you. You must earn that privilege.

So, remember this: others prefer to ‘discovery’ your story not to have you ‘tell it’ to them. The most important advice I have for business leaders who share stories is to first stand in your audience’s shoe–long enough to see the world from their point of view. Get close to their needs and concerns. See what they see and think about what they might want to see. Hear what they hear and think about what they might want to hear.

Then, adapt your message and your stories to connect with them. Remember to use vivid picture words, incorporate the emotions of others (especially others’ reactions), and to pause so that people can imagine what you’re saying and discover key points for themselves. The more they discover on their own, the more they will understand and the more they will care.

Storytelling has become the holy grail of the marketing and advertising world in the past few years, but as a former journalist, I’ve been telling stories for decades. After I shifted my career into marketing and public relations, it was a mindset that just naturally followed. Stories make ideas, facts and statistics relatable. We don’t relate to numbers. We relate to people. As Joseph Stalin said, “A million deaths is a statistic. One death is a tragedy.” We must find examples of the many and tell their stories so that facts and figures come alive. The quickest way to our brain is not through spouting statistics, but through the heart. And the quickest way to our heart is through stories. The mythographer Joseph Campbell, author of “The Hero With a Thousand Faces,” discovered in his study of world myths that they are all basically the same story. The archetypal formula he unveiled works whether you apply it to “The Odyssey” or “Star Wars.” While it is important for businesses to look for opportunities to tell their stories by creating great content, it is important to keep in mind that the purpose for telling them is so that the customer can see himself as the hero. The business is not the hero, but the mentor. So when the business is offering solutions to the customer’s problems, help the customer visualize herself as the heroine in her own life by telling stories about how other customers became heroines when they took your advice or used your product. When an organization embraces a storytelling culture both internally and externally, it not only attracts customers, it creates an ethos that inspires loyalty from its “internal customers” or employees, arguably its most important stakeholders.

“Although your story can feature yourself as the protagonist, the story has to be about your listener. Can your listener relate to the experience you are describing? Do the details, and, most importantly, the emotions you are offering, resonate with his or her own life? You want your listener to imagine themselves inside your story, rooting, not simply for you, but for themselves should something similar have happened or might happen to them. If you can pull them in with empathy, you can fully transport your listeners into your story.”

Imagine you’re the leader of a large technology group. The organization has just completed its strategic plan, of which you’ve been a key player. In the plan is a strategy to make technology a core competence in the organization.

How will you get staff – both inside and outside of your group – to understand and embrace this? By using three types of future stories — “did we make the right choice,” dream, and vision — you’ll be able to translate strategy into to action.

“Did we make the right choice” stories inspire people to overcome reticence for embracing a desired future by leveraging a leader’s personal credibility and confidence in the chosen path. The story you’d tell here (or the CEO might tell) is a personal one. It answers the prompt: “Tell me about a time in your life when you greatly resisted a change … and when you came to embrace it, you found there were many benefits for yourself (and others).”

This is followed by your personal dream story: a story that creates desire and excitement – fueling people’s imaginations for what you believe to be possible if everyone works together. It, too, is a personal story, one that uses visual language and powerful metaphors in a heart-felt way.

Then, it’s time to sit down with a cross-section of all staff to co-create a vision story: what “done” looks like once technology is embedded throughout the organization as a core competence. Bring potential results to life by choosing a main character and work activities that everyone can relate to. When you transform concepts and ideas into concrete behaviors, you make everything real and doable.

What will you do the next time you have to translate strategy into action? Will you provide data and facts that cause people’s eyes to glaze over? Or will you turn to story to fuel peoples’ passion? It’s my hope that you’ll say it with a story.

Storytelling is so powerful that it should be the primary goal of all your business communications. When I say “storytelling,” I mean your capital “S” story. The capital “S” story answers why someone should work for you, invest in you, buy from you, promote you, be your neighbor, etc.

What is your capital “S” story? Once you know that, you can take your story to the marketplace of ideas by answering these questions:

• Who is our audience?

• What do we want the audience to do or feel?

• Who are the key characters in the story?

• What is the plot or plot lines for the story?

• What is the story’s climax or key success point?

• What is our happy ending?

The most important measure of business storytelling is YOUR happy ending. Your organization’s happy ending is not the same as a competitor’s. So how will you make sure your happy ending is the one that defines your story? Think like a storyteller rather than someone who is simply chasing the next sale or marketing tactic. Remember your capital “S” story, and small “s” stories will come by the bucketload, with more and more of them bearing your happy ending.

“There are quite a few ways in which you can become a effective storyteller. One of mindsets to adopt, perhaps counterintuitively, is to become a good listener and observer. Observing the contexts in which people live and work, and listening to people’s needs, wants, grievances, and desires, is the key to understanding lived experience. And it is through communicating the richness of lived experience — your own, as well as that of your customers or constituencies — that your stories will become universal and a way to connect to people.”

5 techniques to achieve innovation and change through effective storytelling.

1. Using stories to empower data.

2. Not allowing your ego to stand between you and your stories.

3. Choosing ”pull” stories instead of ”push” stories.

4. Listening to stories to create a story culture.

5. Leaving fiction to Hollywood.

“The first thing a leader needs to do to be a good business storyteller is to be able to tell a story from a non-story. I call this story spotting. Too many people are calling things stories when they are not and you only get the benefits of storytelling when you tell a story. Here is a simple infographic that explains how to spot a story. You can test their story spotting skills here.

Second, it’s vital in business that your story has a point. Yes, it seems obvious but so often business people tell a story without thinking about the business point they’re trying to make. And to make it absolutely clear for the audience they should share their point in once sentence before telling a story. I call it a relevance statement because the audience needs to know what the relevance the story holds before the really listen. Here is a little video clip of me talking about relevance statements.

Thirdly, stories are more about pictures than words. When you can see the story happening you get the best impact. The easiest way to make a story more visual is to zoom into small moments rather than staying at the stratospheric level.

Finally, whatever a business leader does it’s vital that their story is NOT a performance. Stories in business should be invisible.

“The shortest distance between two people is a story.”

Stories are fundamental to the way we communicate, learn and think. They are the most efficient way of storing, retrieving, and conveying information. Since hearing stories requires active participation on the part of the listener, stories are the most profoundly social form of human interaction communication, and learning.

Stories certainly do a great job of encoding messages and conveying emotion

The “leaders develop leaders,” movement started 20+ years ago in places like GE, Pepsi and Shell brought forward the power of teachable moments and conversation. Story-based forms of communication are present in meaningful conversations.

Leaders need to spend more time eliciting stories than telling them. Actively listen to the stories and watch how they can improve communications and build satisfying, productive, rewarding relationships.

Story-based communication skills can be developed in leaders and throughout the organization. We’ve all got them. These skills go beyond “telling stories” skills.

In my experience the ‘mindset’ for effective storytelling for business leaders needs to be one of transparency and openness/vulnerability (not always easy for many in leadership positions).  Leaders who are comfortable in their own skin, so to speak, and have a true desire to relate their own experiences to a current concern/issue in their organization, gain both understanding and can affect true change in both behaviour and decision making from their employees and/or clients.

Every story you tell has the potential for making a number of points or teaching a number of lessons.

My philosophy is this: make one point per story each time you tell it.  Keep it focused.  When you force yourself to use the story to make one clear and concise point, you make it easier for the listener to learn what you want them to learn.  And, it stops you from going off on tangents!

Storytelling in a business context is about strategy.  You have to ask yourself:  “What is the right story, that makes the right point, for this audience?”  The process of deciding on the point of your story is absolutely essential to your success.

There are many techniques you need to learn to be a great storyteller in business but initially, the right mindset is critical. 

The leaders that do this well have a mindset where they are prepared to show vulnerability and emotion.  They see showing vulnerability as a strength in leadership and they have the courage, confidence and wisdom to do so. 

Without being prepared to step into vulnerability, our stories are often business examples or case studies. These stories are less engaging and effective than stories that show vulnerability and emotion.

First, make sure that the story you are telling your organisation fires YOU up. Because if it doesn’t get your fist-pumped, how on earth do you expect it to inspire others?

Second, make your story simple. Don’t reach for the dictionary just because you’re telling a story in a business context. Speak in the same way you’d speak to your friends or family.

Third, keep it human. Your story should be about people, not products. If you want to change hearts and minds, make sure your audience can relate with the people in your story.

In the world of business, we are often told that data is king. But, in fact, it’s the story framing the data that can ultimately change behaviour or inspire a team or convert a customer. So whenever you are presenting data, make sure you also tell the story behind it. I’m not suggesting that you don’t use data or numbers in your presentations. Just remember that while numbers appeal to the head, it’s the stories behind the numbers that will appeal to the hearts of your audience members. And it’s your stories that will make you – and your message – memorable.

“Establishing trust and belief is job number 1 for salespeople meeting with prospective customers for the first time. Clients need to trust you before they will share their pain. This can be especially difficult for a 25 year-old salesperson calling on a more experienced 50 year-old manager. One of the best ways to put the prospective customer at ease, and in an open state of mind, is to share a 90-second story about a peer who you’ve helped solve a problem, meet a need or achieve a goal. We call this a peer story. Always ask permission first. For example, if I were selling cloud-based manufacturing resource planning software to a materials manager  I might start the conversation with ” Can I tell you about another materials manager I recently worked with who was looking to reduce product shortages?” Try to identify an issue that is common to the title and functional area of the person you are calling on. Rarely will you get a “no.” Make sure you make the story about a person and build out the setting, complication and resolution using both facts and emotion. Pass the baton by stating ” but that’s enough about me, what is going on in your world of material management?” Most times they will voluntarily start sharing their pain.”

“In order to create an effective story, we must resist the human tendency to seek our audience´s total agreement about our story´s message. We must instead be bold and audacious and create debatable conflicts. If there is No conflict, there is no story. Stories work like “Case Studies”. Your audience will identify with their narrative conflicts in order to learn a real life lesson: If I were to encounter a similar conflict in my life, what would I do? How would my company, family, friends or society reward me if I succeed? How will they punish me if I fail? A successful story usually illustrates a cultural truth that is being reviewed by our audience. The existence of diverse opinions and interpretations about the conflict is perfectly normal and a healthy sign of storytelling success. If your story doesn’t provoke debate, that means that your conflict was irrelevant. As a storyteller, you cannot afford to be afraid of creating conflict. Conflicts are your stories “basic pillars.”