Leading a Team? Keep These Five Storytelling Tips in Mind

Storytelling is a powerful way to create a solid emotional connection with your audience or client. Over the past few years, stories have become a universal language in the corporate world, which people can easily relate to.

Digital Marketing expert, Peace Itimi, defines storytelling as “The art of selling your products and services to tell a story. It puts a human angle to the traditionally dry and dull concept of marketing and connects people to people rather than a faceless corporation to its followers.” Stories stimulate imagination and passion and create a sense of community.

As an effective leader or team player, products and services will probably be the least you’ll be selling. You will be selling something more profound; your vision, ideas, and beliefs. The most important feature of your presentation lies in your ability to leverage storytelling in communicating these parts of you to your audience.

The subtle power of storytelling helps leaders influence the decisions of their subordinates and clients. This is because storytelling translates ideas and moves people to action. Storytelling gives your audience an emotional experience.

However, this is not a license to spew randomness. For maximum effect, your story must blend with the context of your presentation, service, or product. When your story is not authentic enough to captivate your audience, it can do the opposite of what you intended. This is best captured in Seth Godin’s words, “A great story is true because it is consistent and authentic.”

Storytelling makes your idea more reliable. It helps to build a seamless rapport between leaders and subordinates. It creates an avenue for personal engagement. Also, as an effective team leader, your story must evoke emotions. This propels your team to make emotional decisions that are relevant to the shared objective. Because stories create relatability, they create buy-in.

That said, let’s dive into the real gist!

These Five Storytelling Tips Will Help You Become an Effective Team Lead

Storytelling has come a long way in the business sphere, and anyone who masters this skill will win the audience’s hearts. Corporations have used it to spread their message at various levels. Businesses that explain their ideas and concepts through stories have proved to be more compelling and encouraging than those using hard, cold facts alone.

Also, for team leaders, storytelling is a valuable skill in conflict resolution. For great results in your organization, check out these storytelling tips.

1. Having a Strong Why

One of the most vital attributes of storytelling is its ability to pull people together psychologically. Stories can capture and keep people’s attention through carefully chosen and woven words until the desired aim is achieved.

For this to happen, you must understand the team’s goal, the vision that unites you all. Having a clearly stated ‘Why’ determines the context of your story and the reactions you want to elicit. This requires you to tailor your stories with your audience in mind.

2. Make Your Story Visual

There’s something powerful about imagery, especially in storytelling. You cannot deny that images add life and colour to a story. It helps to align the puzzles of your story by simplifying the data and business conclusions that your audience can follow for better understanding. A survey conducted by TDWI showed that individuals believed that information “visualization” leads to increased business insight. Visuals will ensure that your presentation is entertaining and informative to your audience.

In his bestselling book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell, begins one of his stories by describing the subject in striking detail; “He is short and slightly hunched. His head is large, framed by long prominent ears, and oversize aviator-style glasses hide his narrow blue eyes. As Gladwell tells this story, readers can visualize this person in their minds.

3. Infuse Suspense

If you’re an avid reader or movies are your thing, you will understand the power of suspense. Suspense captures your audience’s attention, keeps them hungry for more with bated breath as they wonder, “What happens next?”

Understanding how to manage suspense in a story is crucial to its credibility. Without this, you’re only setting the stage for a lame and boring narrative. Suspense is created through conflict; sharing how the conflict was resolved is key to engaging your audience.

4. Make it Personal

If the stories you’re sharing are not from your personal experience, make it personal by sharing the lessons you’ve learned and the convictions you’ve derived from them. Similarly, if the experiences are personal, share images of the scenes if there are any. This will help your audience connect on a personal level. While you’re at it, let them see some of your fears and weaknesses; in telling your story, you are sharing a slice of theirs too. Your story can be delivered in the form of a testimonial.

Again, Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, gave readers a glimpse of his personal story in the final pages of the book; this had a profound impact on readers. To engage your audience, share your personal story!

5. Give your Audience an Explicit Closing Remark

Your closing remarks should be as strong as your introduction. Always have it at the back of your mind to close with dramatization or remarks that resonate with your audience even when the talk is over. You can achieve this by sharing a fact backed up by stats or a video clip. This is best captured in Chris Anderson’s words, a renowned TED curator, “A successful talk is a little miracle–people see the world differently afterwards.”

In conclusion, storytelling is a must-have skill for any team leader or entrepreneur. It will guide managers and team leaders to influence their subordinates and employees to make credible decisions that will scale the organization’s growth and seamlessly achieve goals. As Daniel Pink puts it, “The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers-creative and holistic right-brain thinkers.” The future is truly yours if you can influence people with an authentic story.