Excerpt from my upcoming book Leadership Agility: Enabling Sustainable Organizations
Stephen Denning’s book The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling is a field guide on how leaders can use stories to motivate, build trust, transmit organizational values, get teams working together, share knowledge, tame the grapevine, and create a shared vision.
Leaders who rely on charts and graphs to communicate fail to recognize that organizations are made up of people and that leadership is first and foremost about people. No great achievement was ever realized because a leader gave an amazing PowerPoint presentation. Great leaders inspire people to action.
They do so by the way they communicate the story that describes their vision.
Leadership is not about technical things. A leader’s ability to create a shared purpose is the requisite step for their organization to create a shared future. Creating a shared future needs a good story.
In The importance of storytelling for social change, Simon Hodges argues that
Stories engage people at every level – not just in their minds
but in their emotions, values and imaginations
The role of a leader therefore, is to inspire their people to action towards a shared purpose so they can create a shared future together.
This is not an exercise that is routine, meaningless, or void of emotion. It is values-based. It relies on the most basic of human characteristics to want to contribute to something meaningful that is bigger than ourselves.
The stories that leaders tell helps to frame the collective understanding of the organizations they lead, the vision they have, and the future they want to create.
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