Storytelling: A Tool Leaders Use to Teach, Influence, and Inspire

Storytelling as a Tool

You don't have to be a bearded old man with a resonant baritone sitting in front of a roaring fireplace to be a great storyteller. You could be Malala Yousafzai at just 17 years of age, or Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway, at a young 93. We’re all storytellers by birth, but do we really believe it? When we tell a story, our audience becomes a part of our narrative. Thus, the skillful narration of a compelling story can convey complex ideas simply and meaningfully, and this is where the listener’s real learning begins.

Mr. Buffett once narrated the story of Rose Blumkin, a Belarusian woman who couldn't speak, read, or write English when she immigrated to the US in 1917. With great feeling, Mr. Buffett artfully explained how Ms. Blumkin went on to build a $1.2 billion furniture empire after starting off with just $2,500. Such moving and inspirational stories make up the lore on the world stage. The success of Patty McCord, NETFLIX Chief Talent Officer can largely be attributed to her storytelling gift, whether she’s creating a presentation, or just addressing her team.

Storytelling and Learning

Themes and experiences – the cornerstones of a story

Staying focused on the primary narrative theme while drawing from personal experience is a compelling method of great storytelling. Yet sharing a profusion of data in large troves and excel spreadsheets moves little and in fact repels listener engagement.

In one of his interviews, Steve Jobs, Apple Inc. founder, shared his life story of how he built a $2 billion company starting out from a garage. It wasn't a narrative crowded with numbers, graphs, facts, and figures, but a story with a central theme wherein Mr. Jobs believed in trust. Mr. Jobs urged listeners to trust what instills confidence, to follow their hearts, even when it might lead them off well-worn paths - and that would make the discerning difference.

In a quarterly business review meeting of an organization, a leader presented financial data through a PowerPoint presentation replete with numbers, charts, and graphs. In a similar meeting another leader narrated an emotionally charged story of how her team successfully achieved targets for the past quarter. Interestingly, the audience struggled to remember the financial information presented in the first leader’s slide deck. On the other hand, the audience remembered most of the numeric information shared within the story related by the second leader because of that second story’s emotive content. Such is the imprint left by a story well told with feeling.

Raconteur and the recipients – the audience and you

Therefore, it’s not hard to understand why stories provide an exciting and immersive learning channel, for these stories’ appeal is universal because they resonate with all learners. For ease of understanding, learners typically fall into three distinct profiles.

A Visual learner gleans best from diagrams, illustrations, charts, and images. An Auditory learner understands information most effectively from lectures, group discussions, and group activities. While a Kinesthetic learner learns best by doing, experimenting, experiencing, and feeling.

One of the foremost responsibilities of top-level executives is to keep their employees motivated and engaged. An ideal way to achieve such deep and abiding connections is to engage employees at an emotional level. Storytelling presents an optimal mode to bring about such connections by blending ideas with emotion, the heart with the mind, thus presenting a compelling message that allows learners to connect meaningfully with emotive ideas.

How Storytelling affects cognition…

Leo Widrich, an entrepreneur and capable storyteller, wrote in his essay, “The Science of Storytelling: What Listening to a Story Does to Our Brains,” that stories trigger receptors in the mind which emotionally respond to words and their tone, eventually releasing hormones into the body. The resulting sensations go a long way to delivering an immersive experience as listeners begin to build and embody the personality of the story’s protagonist(s), thus establishing a level of intimacy between storyteller and listener via emotional narrative scenarios that’s difficult to achieve by any other method.

Delving a little deeper into the science of storytelling, we learn that the hormones vasopressin, oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine, and endorphin play a vital role in the storyteller-listener connection. Of these, the three most common hormones released during the storytelling experience are dopamine, cxytocin, and endorphin. All good stories induce dopamine in the brain. Dopamine increases focus, attention, and creativity in the story’s listener, while oxytocin increases the sense of trust and bonding between the listener and the narrator, making listeners more generous by inducing in them a sense of empathy, thus humanizing the listener. While endorphin, like dopamine, induces a sense of joy, focus, and creativity.

And therein lies the most powerful impact of storytelling; the emotions that your story incites will have a recursive effect through a modulated release of those hormones.

Specifically, this means that infusing our stories with humor triggers the release of endorphins in our listeners as humane scenarios initiate the release of oxytocin, creating suspense by the inclusion of cliffhangers in our story, which helps release dopamine.

Wrapping up…

As storytellers, we should always strive to position the narrative problems in the foreground, then weave our story around the solution in order to demonstrate resolution. When we share stories about our struggles, our hardships, our fights against antagonists, we connect with our audience at a vicarious level. Thus, we come across as dynamic, empathetic, and – most of all – as authentic humans.

The art of storytelling demands both intelligence and deep life experiences. The flip side of storytelling is that if the story is not narrated with authentic emotion, it fails to resonate with the audience, and we quickly lose their attention, focus, and our own credibility.

Long, vague, and unrelated stories not only risk losing our audience but end up confusing them as well.

So let’s take care to keep our stories clear, crisp, and relevant to the matter at hand through matters of the heart.