How can you use storytelling to persuade your team to support a new initiative?

Here is my suggestion: Craft a tale that hooks your team from the start—relate to common challenges. Present the initiative as the hero, solving problems and propelling us forward. Personalize it, linking to individual aspirations for work, growth, and accomplishment. Add some drama—reveal obstacles and the initiative's power to conquer. End with an exciting call to action, urging your team to be champions of this epic journey.

Stories help you sell. It may be more clients, new partners, or talent recruitment. Every company has some core stories that need to be told by several people across the organization. Customer Success Stories, Leadership Vision Stories, Internal success stories, etc. Each one of these has an objective to teach the listeners something important that your organization delivered or plans to bring forward (vision). What was at stake that made this event story-worthy? Capture these stories and make them accessible to your team so that they learn to tell them with the most impact---and watch your business grow.

To use storytelling to persuade your team to support a new initiative, craft a narrative that connects the initiative to their values, experiences, and goals. Start by setting the scene, illustrating the current challenges or opportunities that necessitate the initiative. Then, present the initiative as the hero of your story, showing how it can positively transform the situation. Include real-life examples or hypothetical scenarios that make the benefits tangible and relatable. Conclude with a vision of the future that the initiative will help achieve, inspiring your team to see themselves as key players in this journey. Effective storytelling can turn a concept into a shared mission, fostering enthusiasm and buy-in.

Knowing the room is imperative--so have a few versions of your core stories that match the room. For my own founder's story when asked "How did you get into this line of work?", if I'm speaking to a room mostly male or tech-focused people, I start with my foray into Seattle University's Business Plan competition when I had the epiphany that storytelling in an investor pitch was needed. But if I'm talking with more women, I start with the story where I've just been fired from a soulless job I hated and had a personal family health crisis that had no room for unemployment. That story has high stakes out of the gate--and rich in feminine power. It's my story of resilience. Do you have your stories ready for that commonly asked question?

One “must have” of any great story is the inclusion of emotion. If a leader simply provides facts and figures as to why a change should take place (and I’ve seen many leader messages where only facts were presented) the message will miss the mark and the leader will wonder why. Mix in emotion to each of the four story elements noted to make the story stick and to motivate team members to get behind the change desired.

We teach the Hero's Journey story arc because it's easy to follow and keeps stories from meandering into tangents. This is key for your audience. When you jump all over the place (due to not having your story well crafted), you're jarring your listener's imaginations all over the place. They can't keep track of all your various storylines and various characters and your credibility can wane. Sound familiar? When you take the time to construct your story with rich openings that the audience can see, hear, smell, taste, touch and most of all FEEL, you are in control of the room. You're magically seducing their neurotransmitters with your vivid word choices, and that's "edu-taining" and not boring or confusing. Good job, storyteller!

Time to pull out your inner actor, and yes, you do have one. When you're a great storyteller, you're stepping in and out of being the Narrator (that moves the story along) and then stepping into the scenes and interacting with the other characters. Your voice, tone, facial expressions must be genuine, not canned---and feel authentic. This can be uncomfortable at first, but when I see clients push their boundaries and allow this to happen, it's the game changer. Your nerves will quell and your enthusiasm to tell your story becomes much more fun and impactful. Hot tip: Use dialogue when your characters are making a key point. Let us hear it and be in the room with you as you tell the story. And all of this magic happens with: Practice.

My client, a bright woman in finance is working to fine-tune her presentation skills for her boardroom meetings. "I'm not very dynamic," she shared on our first meeting. What clearly jumped out was she knew her numbers though. I pointed to a dip in one of their sales months and asked "What happened there?" She robotically replies "We did not recognize revenue." I look blankly. "What does that mean?" She then leaps into a story about a technical issue that got in the way of their onboarding launch, but it turned positive because their engineers got to shine for the client. "Now we'll be seeing more revenue, but just a few months later." I smiled and said, "Tell that story!" That's what we call Putting Heart Behind The Chart using stories.