Storytelling for Business Leaders
Storytelling is a powerful approach for leadership, innovation, and design thinking. Sharing stories can be a “superpower” that can help you to have a more positive impact in your work with others. Storytelling can help you to share a vision or connect with others on a more purposeful or emotional level which leads to understanding why we do what we do. In an era of accelerating change, storytelling has become a popular approach to make and share meaning.
We customize our story training workshop programs but typically offer three ways to hone your storytelling skills as part of a group:
- A live leadership or storytelling-for-business training workshop held at your site.
- A live virtual storytelling training workshop held over Zoom, Teams, etc.
- A pre-recorded online course on storytelling for facilitators, innovators and leaders that can be done asynchronously. People can do this either individually or licensed for a group from your organization.
Please contact us to learn more about how a storytelling training might be customized for your needs.
Why Learning Storytelling Matters for Businesses and Leaders
A business storytelling training workshop can help you to learn this craft and develop your communication skills. Using storytelling in the important work of organizations and leadership can help you to relate and connect to others at an emotional level – and help others empathize with the journey you or your organization has been on and inspire a future vision. When you have a new idea, innovation, or vision to share, you can help others understand it and connect with it on a more human level through a story. We’ve been telling stories for thousands of years (and giving PowerPoint presentations for just a slight fraction of that). As humans are wired to tell stories and to listen to stories. Neuroscience fMRI studies of the brain show that our brain “lights up” when we are sharing a story or listening to one, and the storyteller and receiver syncs. This “lighting up” probably didn’t happen for you at the meeting last week with the status quo boring power point presentation.
Here’s our origin story so you can learn why we design and facilitate leadership workshops and programs on important topics like business storytelling.
Business Storytelling Techniques, Templates, & Guides
There are many workshops designed to help leaders at all levels in organizations communicate and innovate with greater impact through story. (See our storytelling for leaders workshop as an example where the focus is on transformation.) In our workshops, we will lead you through activities and exercises to help you find, create, make, and share your own stories. This is a hands-on experience. By being a better story finder, story maker, and story teller…the work of leadership, innovation, and change becomes easier and more impacting. Here are a number of the models, templates, and techniques our programs can engage you in using to create and tell better stories. Some are best practice approaches and others we have designed for specific purposes.
- Storyboarding
- Story building blocks
- 3 Act Storytelling model
- SAM V (Stories-Activities-Metaphors-Visuals)
- The Hero’s Journey
- The origin story-what catalyzed you for this cause? What happened?
- How you got into doing this. +1 to share the roots and the DIRT (vulnerability).
- The why story-why do you do what you do? What is a real problem?
- Naming names. Tell a real example of a person or organization you helped.
- The success story…so we know you can help us too.
- The here and now story. Why are you here in this moment?
- First storyline
- First question
- From this to that
- Story circle
Our business storytelling training workshops are highly interactive and engaging. We utilize as many methods as we can for creating the story and telling it. We focus on developing this innovative leadership skill in you. Some activities people will do individually. Others they will do with a partner or in a triad. Some of our most powerful “innovating through story” activities guide teams through a design thinking process to develop a story collaboratively or as a learning community. This is one key difference – the activities in our training include time to reflect and iterate to build and improve the stories that are created during the workshop.
Storytelling Leadership Training Workshops
We customize our business storytelling training workshops for our clients and the unique audience needs they have. One of our favorite examples is our storytelling for transformation workshop. We can do our workshop on-site and in-person or remotely and virtually. Your leadership program could benefit from a workshop or module of another form zeroing in on cultivating this communication skill. An innovation workshop or design thinking session will also benefit from the addition of storytelling activities to help you to communicate your innovation through story. We can design the workshop with a storytelling framework or model you prefer or connect you to other expert trainers or facilitators who have various specialties in different mediums. Here is a video showing some of the storyboard models we could teach or use in your story workshop. Which one captures your interest?
Storytelling Online Training Courses
We have a short online course on storytelling for trainers and leaders. This virtual course is designed for trainers, leaders, managers, and innovators who need to relate, connect, inspire and advance new ideas or a vision for the future. The course is focused on helping you to create your own stories and start sharing them for impact. The online workshop course can be done individually or with a group from your organization. We also have an online storytelling course designed for innovators to communicate their venture through story. We can also include these online courses with our live, custom designed workshops so participants can dive deeper after our interactive experience together.
Business Storytelling Training
Storytelling is for anyone with something to communicate!
Email [email protected] about bringing our design thinking or innovative facilitation, speaking, workshops, or program development to your organization or conference. Let’s create a culture of innovation and collaboration through storytelling. Our business storytelling training can help get things started!
