Using stories to teach, lead, and inspire
Using stories to teach, lead, and inspire – we’ve visited the topic of storytelling a few times in the podcast. In the past, we’ve looked at storytelling as an approach for organisational communication, for our leaders to be able to get their messages across. We’ve looked at it as well in terms of how we construct stories in order to make our messages more sticky, more accessible and to have more impact on our audience. But I also think that sometimes stories are overlooked from the perspective of how we can use them to make meaning of our own experiences in order to be able to help people to learn from what we’ve learned and also to be able to get our points of view and ideas across more clearly. So this topic is something that we’ve been wanting to revisit for a while now.
I’m also interested from the perspective of storytelling not being something that’s new, but something that’s been around for thousands of years. If you go back before we had printing presses and other ways of communicating on a mass basis, our primary way of transferring knowledge and wisdom for many centuries, for many thousands of years, was through storytelling. So storytelling is something that we’re kind of hardwired to do, and I think it’s something that we naturally gravitate towards. So if we have someone in our organisation who is good at telling stories, people will want to spend more time with them, they’ll want to hear more from them. So there’s definitely something going on in our brain.
I want to have a look at what that is and how we can understand that more and recognise why storytelling is so useful. But I also want to look at how we can use real experiences that we’ve had in our lives and within our organisations to be able to create meaning for employees. This isn’t in a kind of profound way, but more about how leaders can actually get their ideas across in a way that’s more compelling and more interesting. In particular, how we can use stories to teach, lead and inspire, which is what this episode is all about. I also want to revisit the idea that storytelling is something that’s a hard sell if you’re an internal communicator and you’re advocating some work around storytelling or storytelling skills. It can sometimes feel as though that’s a bit of a difficult one to get across the line when budgets may be tight and we may be working with an audience where storytelling isn’t naturally high on their agenda.
So I want to talk to my guest about how we can do that if we believe that helping our leaders to be better storytellers is something that’s worth working on, how can we help to be able to deliver that in an organisation that we may think is resistant? So that’s what we’re going to be looking at in today’s episode, how we can use stories to teach, lead and inspire within our organisations. I hope you enjoy this interview.
Guest profile
Mark Carpenter has a passion in helping others achieve more of their potential. He loves coaching, consulting and training in communications, leadership development, motivation, change management, and marketing/public relations. Mark is the co-author of the best-selling book “Master Storytelling: How to Turn Your Experiences Into Stories that Teach, Lead, and Inspire” and creator of the Master Storytelling workshop. When he’s not creating new content, consulting, facilitating, or coaching, he’s likely enjoying the mountains near his home in Utah in the United States or telling stories about his grandchildren.
Useful links
Link to a relevant episode of the podcast: https://thebigpicturepeople.co.uk/blog/podcast/storytelling-and-organisational-communications-s3-e18/
Mark’s LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-carpenter-0b55221/
Mark’s website: www.master-storytelling.com