Month: March 2023
What is Charisma? What is Charismafy?
What is Charisma? What is Charismafy?
What is Charisma?
Charisma is the quality of being able to attract, charm and influence those around you. It is usually easy to identify when someone is charismatic. It is, however, often much harder to say exactly what skills or qualities those people have that other, less charismatic, people lack.
To make things more complicated, there are different types of charismatic people. Some may be quieter, perhaps relying more on their personal charm than their words to influence others. Others are passionate communicators, sweeping everyone along with their enthusiasm.
Ultimately, charisma is the result of excellent communication and interpersonal skills. It is therefore possible to develop and improve your charisma.
Researchers at the University of Toronto carried out a large-scale study into charisma, involving over 1,000 people. They found that charisma consists of a mixture of what they called ‘affability’ and ‘influence’.
• Influence was defined as leadership ability and strength of ‘presence’.
• Affability was defined as being approachable and pleasant.
It turns out to be possible to quantify charisma. It also seems that self-rated charisma levels are surprisingly accurate when compared with ratings by other people.
Quantifying Charisma
Rate yourself on a scale of one to five (where five is high) against these six statements:
I am someone who…
1 …has a presence in a room
2 …has the ability to influence people
3 …knows how to lead a group
4 …makes people feel comfortable
5 …smiles at people often
6 …can get along with anyone
Divide the total score by six to get a charisma value. Anything over 3.7 is considered ‘higher than average’.
There are a number of skills that make up influence and affability. Each of these can be developed, given time and effort.
Developing Influence
1. The statements used to assess charisma show that influence generally has three main parts:
a. presence,
b. ability to influence, and
c. ability to lead.
2. Presence is perhaps the most difficult to define and pin down. However, those with presence can generally be said to be confident and believe in themselves, and also be optimistic and resilient in the face of setbacks.
3. Charismatic people are confident people – or at least have the ability to appear confident.
4. Being confident to communicate in a variety of situations, one-to-one, in groups and in front of audiences is a skill that many people struggle with. A charismatic person can not only appear confident in communication, but they can also help others feel confidence too, thus aiding and enhancing the communication process.
5. Charismatic people are confident in a positive way, without being boastful or egotistical. As with confidence, charismatic people are, or have the ability to appear, optimistic. This means they try to see the best in other people, situations, and events. They usually remain cheerful and bounce back from setbacks because they have good resilience. Charismatic people have the capability to encourage others to see things as they do, thus they can enthuse and enable others to feel more optimistic.
6. Positive thinking and optimism can be powerful forces for successful negotiation and problem-solving.
7. Charismatic people also have very good persuasion and influencing skills. They can often make people want what they want and unite them in a common cause.
8. This ability can be used for both good and bad. Charismatic leaders may be able to influence and encourage their followers to do things that might even seem impossible. They can motivate people to do hard jobs. A charismatic confidence trickster, however, may be able to use their skills to gain the trust and respect of their victims before ultimately extorting money or other valuables.
9. The final characteristic classified as part of ‘influence’ is that charismatic people often have very good leadership skills.
10. They may be seen as ‘natural leaders’, even though they have often spent years honing their skills to make leadership seem effortless. They are able to use a variety of leadership styles to suit the circumstances, and those that they are leading. They are also usually very good at developing and then communicating a compelling vision; their general communication skills are often extremely strong.
Developing Affability
1. The main areas of affability are the ability to get on with people, smiling often—and genuinely—and being able to make people feel comfortable. Perhaps the most important element of this is good emotional intelligence.
2. The ability to appear confident and/or optimistic if you are not requiring a certain amount of ‘acting’. It requires you to be in command of your emotions.
3. You also need to be able to harness both your own and others’ emotions positively to achieve what you want.
4. Charismatic people are very good at showing their true emotions when this works to their best advantage. They are usually also good at masking or acting in a way that makes others believe what they see. The analogy of a swimming swan is useful in this example, calm and serene on the surface but with a lot of hidden activity out of view to the casual observer.
5. Charismatic people are interesting: others want to listen to what they have to say. This is partly because they have interesting things to say—such as a compelling vision—and partly the way that they communicate. They are often good storytellers, with an engaging manner when speaking and explaining. They are able to communicate their message clearly and concisely, being serious and injecting humor where appropriate to keep their audience attentive and focused. When they are in one-on-one or small group situations, charismatic people will use open, relaxed, body language including lots of eye contact. They will watch for feedback from their audience and clarify their position accordingly. When in larger groups or making a presentation to others, body language will be more exaggerated in an attempt to include everybody.
6. Charismatic people are also interested: they genuinely want to listen to what others have to say. They are likely to ask open questions to help them understand the views, opinions, and feelings of others and, because of their ability to make others feel at ease, will often get honest and heartfelt answers. Charismatic people tend to be empathetic and considerate towards others, remembering details from previous conversations and therefore gaining respect and trust.
7. Charismatic people are good at building rapport with others. A sincere smile, maintaining eye contact, being polite and courteous is a very effective way of getting people on your side. People are much more likely to do things for you if they are treated well and you are nice to them.
8. Being charismatic involves communicating dynamically, with passion and enthusiasm whilst displaying positive body language. It involves thinking positively, having optimism and self-confidence, and also being persuasive and building the respect and trust of others.
9. We can all learn to be more charismatic by developing our interpersonal skills through understanding and practice.
Charisma could also be indicated by one or more of the following
1. Very beautiful looks
2. Very beautiful skin tone and texture with no or very little blemishes
3. Highly Symmetrical features
4. A tall person, a man that towers over 6” or more or a blithe & beautiful woman that is 5’10 or 5”11
5. Fair complexion
6. Large healthy-looking eyes – especially among women
7. Very good speaking skills – Obama is a great example of this, even though Obama was not the most handsome man, but once he starts talking, people just couldn’t take their eyes off of him
So now, if I am not that 6+feet tall, dark handsome man with those sharp jaws and v shoulders, or If I am not that damsel with that captivating beauty, what can I do to increase my charisma? Especially when I am smart, competent, possess solid skills, possess significant accomplishments in my career as well as academically, competitive, when I see that my other more beautiful competitors are not as competent as me other than being more beautiful than me.
1. How do I make myself known to the audience?
2. How do I get my point across to my audience in a compelling manner?
3. How do I make my mark and leave my mark?
4. How do I influence my audience?
5. How do I get their attention and make them believe in what I am saying?
6. And overall how do I win against these competitors in all kinds of scenarios?
What is the Solution?
You know how you do that – here is the answer for you,
1. by storytelling,
2. by doing some very powerful, impactful, perspective altering storytelling
3. by mastering the art of telling relevant (relevance is extremely important, if your story is not relevant you are going to look like a fool), powerful, impactful stories that change people’s perceptions, deeply alter their stereotypic way of thinking.
4. by telling stories full of drama (more drama makes the story merrier, but don’t overdo it), that succinctly convey the point across
5. by using the right tone (tone is extremely important that amplifies the effect of the story in a big way, there are both conscious tones and subconscious tones) and the right words taking people on a vicarious journey through your stories
Why is Storytelling so powerful?
Remember humans are emotional beings, so stories connect well with humans, especially stories with such emotions that humans can relate to and resonate with,
1. Because stories are easy to remember, human brain remembers stories better than data
2. People like you when you tell stories, humans identify with you
3. Stories help with communicating the purpose easily
4. Stories that you tell trigger other people to share stories related to the same emotion as well
5. Stories help you demonstrate empathy with your audience
7. Stories need to be memorable. They have to have their twists and turns, that is what humans relate to. Very good stories with such twists and turns, that are intriguing are remembered 22 times. more than just facts. Such stories evoke an emotional response from humans and, when humans emotionally react to something, they never forget that experience, so that is how humans remember stories. And when we sprinkle concepts in those stories, humans remember those concepts so well. That is why humans remember stories 22 times more than just facts.
But how do you tell stories in a powerful, impactful way?
1. How many stories you can remember, 100, 1000 or may be 10,000, is that enough?
2. How to make sure you tell those relevant stories, not look like a fool by telling stories that are not relevant?
3. How to consistently do this all the time?
4. How to pick and choose stories for a work meeting versus a personal meeting?
What if there is a mobile app available for Story Telling?
Basically this mobile app Charismafy will indeed give you that Charisma, by doing the following
1. It will provide you a story on demand, for example if you are going for a meeting at work, you can get a quick 1-minute story that is relevant very quickly from the story database and give it to you. You can read that story, also watch the video of the recital of the story, so you can do the appropriate pauses, highs and lows and deliver that story beautifully to your audience. (The video recital is Phase III)
2. It will help you retrieve the story that is relevant for the occasion. Your story could be for one of the following
a. Work meeting
b. Personal meeting
c. Party
d. One on one with your employee
e. One on one with your son or daughter
f. For a public speech
3. It will help you retrieve stories based on categories
a. Stories based on Indian mythology such as Ramayana
b. Stories based on Indian mythology such as Mahabharat
c. Bible Stories
d. Abraham Lincoln Stories
e. Wild West Stories
f. American Folk Stories
g. Thirukkural Stories
4. Stories fit for group story telling
5. Stories fit for one-on-one story telling
6. Stories fit for public speaking occasions
7. Stories fit for young people
8. Stories fit for old people
9. Stories for teens
10. Stories on specific topics
Storytelling Can Make or Break Your Leadership
Storytelling Can Make or Break Your Leadership
- by Jeff Gothelf
Telling a compelling story is how you build credibility for yourself and your ideas. In this piece, the author draws on his experience as a speaker, publisher, and author to illustrate five characteristics of effective storytelling. He suggests that strong stories must be audience-specific, clearly contextualized, human-centric, action-oriented, and humble. Whether you’re winning over a colleague, a recruiter, or an entire conference audience, making sure you stick to these guidelines will help you convey care and compassion when presenting even the most daunting of ideas.
“It’s a new goal-setting framework.” That was one of my large enterprise clients’ attempt at an inspirational rallying cry for their rollout of Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs. As you might expect, it wasn’t met with much enthusiasm: “Why do we need a new goal-setting system?” managers and employees protested. “What will this mean for my evaluation? Am I still on track for that promotion?”
The problem wasn’t anything inherent to the proposal — instead, what was lacking was the executive’s storytelling. Telling a compelling story is how you build credibility for yourself and your ideas. It’s how you inspire an audience and lead an organization. Whether you need to win over a colleague, a team, an executive, a recruiter, or an entire conference audience, effective storytelling is key. As a speaker, publisher, and author of four books and dozens of articles, I’ve found that my most effective stories all shared the following five characteristics:
1. Be audience-specific.
It may sound basic, but if you want to know what your target audiences is curious about, what worries them, and what motivates them, a series of quick, informal conversations is often the most effective way to figure it out. You can then infuse your storytelling with words that speak to your audience’s specific anxieties or concerns, while avoiding language that will come across as bland platitudes.
That was the first mistake my client made around their OKRs announcement — they assumed that the same message would be effective for all 10,000 employees. But this audience included managers and individual contributors, veteran employees and new hires, people who were already aware of the OKR framework and others who had never heard of it. Furthermore, the audience was particularly concerned because this announcement had the potential to impact how all of these different groups were evaluated and promoted. As such, a better approach would have been to craft a variety of different rollout announcements addressing the specific questions and concerns of each subgroup within the organization.
2. Contextualize your story.
Another major issue with the OKR rollout was that the various announcements made about it failed to contextualize why now was the right time to make this change. To many employees, it seemed like yet another random, top-down management initiative. Had the story of the rollout explained how it fit into the broader vision of the company, its background, and future strategy, that would have helped people understand where the changes were coming from and why they were important. For example, they could have provided a statement along these lines:
Our roots are in industrial manufacturing, and the goal-setting frameworks we’ve been using were designed to be effective in that world. As we now transform into a digital, software-enabled company, those frameworks no longer make sense. We’ve invested in a variety of projects over the past five years to increase our digital capabilities, and those new ways of working require new ways of setting goals.
3. Humanize your story.
A personal anecdote can both lighten the mood and illustrate your perspective more effectively, helping your audience feel less skeptical and more open to your ideas. For example, when speaking to my leadership clients, I’ll often bring up the six months I spent traveling with a circus. While this might seem completely unrelated to the business context at hand, stories about my time hanging out with the human cannonball always get a laugh, and more importantly, my experience handling a strange new situation, building relationships, learning a new culture, failing often, and ultimately integrating successfully into a totally new world often turns out to be extremely relevant to my clients.
Similarly, the executives tasked with announcing the OKRs might kick things off with a personal story:
As some of you know, I enjoy skydiving. They say your mind goes blank when you jump out of an airplane, but last weekend, as I was stepping out of the door at 12,000 feet, it dawned on me that I had a clear objective: to maintain a work/life balance that reminds me regularly why both are important. And what were my key results? Well, at least one of them was to land 100% of my jumps without major injuries. As you can see, so far so good! This kind of clarity around our objectives is what I hope to achieve for our company with this new OKR framework.
4. Make it action-oriented.
Specificity reduces anxiety. If you give your audience practical advice and clear direction, you empower them to take action and make your story their own.
Initially, my client described the OKR rollout with impressive-sounding, but ultimately unhelpful platitudes: “It will change how we work. It will redefine success for the company. It will bring us closer to the customer,” they declared. And these things were all true. But they did nothing to help people understand what the changes would actually mean for them, day to day, as they began setting and working towards their new goals.
Instead, a more effective approach would be to focus on exactly what changes people would need to make:
Instead of relying on a roadmap with fixed initiatives and feature launch dates, we’re going to set quarterly check-in dates for assessing our progress towards customer metrics like retention, average order value, and customer acquisition cost. This means that executives and middle managers will no longer be prescribing work to product teams, but instead, teams will be responsible for developing their own plans for how best to achieve these goals. In addition, we will be offering training courses and long-term coaching to support teams as they make this transition. If you’re interested, just reach out to your manager and they’ll help you get started.
5. Keep it humble.
It’s normal to wince at the idea of baring your failures in front of colleagues, a conference audience, or a recruiter. But true humility shows capacity for growth and learning. It builds trust in your story precisely because it demonstrates that you’re not claiming to have all the answers, and that you’re willing to learn and adjust course as needed. In my experience, nothing creates a tighter connection between you and your audience than acknowledging that you’re standing on others’ shoulders, and you’re not going get everything right all the time.
In the case of the OKRs announcement, a dose of humility might look something like this:
Many of you may remember the last time we tried to update our goal-setting system. I was COO at the time, and I was one of the main drivers for that change. Many of you will also remember how badly that initiative failed. That was my fault. I pushed the change too quickly without a clear understanding of how to support the organization through that transition. I’ve learned so much from that experience, and I’m continuing to look to all of you for your valuable suggestions and support to ensure this OKR rollout is a success.
Storytelling can make or break any initiative. A poor storyteller can butcher even the best ideas, while a strong storyteller can present a daunting concept with care and compassion for their audience. It will take practice, but when done well, good storytelling can make a major impact on your team, your organization, and your entire career.
Read more on Persuasion or related topic Business communication
Jeff Gothelf helps organizations build better products and executives build the cultures that build better products. He is the co-author of the award-winning book Lean UX and the Harvard Business Review Press book Sense & Respond. He works as a coach, consultant and keynote speaker helping companies bridge the gaps between business agility, digital transformation, product management and human-centered design. His latest book, Forever Employable, was published in June 2020.
Learning Charisma
Learning Charisma
- by John Antonakis, Marika Fenley,and Sue Liechti
Many believe that charisma, the ability to captivate and inspire an audience, is innate. But through research in the laboratory and in the field, the authors, who all work at the University of Lausanne, have identified 12 tactics that help managers become more influential, trustworthy, and “leaderlike” in the eyes of others. Great orators and politicians employ these techniques instinctively, but anyone can learn how to use them.
Nine of the tactics are verbal: metaphors, similes, and analogies; stories and anecdotes; contrasts; rhetorical questions; expressions of moral conviction; reflections of the group’s sentiments; three-part lists; the setting of high goals; and conveying confidence that they can be achieved. Three are nonverbal: animated voice, facial expressions, and gestures. Though there are other tactics that leaders can use—repetition, humor, talking about sacrifice—the 12 singled out by the authors have the greatest effect and can work in almost any context. And the research shows that they also have a larger impact than strong presentation skills and speech structure.
This article explores the 12 tactics in detail, providing examples from business and politics, and offers guidance on how to start implementing them. A manager’s goal should be to incorporate them not only into public speaking but also into everyday interactions. They work because they help you create an emotional connection with your audience, even as they make you appear more powerful, competent, and worthy of respect. People who use them effectively will be able to unite their followers around a vision in a way that others can’t. And in the authors’ study, executives who practiced them saw the leadership scores that their audience gave them rise by about 60%.
Jana stands at the podium, palms sweaty, looking out at hundreds of colleagues who are waiting to hear about her new initiative. Bill walks into a meeting after a failed product launch to greet an exhausted and demotivated team that desperately needs his direction. Robin gets ready to confront a brilliant but underperforming subordinate who needs to be put back on track.
We’ve all been in situations like these. What they require is charisma—the ability to communicate a clear, visionary, and inspirational message that captivates and motivates an audience. So how do you learn charisma? Many people believe that it’s impossible. They say that charismatic people are born that way—as naturally expressive and persuasive extroverts. After all, you can’t teach someone to be Winston Churchill.
While we agree with the latter contention, we disagree with the former. Charisma is not all innate; it’s a learnable skill or, rather, a set of skills that have been practiced since antiquity. Our research with managers in the laboratory and in the field indicates that anyone trained in what we call “charismatic leadership tactics” (CLTs) can become more influential, trustworthy, and “leaderlike” in the eyes of others. In this article we’ll explain these tactics and how we help managers master them. Just as athletes rely on hard training and the right game plan to win a competition, leaders who want to become charismatic must study the CLTs, practice them religiously, and have a good deployment strategy.
What Is Charisma?
Charisma is rooted in values and feelings. It’s influence born of the alchemy that Aristotle called the logos, the ethos, and the pathos; that is, to persuade others, you must use powerful and reasoned rhetoric, establish personal and moral credibility, and then rouse followers’ emotions and passions. If a leader can do those three things well, he or she can then tap into the hopes and ideals of followers, give them a sense of purpose, and inspire them to achieve great things.
Several large-scale studies have shown that charisma can be an invaluable asset in any work context—small or large, public or private, Western or Asian. Politicians know that it’s important. Yet many business managers don’t use charisma, perhaps because they don’t know how to or because they believe it’s not as easy to master as transactional (carrot-and-stick) or instrumental (task-based) leadership. Let’s be clear: Leaders need technical expertise to win the trust of followers, manage operations, and set strategy; they also benefit from the ability to punish and reward. But the most effective leaders layer charismatic leadership on top of transactional and instrumental leadership to achieve their goals.
In our research, we have identified a dozen key CLTs. Some of them you may recognize as long-standing techniques of oratory. Nine of them are verbal: metaphors, similes, and analogies; stories and anecdotes; contrasts; rhetorical questions; three-part lists; expressions of moral conviction; reflections of the group’s sentiments; the setting of high goals; and conveying confidence that they can be achieved. Three tactics are nonverbal: animated voice, facial expressions, and gestures.
There are other CLTs that leaders can use—such as creating a sense of urgency, invoking history, using repetition, talking about sacrifice, and using humor—but the 12 described in this article are the ones that have the greatest effect and can work in almost any context. In studies and experiments, we have found that people who use them appropriately can unite followers around a vision in a way that others can’t. In eight of the past 10 U.S. presidential races, for instance, the candidate who deployed verbal CLTs more often won. And when we measured “good” presentation skills, such as speech structure, clear pronunciation, use of easy-to-understand language, tempo of speech, and speaker comfort, and compared their impact against that of the CLTs, we found that the CLTs played a much bigger role in determining who was perceived to be more leaderlike, competent, and trustworthy.
Still, these tactics don’t seem to be widely known or taught in the business world. The managers who practice them typically learned them by trial and error, without thinking consciously about them. As one manager who attended our training remarked: “I use a lot of these tactics, some without even knowing it.” Such learning should not be left to chance.
We teach managers the CLTs by outlining the concepts and then showing news and film clips that highlight examples from business, sports, and politics. Managers must then experiment with and practice the tactics—on video, in front of peers, and on their own. A group of midlevel European executives (with an average age of 35) that did so as part of our training almost doubled their use of CLTs in presentations. As a result, they saw observers’ numerical ratings of their competence as leaders jump by about 60% on average. They were then able to take the tactics back to their jobs. We saw the same thing happen with another group of executives (with an average age of 42) in a large Swiss firm. Overall, we’ve found that about 65% of people who have been trained in the CLTs receive above-average ratings as leaders, in contrast with only 35% of those who have not been trained.
After executives were trained in these tactics, the leadership ratings observers gave them rose by about 60%.
The aim is to use the CLTs not only in public speaking but also in everyday conversations—to be more charismatic all the time. The tactics work because they help you create an emotional connection with followers, even as they make you appear more powerful, competent, and worthy of respect. In Greek, the word “charisma” means special gift. Start to use the CLTs correctly, and that’s what people will begin to think you have.
Let’s now look at the tactics in detail.
Connect, Compare, and Contrast
Charismatic speakers help listeners understand, relate to, and remember a message. A powerful way to do this is by using metaphors, similes, and analogies. Martin Luther King Jr. was a master of the metaphor. In his “I Have a Dream” speech, for example, he likened the U.S. Constitution to “a promissory note” guaranteeing the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to all people but noted that America had instead given its black citizens “a bad check,” one that had come back marked “insufficient funds.” Everyone knows what it means to receive a bad check. The message is crystal clear and easy to retain.
Metaphors can be effective in any professional context, too. Joe, a manager we worked with, used one to predispose his team to get behind an urgent relocation. He introduced it by saying: “When I heard about this from the board, it was like hearing about a long-awaited pregnancy. The difference is that we have four months instead of nine months to prepare.” The team instantly understood it was about to experience an uncomfortable but ultimately rewarding transition.
Stories and anecdotes also make messages more engaging and help listeners connect with the speaker. Even people who aren’t born raconteurs can employ them in a compelling way. Take this example from a speech Bill Gates gave at Harvard, urging graduates to consider their broader responsibilities: “My mother…never stopped pressing me to do more for others. A few days before my wedding, she hosted a bridal event, at which she read aloud a letter about marriage that she had written to Melinda. My mother was very ill with cancer at the time, but she saw one more opportunity to deliver her message, and at the close of the letter she [quoted]: ‘From those to whom much is given, much is expected.’”
Lynn, another manager we studied, used the following story to motivate her reports during a crisis: “This reminds me of the challenge my team and I faced when climbing the Eiger peak a few years ago. We got caught in bad weather, and we could have died up there. But working together, we managed to survive. And we made what at first seemed impossible, possible. Today we are in an economic storm, but by pulling together, we can turn this situation around and succeed.” The story made her team feel reassured and inspired.
Contrasts are a key CLT because they combine reason and passion; they clarify your position by pitting it against the opposite, often to dramatic effect. Think of John F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” In our experience, contrasts are one of the easiest tactics to learn and use, and yet they aren’t used enough. Here are some examples from managers newly trained in the CLTs. Gilles, a senior VP, speaking to a direct report managing a stagnant team: “It seems to me that you’re playing too much defense when you need to be playing more offense.” (That’s also a metaphor.) And Sally, introducing herself to her new team: “I asked to lead the medical division not because it has the best location but because I believe we can accomplish something great for our company and at the same time help save lives.”
Engage and Distill Rhetorical questions might seem hackneyed, but charismatic leaders use them all the time to encourage engagement. Questions can have an obvious answer or pose a puzzle to be answered later. Think again of Martin Luther King Jr., who said, “There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, ‘When will you be satisfied?,’” and then went on to show that oppressed people can never be satisfied. Anita Roddick—founder of the Body Shop—once used three rhetorical questions to explain what led her to help start the social responsibility movement. The thinking, she said, “was really simple: How do you make business kinder? How do you embed it in the community? How do you make community a social purpose for business?”
This tactic works just as well in private conversations. Take Mika, a manager in our study, who effectively motivated an underperforming subordinate by asking, “So, where do you want to go from here? Will it be back to your office feeling sorry for yourself? Or do you want to show what you are capable of achieving?” Here’s another question (also employing metaphor) used by Frank, an IT executive who needed to push back at the unrealistic goals being set for him: “How can you expect me to change an engine in a plane midflight?”
Three-part lists are another old trick of effective persuasion because they distill any message into key takeaways. Why three? Because most people can remember three things; three is sufficient to provide proof of a pattern, and three gives an impression of completeness. Three-part lists can be announced—as in “There are three things we need to do to get our bottom line back into the black”—or they can be under the radar, as in the sentence before this one.
Here’s a list that Serge, a midlevel manager, used at a team meeting: “We have the best product on the market. We have the best team. Yet we did not make the sales target.” And here’s one that Karin, division head of a manufacturing company, employed in a speech to her staff: “We can turn this around with a three-point strategy: First, we need to look back and see what we did right. Next, we need to see where we went wrong. Then, we need to come up with a plan that will convince the board to give us the resources to get it right the next time.”
Show Integrity, Authority, and Passion
Expressions of moral conviction and statements that reflect the sentiments of the group—even when the sentiments are negative—establish your credibility by revealing the quality of your character to your listeners and making them identify and align themselves with you. On Victory Day at the end of the Second World War, Winston Churchill brilliantly captured the feelings of the British people and also conveyed a spirit of honor, courage, and compassion. He said: “This is your hour. This is not victory of a party or of any class. It’s a victory of the great British nation as a whole. We were the first, in this ancient island, to draw the sword against tyranny….There we stood, alone. The lights went out and the bombs came down. But every man, woman, and child in the country had no thought of quitting the struggle….Now we have emerged from one deadly struggle—a terrible foe has been cast on the ground and awaits our judgment and our mercy.”
Another nice example of moral conviction (plus a number of other CLTs) comes from Tina, a manager in an NGO pushing for a needed supply-chain change: “Who do you think will pay for the logistical mess we’ve created? It is not our donors who’ll feel it, but the children we’re supposed to be feeding that will go to bed one more time with an empty belly and who may not make it through the night. Apart from wasting money, this is not right, especially because the fix is so simple.” And here’s Rami, a senior IT director trained in the CLTs, expertly reflecting the sentiments of his disheartened team: “I know what is going through your minds, because the same thing is going through mine. We all feel disappointed and demotivated. Some of you have told me you have had sleepless nights; others, that there are tensions in the team, even at home because of this. Personally, life to me has become dull and tasteless. I know how hard we have all worked and the bitterness we feel because success just slipped out of our reach. But it’s not going to be like this for much longer. I have a plan.”
Another CLT, which helps charismatic leaders demonstrate passion—and inspire it in their followers—is setting high goals. Gandhi set the almost impossible (and moral) goal of liberating India from British rule without using violence, as laid out in his famous “quit India” speech. An example from the business world that we often cite is the former CEO of Sharp, Katsuhiko Machida. In 1998, at a time when Sharp faced collapse, cathode-ray tubes dominated the TV market, and the idea of using LCD technology was commercially unviable, he energized his employees by stating the unthinkable: “By 2005, all TVs we sell in Japan will be LCD models.”
But one must also convey confidence that the goals can be achieved. Gandhi noted: “I know the British Government will not be able to withhold freedom from us, when we have made enough self-sacrifice.” In a later speech he expressed his conviction more forcefully: “Even if all the United Nations opposes me, even if the whole of India forsakes me, I will say, ‘You are wrong. India will wrench with nonviolence her liberty from unwilling hands.’ I will go ahead not for India’s sake alone but for the sake of the world. Even if my eyes close before there is freedom, nonviolence will not end.” Machida personally took his vision to Sharp’s engineers to convince them that they could realize his risky goal; he made it the company’s most important project, brought together cross-functional teams from LCD and TV development to work on it, and told them plainly that it was crucial to Sharp’s survival. Or take Ray, an engineer we know, addressing his team after a setback: “The deadline the CEO gave us is daunting. Other teams would be right to tremble at the knees, but we are not just another team. I know you can rise to the challenge. I believe in each one of you, which means that I believe that we can get the prototype to manufacturing in three months. Let’s commit to do what it takes to get the job done: We have the smarts. We have the experience. All we need is the will, and that’s something only great teams have.” Passion cannot emerge unless the leader truly believes that the vision and strategic goal can be reached.
The three nonverbal cues—expressions of voice, body, and face—are also key to charisma. They don’t come naturally to everyone, however, and they are the most culturally sensitive tactics: What’s perceived as too much passion in certain Asian contexts might be perceived as too muted in southern European ones. But they are nonetheless important to learn and practice because they are easier for your followers to process than the verbal CLTs, and they help you hold people’s attention by punctuating your speech. (For more on these, see the exhibit “Charisma in Voice and Body.”)
Charisma in Voice and Body
Three tactics for showing passion—and winning over listeners Animated voice People who are passionate vary …
Putting It All into Practice
Now that you’ve learned the CLTs, how do you start using them? Simple: Preparation and practice. When you’re mapping out a speech or a presentation, you should certainly plan to incorporate the tactics and rehearse them. We also encourage leaders to think about them before one-on-one conversations or team meetings in which they need to be persuasive. The idea is to arm yourself with a few key CLTs that feel comfortable to you and therefore will come out spontaneously—or at least look as if they did. The leaders we’ve trained worked on improving their charisma in groups and got feedback from one another; you could ask your spouse or a friendly colleague to do the same, or videotape yourself and do a self-critique.
The goal isn’t to employ all the tactics in every conversation but to use a balanced combination. With time and practice, they will start to come out on the fly. One manager we know, who met his wife after being trained in the CLTs, showed her his “before” videos and told us she couldn’t believe it was he. The charismatic guy in the “after” videos—the one whose CLT use had more than doubled—was the person she had married. Another manager, who learned the tactics six years ago and has since become the chief operating officer of his company, says he now uses them every day—personally and professionally—such as in a recent talk to his team about a relocation, which went “much better than expected” as a result.
If you think you can’t improve because you’re just not naturally charismatic, you’re wrong. The managers with the lowest initial charisma ratings in our studies were able to significantly narrow the gap between themselves and their peers to whom the tactics came naturally. It’s true that no amount of training or practice will turn you into Churchill or Martin Luther King Jr. But the CLTs can make you more charismatic in the eyes of your followers, and that will invariably make you a more effective leader.
A version of this article appeared in the June 2012 issue of Harvard Business Review.
How to Tell a Great Story: Learn Science of Storytelling
How to Tell a Great Story: Learn Science of Storytelling
- By Vanessa Van Edwards
You’ve heard that storytelling is important in business, and in life. That it’s a powerful tool that has lasting impact.
But why is that? And how can you become better at it?
Below, we’ll explain the effect of storytelling on our brain, and then give you five tips on how to become a better storyteller.
Have you ever been in an audience when someone is telling a story on stage? Maybe at a TED-style talk, or a stand up comedy show. Notice how it feels like there’s magic in the air?
It’s not magic. It’s neurology.
If we were to put you in an MRI machine and tell you facts (like this one!), the parts of your brain that would light up are called Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area. They are the data processing regions of your brain.
But in a study at Princeton University, scientists found that, when you listen to a well-told story, the parts of your brain that respond are those that would if you were inside the story. So somebody talks about the smell of roasting coffee and your olfactory cortex lights up. They tell you about grabbing a pencil and your motor cortex responds–specifically, the part associated with handmovement.
Even more impressive: this effect also happens to the person telling the story. So, if the story is being told live or in person, both the storyteller’s and the listeners’ brains start lighting up in sync with one another! This is the magic you feel in a room or a group, when a story is being well told and the audience is captivated.
One explanation for this is mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are a type of brain cell that respond both when we’re doing an action, and when we see someone else doing that same action. It’s believed that these are the reason why we yawn when we see someone else yawn–and are likely the basis for why we feel empathy.
When someone is telling a story and our brains respond as if we are inside the story ourselves, we feel a powerful connection to the storyteller.
So, what’s the best way to elicit that connection when you tell stories?
Don’t commentate; describe.
We were taught by Dale Carnegie to “Tell the audience what you’re going to say, say it; then tell them what you’ve said.” But storytelling doesn’t work like that.
In order to make your audience’s brains respond as if they’re inside the story, you need just to describe what was happening to you at the time it happened–without necessarily adding opinions or context.
Think of telling a story as making a movie inside your audience’s head. Instead of using voiceover (no pictures) or montage (brief, not very descriptive pictures), tell your story in action scenes. Get granular with the detail. What did it look like? What was happening? Who was there? What did they say?
Here’s an example of someone launching you immediately into an action scene as the story begins:
Use sensory information
Make your descriptions rich. Activate the sensory cortex in your listeners by focusing on smell, touch, sound and feelings in your stories. This story begins immediately by doing this:
Fill your stories with emotion
The biggest mistake I see people making in storytelling is leaving out how they felt. When you include emotions in a story, your audience’s mirror neurons will make them feel those emotions, too.
When we experience empathy, our brains release oxytocin, the “bonding chemical” which leads to feelings of connection and trust.
Further, scientists have discovered that, when we experience an emotionally charged event, our amygdala release dopamine, which helps with information processing and aids memory.
So, if you want people to trust you more, and remember what you said, include emotions in your storytelling!
Bonus tip: To increase the likelihood of activating your audience’s mirror neurons, instead of just naming the emotion you felt, describe how it physically felt in your body. So, rather than “I was happy”, you might say, “It felt like I had warm honey moving through my chest and I couldn’t stop smiling”.
Edit, Edit, Edit!
Telling the truth in your stories isn’t the same as telling EVERYTHING!
John Medina, the New York Times best-selling author and developmental molecular biologist, discovered that the brain has a very short attention span, so it’s important to make sure every part of your story has a place.
Think about what you most want to get across in your story. Then, include details that support this, and take almost everything else out. Does it matter that you had a cold that day? No? Leave it out. Is it important that your mom was wearing a red jacket? Yes? That can stay in.
One thing Medina discovered that we do pay attention to is emotions. Given the release of dopamine and oxytocin we experience, this is no surprise! So, again, your emotional state is a detail worth leaving in.
When you stick to the essential scenes and details plus emotions, you can get across a lot in a short period of time as these five, ninety-second stories show:
Don’t throw in spoilers!
When telling a story, stick to the chronological order that things happened to you in real life. In other words, don’t give us details that you yourself didn’t know, until the part of your story where you discovered them.
By telling us what’s going to happen later, you lose the tension in your story. For example, if you were telling a story about a job interview, then said, “At this point, I didn’t realize that they’d already given the job to someone else” – we stop caring about what happens in that interview, because we know the outcome already.
This is important because, as Paul J. Zak’s studies found, tension is one of the key aspects of holding attention in stories. By throwing in “spoilers”, you lose this tension, which, Zak says, is essential to creating emotional resonance between the storyteller and the audience.
In summary
When you’re telling a story, make sure you lay off the thoughts and opinions, stick to the important details, and focus on sensory description and emotions. Ask yourself, “What did it look like?” and “How did I feel?”This is a guest post by Marsha Shandur, a Storytelling Coach at Yes Yes Marsha. Find her on Facebook and get more tips on how to use personal stories to impact your readers and listeners at her website, YesYesMarsha.com
The Secret to Powerful Communication in Two Words
The Secret to Powerful Communication in Two Words
- Nick Morgan Shrestha
- Contributor
- I'm passionate about communications, especially public speaking.
If I had to sum up in two words everything I’ve learned in 25 years of work on communications, rhetoric, public speaking, speechwriting, and body language, those two words would be: charismatic storytelling.
Charismatic because in an over-stimulated, impatient world, it’s passion and charisma that get attention. But passion alone doesn’t get you to charisma; that magic ingredient takes a little additional work.
Storytelling, because we’ve already got way too much information to take in, so the only thing we remember these days is stories. And oh yes, that’s the way it has always been.
The good news is that both charisma and storytelling are skills you can learn, not gifts from the gods that only a select few are anointed with.
That’s it. If you’re a charismatic storyteller, you can command attention, persuade people of anything, sell successfully, lead multitudes, and even make politics work again.
The world desperately needs more charismatic storytellers. In subsequent blogs, from time to time, I’ll talk about how to develop those skills in yourself.
An interview with Nick Morgan about using storytelling to help an audience emotionally connect with your ideas.
What’s the best way for a speaker to help their audience connect with their ideas?
Many organizations have brilliant employees with a great depth of knowledge, but when it comes time for them to share that knowledge, they have trouble finding their voice. How does a speaker connect with their audience? How do you evoke emotion, and gain the investment of your listeners?
Our guest today is Dr. Nick Morgan, one of America’s top communication theorists and coaches. He is also the President of Public Words , coaching speakers and business leaders in methods of connection, helping them develop their ideas, and bringing their insights to life with powerful language that will move people to action.
We discuss why it’s best for thought leaders to focus on their insights, narrowing their area of expertise and making their ideas accessible to learners. Nick explains that speakers should share stories that are relevant to their audience, otherwise it won’t hold interest. In addition, your story should identify a specific problem that the audience understands, and illustrate concrete solutions. That’s how a speaker connects emotionally with their listeners.
One method of establishing an emotional connection is by telling stories of conflict or failure. While many have difficulty sharing such personal stories, Nick describes why these are exactly the stories your audience most needs to hear. They want to understand the stumbling blocks you faced, and how to overcome those challenges and reach success. As a coach of some of the world’s top speakers, Nick shares great advice for breaking through the primal fear of public speaking. He discusses why speakers should establish a clear narrative, and how to gain confidence through repetition of those stories.
If over the last two years you’ve felt disconnected or misunderstood during virtual conversations please check out Nick’s book Can You Hear Me?: How to Connect with People in a Virtual World .
If you are planning to add speaking to your repertoire, or even if you’re an experienced speaker, this episode is a trove of wisdom. Listen in!
Three Key Takeaways:
- To make an emotional connection with your audience, you need to find the intersection between thought leadership and listener relevance.
- Share your thought leadership expertise in a narrow band, and seek out an audience that needs your insights.
- Be passionate about your thought leadership. The audience can only be excited if you’re excited, too!
Transcript
Bill Sherman If you practice thought leadership long enough, someone will ask you to speak on the topic. And many organizations find that they have subject matter experts who are comfortable speaking about their ideas with other experts felt less comfortable speaking with non-experts. So how do you give voice to your ideas?
Bill Sherman My guest today is Nick Morgan. He spent a career studying communication with a focus on verbal and nonverbal communication. Nick is the president of public words. He’s coached many of the top professional speakers in the world and is also the author of many books on speaking, most recently: Can You Hear Me? How to Connect with People in a Virtual World. He’s also written one of my all-time favorite books titled Working the Room. I’m eager to talk with Nick about how to communicate more effectively. We also touch on his journey as a coach of thought leadership practitioners, as well as his own thought leadership journey.
Bill Sherman I’m Bill Sherman and you’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership ready. Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, Nick.
Nick Morgan Thank you, Bill, it’s a great pleasure to be here, and I’m delighted, particularly excited to be talking about thought leadership with you today. This is a passion of both of ours, so let’s get started.
Bill Sherman It is! So, you and I have known each other for the better part of 20 years. And so with that, I think one of the joys that I have is when I think about you, I think about connecting people with ideas. And you’ve done that in the world of speaking in person. Now you focused on virtual. And so I want to dig into that a little bit, and let’s start by setting the table when you think about connecting people with ideas. How would you explain that what comes to mind?
Nick Morgan Well, so many things, but let’s start with a couple that seemed key. I began my career after I was an academic for a while as a political speechwriter. And so, the first thing I learned was, you have to understand the voice of the person that you’re working with. In this case, I was the speechwriter. I had to in essence, channel the governor so that I could speak with his voice. And one of the mistakes you tend to make early on is you think I have to say something brand new and clever. But as you and I both know, there are not a lot of new ideas under the Sun. Most of the ideas around the big themes that thought leadership tend to be about leadership and change. And those kinds of great issues. Most of what can be said has been said. But what’s different is your voice, your unique voice. Nobody’s going on the on the road that you’ve gone on in your own personal journey. And that personal journey has to inform the themes of the thought leadership that you strike. And so that’s really the first. That’s the first place to start is figuring out what’s your voice. And that’s gotten more complicated over the years because the news to me was fairly simple. You kept a lot of your personal story out of this and focused on your expertise, your knowledge. And now it’s expected indeed, perhaps required that you be authentic and self-disclosing and bring a lot of your own personal journey into the story. And how much information is too much information? Is the just the operative question. So, yeah, that’s how we get started.
Bill Sherman Well, in that line, I think in terms of that self-disclosure and what’s appropriate has not only moved significantly over the past few decades, but it’s still in the process of moving. And each of us is navigating and saying, OK, if there is an I in the practice of thought leadership, what is the right amount of sharing that I in the idea, right?
Nick Morgan Yeah, it varies from fairly simple answers such as the day I had to give a speech and my father had passed away three days before. Should I share that with the audience or not? Because there was no way I was going to escape from under that cloud that I was enveloped in? And it was it was going to affect how I connected with that audience. Should I mention or not? In the end, I decided not to because it wasn’t relevant to the particular topic, and I didn’t want to burden the audience with that because it would have gotten in the way of the top. But I think about a client of mine who was doing very well as a very successful entrepreneur and now CEO, and she began at age twenty-two and a half seconds from death as a drug addict. And it was literally a phone call that saved her life. Now we debated as she was working on her thought leadership long and hard about how much of that story we would tell. And it turned out because of the answer that she developed that much of that story was relevant. And so, she tells that quite a gripping and really horrific story. And then ultimately ennobling story about her recovery and her new life. So, it can vary quite a bit as to how much information you need to share or you should share.
Bill Sherman And with that, I think there’s also the challenge how do you create that connection with whether it’s an audience in the room or the audience on Zoom or whatever environment you’re in? How do you turn it from? I’m sharing a piece of me or an idea that I have into something where it becomes relatable and understandable. And I think you’ve done a good job of both in terms of being aware of that need helping people see that it’s not just standing on stage or, you know, putting yourself out for the world to see. But to evoke that empathy. So, let’s explore that sort of empathy.
Nick Morgan Yeah, I always remember the advice of my grandmother when I was about eight and prone to speaking up at the dinner table when I visited grandma and telling her all about my day and my life. And she was a stern, stern woman, wonderful in many ways, but tended to be tough on the people closest to her that she loved the most. And she said at one point, “Nicholas, not general information. And she meant the what you share needs to be of general information, needs to be relevant in some way to the person who’s listening in order for it to be acceptable, conversation for the dinner table or for the stage or for the Zoom. And I’ve always remembered that that rule from grandma and thought about it and its many permutations over the years, but things have to be a sufficiently general information. However, you don’t want to define that too narrowly because there was a book written by an African writer, unknown African writer who got turned down by something like 75 publishing houses because they all said nobody in the West is going to be interested in the growing up story. The coming of age story of a young boy in an African, a small African village. And it became a worldwide bestseller. Things Fall Apart because they were focusing on the wrong thing, not the differences, but the similarities. Everybody has to grow up. So the story of a young person becoming an adult turns out to be universal. It turns out to be sufficiently general information.
Bill Sherman And I think that’s something that. You have to be able to step away from yourself, and you talked about that process of working with the client and working through the story and saying, OK, how do we share not just the experience but the learning from it? And so you have to have a little bit of distance.
Nick Morgan Yeah, you need you need some wisdom or some distance on yourself, and not everybody has that. That’s one of the coach’s job jobs is to help them find that. But ultimately you just need to ask yourself what is the problem the audience has for which my story, my information can be a solution. And once you know what that is, then you know the extent to which it’s relatable, and you can use that as a rule of thumb to keep from wandering too far down into some rabbit hole that won’t be of interest to your audience. So that’s really the key is what’s the problem the audience has for which your information is the solution?
Bill Sherman So your latest work on Can You Hear Me in the digital age? Talk to me about that sort of transformation of because speaking had been so much in person and communications in person. So you talk about writing the speech for governor, in fact, right now we’re all in these boxes. What’s the same and what’s changing and how should we do it better?
Nick Morgan That is the question. And, of course, one we’ve all been living in for the past almost two years now. And the quick answer is that the basic rules of communication turn out to be surprisingly the same. However, you still need good storytelling. You still need to show up with energy and presence. You still need these basics. However, there are some pitfalls in the virtual world that I was actually quite surprised to discover when I did the research for the book because I’m a I’m a technophile, I’m an audiophile. I love new gadgets and I thought, This is going to be fun. We’re going to discover we have this whole new way of communicating that is going to add to our options, and that may be the way it comes down. Ultimately, when we get through the pandemic and we’re free to go back in person in whatever hybrid version of reality we experience. But for now, for many people, it feels like a restriction or a less lesser thing. And the reason for that is what we humans care about is each other’s intent more than we care about the exact words that we say. Exact words can sometimes be very important. Don’t get me wrong, but what we care about is the intent behind them. So, if I say nice job bill. You’re pleased. Because who doesn’t like a little couple of words of praise unless you think I mean it sarcastically? And then you feel stung, you say, Why are you ragging on me? So intent matters, and it matters enormously, in fact, antennas everything, and most communications and intent is harder to get in the virtual world, even on video conferencing. Just give a quick, for instance, on video conferencing. We think of it as a three-dimensional exchange because we’re used to translating in our brains. What a two-dimensional picture looks like into three dimensions, but it isn’t the same as three dimensions, and we don’t get as good a read on the other person’s emotions from the two dimensional representation of a three dimensional being your flattened out as the receiver and the and the sender, but your affect comes across as less. And just to illustrate how this can work, here’s a quick, paradoxical example there is one profession that is going much better on Zoom than it did in person. And that is mediation. Hmm. So, couples getting divorced, they hire a mediator because they’re going to be basically friendly about it, and they work out all the details of the divorce in person that can sometimes get heated, even with the best of intentions. Suddenly you’re taking away my assets. How do I feel about that? It turns out because the emotions are damped down on Zoom, that mediation works better because the two parties just don’t get as angry, potentially as they do as they can in person. And so that’s to me, that’s a beautiful counter example of what’s going on here. Emotions are tamped down. We don’t know how strongly the other person really feels about it on Zoom. We don’t get as good a read on their emotions. And it’s not just the intensity, either it’s the quality and kind of emotions as well.
Bill Sherman So that access to a motion right and the ability to evoke emotion, I think is often one of the most effective tools and the practice of leadership, whether it’s seeing around a corner and getting someone to see an opportunity or a risk and have that aha moment or for them to look back on the past and say, Oh, there was another way. So. How do you view that sort of accessing emotion? And is there a way to do it more effectively? Because I think a lot of us stumble through that process.
Nick Morgan Yes, it’s really a lovely question, because for business people, especially when we’re talking about our area of expertise, we tend to think of it as a body of knowledge. It’s not infused with emotion. So we have to remember, first of all, we’re passionate enough about it that we’re willing to devote our lives to studying this. This area, as I am about communications, I start thinking about communications when I wake up and I often doze off thinking about, Oh, that would be a good blog topic if I write it down here as I’m falling asleep. So, you know, I’m crazy passionate about communications. The issue in the business world often is that we don’t like to think about conflict in the business world. Everything is supposed to go well. We’ve got some great products or services. We treat our customers beautifully. They never complain. It’s all good. The interesting stories and the and the passion comes in when things go wrong and when there’s conflict. And to bring that in is often uncomfortable at first for the thought leader and more personally, the one who once upon a time I worked with a billionaire, the one time when things didn’t work out well with a thought leadership program. And I kept telling him, you have to tell us all the mistakes you’ve made along the way because people want to know how did you screw up and still become a billionaire? Because we know we’re going to screw up. What we want to know is how do you survive that and become a billionaire? And he was just deeply uncomfortable talking about any of the mistakes he made. He was convinced that he had done a few things right, and he wanted to tell us about those things. But they weren’t frankly that different than what other people do. He just did it more so, and as former governor of Texas Ann Richards liked to say, backwards and in high heels. He just did it with a couple of twists. But what was really interesting was all the mistakes he’d made and the things he’d learned along the way. He just didn’t want to talk about those things. So conflict is hard, and that’s what typically gets in the way of good storytelling.
Bill Sherman Conflict, vulnerability, transparency and the ability to admit a mistake. Right. And those are the things that we probably sweat over the most in hindsight or in two a.m. when we’re in bed going. What could I have done differently? But if we don’t bring those things to the table, I think we rob our ability to story tell and to share insights. So you mentioned something I want to circle back to. You talked about the joy of the practice of the leadership and you said, Hey, my passion is the communication from the morning I wake up to the time I go to bed. And it’s always percolate. So was that always the case for you or what activated that joy?
Nick Morgan Well, it was really a couple of things that happened to me when I was 17. The most important of which was I was tobogganing and it was in a horrific accident, fractured my skull and was in a coma for a week. And during that week, I died very briefly and came back to life, just came running in with the paddles and shocked me back to life. And when I woke up, I could no longer read body language is a very curious thing. And it wasn’t something that that the doctors tested for. They test for to make sure your brain still functions and you know what year it is and who’s the president United States. They ask you a sort of a basic IQ test to see if your prefrontal cortex and higher brain functions have survived, but nobody asks you. So, can you still read body language neck? And it was. It took me a while to figure out that I couldn’t. It was when I went back to school and I was looking terrible having just been to this accident and I had a horrific scar running down the side of my head and my friend said, Nick, you look great. Big, of course, sarcastic 17-year-olds. And I said, thanks because I thought I meant it. I had lost the ability to read sarcasm. And it wasn’t until a couple of awkward exchanges later that I figured this out, and then I started studying body language with intensity because I knew I was missing something huge intent. Again, the ability to read other people’s attention. And I had to get it back. And so I started studying. That made a bunch of friends very uncomfortable by staring at them for long periods of time, trying to figure out what’s your emotion here? And it gradually came back, and I think I probably just recovered as well as sort of trained myself. But as a result, ever since, I tend to think about these things consciously as well as the way all humanity does, which is unconsciously, we’re all unconscious experts and body language. We when we have some friend that we know or loved, one that we know or family member, and if they’re full of emotion, they come running into the room full of good news or bad news, or they’re angry because something bad has happened. We can instantly pick up on that. Why? Because we know, well, they’re sort of baseline of communication. We know what they’re like a normal state. And so we can easily read heightened state of emotion. And I couldn’t do that for a long time. It was at six months, six to nine months, and so that led to this absolute fascination and passion for communications because once it’s sort of threatened to be taken away from you, then you realize how precious it is and you want to be able to function fully yourself. That’s how I started.
Bill Sherman That’s a fantastic story. Thank you for sharing that, Nick. It also makes me think of something that I’ve seen as a pattern working with all leadership practitioners over the years. And I’m curious if this resonates with you. I think for many, not all, but for many thought leadership begins with something of a problem or challenge you’re trying to solve for yourself. And that leads to that deep questioning where you’re wrestling with it on a day-to-day basis. And then from there, the aha and sort of the spark of, oh, there’s so much to learn and just the small area, and then it becomes self-sustaining. Have you seen that working with some of your clients as well? Does that resonate?
Nick Morgan Yeah, absolutely. It’s I can think of, oh, at least a half dozen offhand immediately that come to mind that either it’s a personal challenge they face. A scion of industry who had his company bought out from under him and so became interested in other kinds of purpose and leading a purpose driven life. Very moving story and I mentioned earlier that the woman who was a drug addict and narrowly escaped death, only to go on to become very successful and to fill her life with love and purpose and achievement. And so these stories just come to mind one after another. Sometimes it’s a problem about an idea. You know, I have a good friend who is an expert on A.I. and. Her interest comes originally from the academic study of computers in artificial intelligence and that sort of thing. And she’s found the challenges of A.I. to be sufficiently intriguing in a fast-changing world, of fast changing area of information that that keeps her engaged. So, it doesn’t have to be a personal tragedy, but there often is a personal story behind it that makes you more sensitive to a particular area or such as I was with the communication or such as sign of industry was with purpose. When you have something taken away from you or when you have it threatened, then you see it sometimes for the first time, especially if you’ve taken for granted before. And so I think you’re right, that does make a big difference.
Bill Sherman And I think that also is you have to have that passion and that willingness to study something and explore it on your own, not because you’re told to, not because you have to, but because you want to understand. And that perpetual flywheel of curiosity.
Nick Morgan Yeah, if that’s not there, then it’s not going to go the distance it when I work with people, they often sidle up to me sort of early in the process and they say, Nick, do you think I have the talent to do this? And I’ll say to them, if I’m feeling particularly honest that moment, I’ll say, you know, talent isn’t what I’m worried about here. It’s whether you have the determination to go the distance and the determination ultimately springs from passion. We can coach you into doing – giving a good speech, or help you get over the pitfalls, the things, the mistakes that people make. But if you don’t have the passion, then you’re going to get tired of it because it’s a long process and you won’t go the distance.
Bill Sherman Well, and that’s so true because the journey of thought leadership, both as an independent practitioner as well as if you’re doing it inside of an organization, the arc of thought leadership is not something you do for a week. It’s not a quarterly project. It’s something that gets woven into your DNA. Those who become most successful at it.
Nick Morgan Yes, absolutely, and it both, as you say, inside and outside organizations inside the organization, you have to push against the kinds of forces that want to keep you focused on just maximizing profit or just taking care of the customers or just developing new markets or whatever it is you’re supposed to do. The inertia of a company is quite strong and whatever their key directions are like that. And so to say, Well, we’re going to start a larger conversation and ultimately will benefit the organization because it will raise everybody’s profile. That’s a somewhat that’s a somewhat delicate argument to make and isn’t always met with huge enthusiasm initially, and it helps if you’re higher up in the organization. If you’re lower down, it gets even more challenging. So you need a lot of passion, a lot of enthusiasm to keep you going. And it’s hard to measure ROI, especially at first.
Bill Sherman Right. Right? Because the signals of success aren’t ones that you can measure through content marketing, for example, your reach or the number of likes engagement. Often when you’re putting an idea out for conversation, that seed that you plant takes a while to grow and it’s below the soil. And so you don’t see it until it sprouts and you’re like, Oh, that maybe took me half a year or a year for that idea to really start even have that green shoot?
Nick Morgan Yeah, absolutely. It’s long-term work. And if your business is obsessively focused on the short term, as many businesses have to be and as many are, then then you’re not. You’re not going to have an easy ride. So, you do have a lot of passion that gets you through. But don’t let that stop you if you’ve got the passion.
Bill Sherman Absolutely.
Bill Sherman If you are enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about the podcast, please leave a five-star review and share it with your friends. We are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all major platforms, as well as at LeveragingThoughtLeadership.com.
Bill Sherman So one of the things that I know you and I have talked about before and this leads to the concept of passion, is the ability to see the connection between your area of interest and the news of the day. Stories that are in the world and it has a term news jacking. But I want to explore that with you because you’ve said that over the years, it’s a skill that some people catch immediately and some struggle with. So, I’d like to get your perspective on this in terms of what is it, how does it work and why do people struggle?
Nick Morgan So I tell people, as they’re getting into a thought leadership program, that it’s like a filter you put on the world and you’re going to be using that filter for the rest of your life. And it’s precisely in the moments when you’re not expected to be think about it thinking about it that that it’s so important. So, I have I have relatives who live in the UK and I got a call from one just the other day who said, you should see this piece by Boris Johnson. He just made a complete idiot of himself giving a speech on the BBC, and it’s hilarious. And immediately, my thought leadership communications, you know, of course, this relative knew me and knew my interest. So that was, in a sense, a softball. She knew I’d be interested in it, but there was Boris Johnson giving a speech and he got lost for twenty one seconds, which is an eternity of stage time. And it was even whether you like the man or not, whether you agree with his politics or not. Everybody’s uncomfortable watching those 21 seconds.So I tell people, as they’re getting into a thought leadership program, that it’s like a filter you put on the world and you’re going to be using that filter for the rest of your life. And it’s precisely in the moments when you’re not expected to be think about it thinking about it that that it’s so important. So, I have I have relatives who live in the UK and I got a call from one just the other day who said, you should see this piece by Boris Johnson. He just made a complete idiot of himself giving a speech on the BBC, and it’s hilarious. And immediately, my thought leadership communications, you know, of course, this relative knew me and knew my interest. So that was, in a sense, a softball. She knew I’d be interested in it, but there was Boris Johnson giving a speech and he got lost for twenty one seconds, which is an eternity of stage time. And it was even whether you like the man or not, whether you agree with his politics or not. Everybody’s uncomfortable watching those 21 seconds.
Bill Sherman He’s shuffling papers, gaping in terror. Yeah, yeah.
Nick Morgan Trying to find some bit of inspiration in there. And he finally gives up after 21 seconds that he starts talking about Peppa Pig. It’s one of the funnier moments in recent political history, and if you don’t know what Peppa Pig is, it’s a favorite TV show that was launched in the U.K. and there’s a Peppa Pig world. It’s like Lego World or, you know, any of these characters that they get a theme park. So this is Peppa Pig theme park. And the prime minister had toured it recently as an example of British initiative and creativity and enterprise. And so locked in there somewhere there probably was a point that he could have made had he not been so obviously lost. But yeah, he did not do that well, but it was an ideal moment of news, Jackie for me. So that was a pretty easy one. As I say, the harder one is when you take an ongoing issue that’s that is constantly debated. Let’s say the good and bad news about the environment. We tend to hear so much of that on a daily basis that it sort of achieves background status in our minds unless we are particularly passionate about it. But it sort of goes in one ear and out the other. You see, we have so much, so many news feeds that we’ll hear the same stories seven times during the day. And so we think, yeah, that’s happening. It’s bad news and so on. But we need to be able to pay fresh attention at that point and see, is this relevant to my area of expertise and not precisely tuned it out because we hear it about it so much? And that’s the real opportunity, because pity the poor press that has to report on something like that over and over again. They’re always looking for a new angle. So, if you’re the bright spark who comes along and says, you know, this is really about X my interest. Artificial intelligence could solve this problem, then the press will love you because you’re bringing a perspective that allows them to write something new and you’ll get attention that way. So it’s a great way to tie your story, your story where you sometimes struggle to get people to pay attention to something that they’re already paying attention to, and as a result, it’s can be a very effective way to spread the word. But. You’ve got to be ready and always have that filter on. Always be looking at the world thinking, how can I turn this into a news item about my subject?
Bill Sherman And that’s that twenty-four/seven. Sort of your mind tied to your passion, it’s the voice back in the back of your head that for you is thinking about communications, for example, for your friend, I whatever the topic you’ve chosen, whatever your passion is, is always looking at the world through your lens with fresh eyes and saying, Is there an opportunity here? Is there a story that ties to what I care about, right?
Nick Morgan I had a lovely example of this the other day I was on vacation. This was in August, and I was just walking into a cafe and there was a gentleman in front of me who said he’d like some toast. And the person in front said the clerk said, Sure, OK, I’ll get some toast for you, and he’s sitting there and looking at the person. There’s clearly something he’s frustrated with, and he waits a while because he’s polite to say anything. But he says, Why aren’t you using the machine? And Clarke just looks at him and says, What? What are you talking about? And realizes he’s gesturing to the little credit card reader, which is made by a company called Toast, based here in Boston. And he saw toast on the top. So he thought this was some magical new way to toast. And yeah, we the reaction of the clerk was priceless. She didn’t want to draw attention to, you know, his moment of foolishness and humiliate him, and I was trying not to crack up behind him. But, you know, we can all understand this technology moves fast. He’d never seen this before. Just because it was about the size of a credit card was awfully small to be making toast. But never mind, he wanted this, and if
Bill Sherman it did, makes toast. I want to see it used, right? How cool would that be? Right, exactly, exactly.
Nick Morgan So, yeah, so there was an opportunity for anybody, for an A.I. story. You know, it wasn’t. It didn’t quite work out as a communication story, although I wrestled with it for a while and I loved it. But yeah, it’s for any number of of particular interest that would have made a lovely little vignette, taking a lot of technological adaptation and so on.
Bill Sherman So we’ve talked about your start into the world of communications back at 17 and you over your career. But a teacher, a coach, a consultant, an advisor, you’ve worn many hats. I want to talk to you for a few minutes about what have you learned, both being a practitioner as well as that adviser. And so I think those are two different perspectives in thought leadership and there are more practitioners and fewer of us who do the advising. So I want to ask you, what have you learned by seeing many people wrestle with their own leadership?
Nick Morgan Well, it’s never as interesting as you think it is to the rest of the world. That’s the first thing you have learned. So a certain amount of humility, you’re going to be wearing that filter all the time. And so you’ll be like that annoying person at the cocktail party who won’t stop talking about X. Whatever that is. So you have to where you’re learning your expertise lightly and have a sense of humor about it. But also you can’t despair. People will be interested. And if they’re not and you are, it’s probably because you haven’t figured out how to tell the story yet in a way that will make it sufficiently relevant to people. Back to my grandma, sufficient general of general interest is the key question How do you make this a general interest? And what your job is to find the human theme, the elemental story in in that area of expertise. What brings it to life? And of course, the people who struggle with the people who are in the more esoteric fields like A.I. and that kind of thing. But then when you look at a lot of recent movie making and TV making, A.I. is all over it, right? Robots and all that kind of thing. So there’s there are stories to be told. It’s just you have to figure out what they are and as I say, find it in the conflict, which is not the first place you want to look usually. But so that’s the main thing is, it’s not as interesting to other people as it is to you. And also, if you do it right, you can get their interest and you can get them to pay attention. And the key is make letting the audience do some of the work and making it about them. So it’s about being aware of and talking to your audience.
Bill Sherman So you say letting your audience do some of the work, what do you mean by that? Because I think there’s something to unpack there.
Nick Morgan Yeah. So that that has both specific immediate applications and also more general ones. But me, see if I can illuminate it by talking about a bit of research that was done at Princeton University by a psychology professor who wired up storytellers and listeners to each other. Wired up in terms of their brains, so you could study the brain patterns of both. And what he found was he had the storyteller read or recite a fairy tale to the listeners and the listeners started to match their brain patterns up to the storyteller. We literally get on the same wavelength when you tell a story. But here’s what’s interesting when they got near the end of the story, this the listener’s brain patterns anticipated. They actually led the storyteller because they knew where the story was going. And so one of the secrets to good thought leadership is to tell basic stories, fundamental stories that resonate with people so that they can do the rest of the work that can carry it home for you. They can carry it the rest of the way. And so you want to be telling stories about deep quests and deep fundamental human conditions and things like that. What if you think it’s not about that, then you haven’t done enough work yet? You’ve got to find the deep human story within your area of expertise. And to my astonishment, I will tell you that the people who struggle with this the most are people in the medical world. And for me, that’s astonishing because the medical world is about life and death, and you can’t get much more basic and human than that. We all want to live and not die. We all want to get cured and not die of some mysterious disease. So it’s inherently interesting. But they’ve been trained. Their scientific training gets in the way they’re trained to be dispassionate and not see. And this is changing, thank goodness. And there’s lots of narrative storytelling going on in the medical world now and there, and they’re being trained in new and interesting ways. But on the whole, doctors are trained to disconnect from the emotions so that they don’t get overwhelmed by all the grief and all the pain. And but the result is it’s often hard for them to see the story right in front of them.
Bill Sherman And I think if we extrapolate even a little bit further to that, that training in science also leads to a lot of business function as well, where you communicate an idea through a white paper and you hand, you know, 20 30 pages to someone and say, Read this There’s often very little storytelling that happens in a white paper. Now, infographics and shorter forms of communication rely essentially on that storytelling. And so that ability to put the circuit breaker in and say, OK, we’re doing a white paper or a longform piece. Where’s the story here? How do we break it down to the individual beats that gets someone to see why it relates to them? Because if you can’t create that like you said, that alignment of brain rate on an EEG, if you can’t get someone to see your worlds, they’re not going to have your excitement because I’ve used the phrase that your audience will never be as excited about your idea as you are. And that means if you’re not showing excitement, they’re not coming along for the ride. Right?
Nick Morgan Yeah, absolutely. It’s you got to be 10 times as excited as they are. Yeah. The case of getting other people as interested in your ideas as you are is that’s really the heart of it. That’s the nub of figuring out thought. Leadership is finding that finding that story and going with going with something that will ignite their passion, their curiosity just as much as years or almost as much as.
Bill Sherman Or related to something that they deeply care about, right? And so if you can find that common bridge where they say, OK, you’re an expert in X, I’m curious about why, just like you and I, a conversation on the intersection between communication and leadership, there is so much that we can continue talking about. And I have a question that I think will relate to something that I’ve heard from a number of people who practiced thought leadership in organizations. And I want to ask on their behalf. So heads of the leadership have said to me something along these lines. We have some amazing experts in-house, but if you ask them to go out and speak or to share these ideas, they get scared or they deal with cold feet and they’re afraid. You’ve worked with speakers at many different stages in the journey, from novice to true pros and masters. How do you help those people who have great stories, great insights gain the confidence that they need to be able to tell those stories?
Nick Morgan My approach for a long time has been based on the neuroscience of communications, and for many people, especially thought leaders who are dealing with some area of scientific knowledge or academic knowledge, that’s quite profound. They’re used to thinking in evidentiary terms. And so they find it very reassuring when I show them this is when you go out and stand in this way on stage, you’re going to have this effect on the audience. The audience will be here with you at this point in the story because we know the neuroscience of storytelling tells us that the audience is going to respond in this way and knowing that you can control that to an astonishing extent and have a clearer understanding of where your audience is, where you are. That gives people a lot of reassurance. And so it takes away the basic fear of public speaking, which is that I’m feeling exposed. I’m standing in front of a bunch of people. We’re going to judge me. And that feeling is probably ancient. Many of my colleagues in the space say it comes from the fear of being kicked out of the tribe. That was our biggest danger 100000 years ago or a million years ago, because humans being a weak species could survive on their own. We were strong as a group, but weak on our own, so we’re afraid of getting kicked out of the tribe. Hence, any time we have to stand up in front of the tribe and be judged by the what ifs their vote is thumbs down, you know, then then we’re out in the woods somewhere with the saber tooth tigers after us. So. So that fear is real and it’s primal. But it goes away if you can understand fully what you’re doing and realize that these things are controllable and predictable.
Bill Sherman So take away some of the uncertainty and bring clarity in terms of what needs to be done rather than worry about what might happen.
Nick Morgan Yeah, and if you have a good clear plan and you’re in mind and you know that it works, then then that gives you a lot of comfort. And of course, for many people, that kind of fright is quickly overcome. A few minutes into the speech of this sort of immediate nerves, but then for other people, it takes a longer period of time and it’s speaking in front of a number of audiences. You say you start to recognize how this is at this point. This is where the audience will laugh or this is where the audience will respond in some way that I’m familiar with now. And that’s very reassuring. If you know your audience and you know your topic, then that you can get quite comfortable, even the most extreme introvert can get comfortable in front of an audience when one is predictable.
Bill Sherman So as we begin to wrap up, I want to close with one question. There are more people at the start of their journeys in thought leadership than there are who are reaching towards the end. And that’s just true because so many people are more interested in bold leadership now than decades ago. My question would be one for you if you were to go back and offer advice to 17-year-old Nick, or maybe twenty two year old Nick starting down this journey. What advice in terms of developing the skills for thought leadership and what advice would you give for the journey?
Nick Morgan Yeah, I’d say start narrow the urges to start wide. You think I have to appeal to everybody? But you actually get further faster if you find the other experts who truly care about the thing you do as narrowly as possible and then you get to know them and you find out the tricks of their trade and how they go about it and how they talk about it. And if you can do them one better, great. But you’re going to learn from that experience and then you can gradually build out from there. But if you start too wide, if you say and this is classic, when you write your first book, the publisher and your agent will ask you, So who’s the audience for this? And you’ll say, Well, everybody and my mother. And their reaction is, Oh, we’ve got another one here, because anybody who answers that hasn’t really thought about who their audience is. It’s not true that the whole world wants to know about your expertise and to find who is interested. You need to start as narrow as possible. So that’s the first sort of counterintuitive advice I’d give. And then the second, because I ran into I had a lot of stage fright and a lot of uncertainty along the way and almost came up, gave up any number of times is in follow that passion and hang in there because it’s a we used to talk about in the consulting world, a hockey stick phenomenon where you’re first, you’re down here and it doesn’t look like you’re making any progress and then it shoots up after you’ve been for doing it for a while. Well, what they don’t tell you is, you know, an actual hockey stick has a short little blade and then a long run up right with the with the handle. But it’s really more like the other way around. You have a long, long, flat blade, right? And then it’s going to start going up. How long does it take? I mean, it’s impossible to predict everybody has a different experience, but it can take five years, you know, to really start to get noticed even in this instant world. The problem with this instant world is that it forgets as fast as it is entranced by something. And so even going viral doesn’t guarantee that you’ve got a thought leadership career. It just means that a large group of people paid brief attention to you. And that’s it. That’s a trap that many a thought leader falls into. That’s and that’s the other bit of advice I give is don’t in fact try at all for the for the short-term viral meme, but rather go for the long, the long haul and build your audience slowly. Because that short term audience, it’s like crack cocaine, you know, it’s going to come and go just like that and you’re going to be left feeling worse when you were done that than you did before you started.
Bill Sherman So there is so much more we could talk about next, but I think that’s great advice. Thank you very much for joining us today.
Nick Morgan Oh, Bill, it’s always great to chat with you.
Bill Sherman If you’re interested in organizational thought leadership, then I invite you to subscribe to the Orbital newsletter. Each month, we talk about the people who create, curate and deploy thought leadership on behalf of their organizations. Go to the website orgtl.com and choose Join our newsletter. I’ll leave a link to the website as well as my LinkedIn profile in the show notes. Thanks for listening, and I look forward to hearing what you thought of the show.
Bill Sherman works with thought leaders to launch big ideas within well-known brands. He is the COO of Thought Leadership Leverage. Visit Bill on Twitter
Develop Your Charisma with Compelling Stories
Develop Your Charisma with Compelling Stories
In this video Dr. Renee Jacobs shows how you can develop charisma using your personal stories. The late Apple CEO Steve Jobs, considered one of the most charismatic leaders of the decade, worked hard to develop his brand of charisma. You will learn storytelling strategies to rapidly excite interest, earn trust, be credible, and quickly develop business relationships. Your stories will give you exposure, recognition and validation on many platforms including public speaking, social media, as well as one on one professional and personal conversations.
LEARN HOW TO
- Confidently and quickly build trust - the foundation of business success
- Massively increase your ROI from live and online networking events
- Become THE recognized, validated, credible expert in your field
SPEAKER’S BIO
Dr. Renee Jacobs is Director of Speaker Training for Get Inspired Talks. She has a passion for helping entrepreneurs connect deeply when it counts. If you are communicating with potential clients, partners, or investors, Renee has a proven method for developing your charisma and clarifying your core message. Renee has been a Captain in the United States Air Force, grew and sold an eyecare business, earned a Master’s Degree in education, then pivoted into teaching and business consulting. She learned humour late in life, proving that anyone can be funny. Dr.reneejacobs@getinspiredtalks.com
Karen Eber – How your brain responds to stories and why they are crucial for Leaders?
Karen Eber – How your brain responds to stories and why they are crucial for Leaders?
How do the world’s best leaders and visionaries earn trust? They don’t just present data — they also tell great stories. Leadership consultant Karen Eber demystifies what makes for effective storytelling and explains how anyone can harness it to create empathy and inspire action.
Storytelling Is A ‘Foundational’ Leadership Skill, According To McKinsey
Storytelling Is A ‘Foundational’ Leadership Skill, According To McKinsey
- Carmine Gallo
- Senior Contributor
- Author, The Bezos Blueprint. Communication coach, Harvard instructor
Public speaking with an emphasis on “storytelling” is a foundational skill for CEOs and leaders in the next decade, according to a McKinsey & Company study of 18,000 business professionals across 150 countries.
Leaders who share stories are more likely to align teams, motivate employees and inspire new recruits, customers and stakeholders.
Storytelling is one essential skill that sets apart the best CEOs from the rest, says Carolyn Dewar, a senior partner at McKinsey and co-author of CEO Excellence. I talked to Dewar recently about McKinsey’s research and why CEO storytellers are needed now more than ever.
“Storytelling applies to leaders in any field,” Dewar told me. “It’s core to the leadership role now. A leader’s role is to set the vision and align and mobilize teams to go after it.”
People who are internal to a company want answers to a few questions such as:
What is the vision?
Where are we going?
What does success look like?
What is my individual role?
How do we collectively accomplish the mission?
Dewar says that the best CEOs answer these questions and bring them to life through stories. “Stories are how we humans learn and understand expectations,” she says.
There are different types of stories that successful leaders share. Some stories are personal anecdotes, while others include customer stories and case studies. Dewar also encourages CEOs to leverage the power of a company’s history to guide its future.
In other words, the best CEOs look back to move forward.
“Our research found that the best CEOs often dig back into a company’s history to find out what originally made it successful and then take that central idea and expand it in ways that open up new opportunities, Dewar writes.
For example, Intuit, the maker of QuickBooks and Turbotax, was founded in 1983 by Scott Cook. The company’s founding mission was to “end financial hassles.” But, according to McKinsey researchers, when Brad Smith joined Intuit and took over the CEO’s job in 2008, the company faced daunting challenges that it had not encountered two decades earlier. The world was shifting, threatening to make a desktop software company irrelevant.
“Smith felt the essence of Cook’s vision was still relevant, but how it was expressed and pursued needed to change,” according to CEO Excellence. As a result, Smith kept the spirit of Cook’s founding mission, but updated the language to make it more contemporary and relevant to the age of cloud computing.
Smith led Intuit for eleven years with the new mission: “powering prosperity to meet the needs of an increasingly connected world.” According to McKinsey, under Smith’s leadership, Intuit doubled the number of customers and tripled its earnings.
Smith offered the following advice to new and aspiring CEOs:
“Have a vision that is so clear, a leader doesn’t have to do anything but get out of the way. That’s the most inspiring vision of all.”
CEO storytellers often motivate people to do more than they thought possible, but only when stories are shared constantly and consistently throughout the organization. And in many cases, stories that are shared long after the company’s founders are gone are among the most inspiring.
For example, most of Medtronic’s 100,000 employees around the world have heard the story of the medical device maker’s founder, Earl Bakken, who passed away four years ago. In many ways, it’s a classic American success story.
Bakken fixed medical equipment from the garage of his Minnesota home. He made $8 in his first month. In 1957, an event changed his life. An electrical grid went down and cut power to three states, cutting off the lifeline for patients connected to electrical pacemakers plugged into wall outlets. Bakken spent four weeks in his garage working on a solution. He emerged with the world’s first battery-powered pacemaker.
The event inspired Bakken to build a company “to alleviate pain, restore health, and extend life.” Sixty years later, the mission continues to serve as the company’s guiding principle.
That’s the power of a legacy story. Some of the words of a company’s founding mission can change—like they did at Intuit— but a CEO’s role is to maintain the spirit of innovation the words have always represented.
By sharing stories, the best CEOs can cut through the clutter and create clarity in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world. Storytelling is foundational.
Storytelling That Moves People
Storytelling That Moves People
- by Bronwyn Fryer
Persuasion is the centerpiece of business activity. Customers must be convinced to buy your company’s products or services, employees and colleagues to go along with a new strategic plan or reorganization, investors to buy (or not to sell) your stock, and partners to sign the next deal. But despite the critical importance of persuasion, most executives struggle to communicate, let alone inspire. Too often, they get lost in the accoutrements of companyspeak: PowerPoint slides, dry memos, and hyperbolic missives from the corporate communications department. Even the most carefully researched and considered efforts are routinely greeted with cynicism, lassitude, or outright dismissal.
Why is persuasion so difficult, and what can you do to set people on fire? In search of answers to those questions, HBR senior editor Bronwyn Fryer paid a visit to Robert McKee, the world’s best-known and most respected screenwriting lecturer, at his home in Los Angeles. An award-winning writer and director, McKee moved to California after studying for his Ph.D. in cinema arts at the University of Michigan. He then taught at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema and Television before forming his own company, Two-Arts, to take his lectures on the art of storytelling worldwide to an audience of writers, directors, producers, actors, and entertainment executives.
McKee’s students have written, directed, and produced hundreds of hit films, including Forrest Gump, Erin Brockovich, The Color Purple, Gandhi, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Sleepless in Seattle, Toy Story, and Nixon. They have won 18 Academy Awards, 109 Emmy Awards, 19 Writers Guild Awards, and 16 Directors Guild of America Awards. Emmy Award winner Brian Cox portrays McKee in the 2002 film Adaptation, which follows the life of a screenwriter trying to adapt the book The Orchid Thief. McKee also serves as a project consultant to film and television production companies such as Disney, Pixar, and Paramount as well as major corporations, including Microsoft, which regularly send their entire creative staffs to his lectures.
McKee believes that executives can engage listeners on a whole new level if they toss their PowerPoint slides and learn to tell good stories instead. In his best-selling book Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, published in 1997 by Harper-Collins, McKee argues that stories “fulfill a profound human need to grasp the patterns of living—not merely as an intellectual exercise, but within a very personal, emotional experience.” What follows is an edited and abridged transcript of McKee’s conversation with HBR.
Why should a CEO or a manager pay attention to a screenwriter?
A big part of a CEO’s job is to motivate people to reach certain goals. To do that, he or she must engage their emotions, and the key to their hearts is story. There are two ways to persuade people. The first is by using conventional rhetoric, which is what most executives are trained in. It’s an intellectual process, and in the business world it usually consists of a PowerPoint slide presentation in which you say, “Here is our company’s biggest challenge, and here is what we need to do to prosper.” And you build your case by giving statistics and facts and quotes from authorities. But there are two problems with rhetoric. First, the people you’re talking to have their own set of authorities, statistics, and experiences. While you’re trying to persuade them, they are arguing with you in their heads. Second, if you do succeed in persuading them, you’ve done so only on an intellectual basis. That’s not good enough, because people are not inspired to act by reason alone.
The other way to persuade people—and ultimately a much more powerful way—is by uniting an idea with an emotion. The best way to do that is by telling a compelling story. In a story, you not only weave a lot of information into the telling but you also arouse your listener’s emotions and energy. Persuading with a story is hard. Any intelligent person can sit down and make lists. It takes rationality but little creativity to design an argument using conventional rhetoric. But it demands vivid insight and storytelling skill to present an idea that packs enough emotional power to be memorable. If you can harness imagination and the principles of a well-told story, then you get people rising to their feet amid thunderous applause instead of yawning and ignoring you.
So What is a story?
Essentially, a story expresses how and why life changes. It begins with a situation in which life is relatively in balance: You come to work day after day, week after week, and everything’s fine. You expect it will go on that way. But then there’s an event—in screenwriting, we call it the “inciting incident”—that throws life out of balance. You get a new job, or the boss dies of a heart attack, or a big customer threatens to leave. The story goes on to describe how, in an effort to restore balance, the protagonist’s subjective expectations crash into an uncooperative objective reality. A good storyteller describes what it’s like to deal with these opposing forces, calling on the protagonist to dig deeper, work with scarce resources, make difficult decisions, take action despite risks, and ultimately discover the truth. All great storytellers since the dawn of time—from the ancient Greeks through Shakespeare and up to the present day—have dealt with this fundamental conflict between subjective expectation and cruel reality.
How would an executive learn to tell stories?
Stories have been implanted in you thousands of times since your mother took you on her knee. You’ve read good books, seen movies, attended plays. What’s more, human beings naturally want to work through stories. Cognitive psychologists describe how the human mind, in its attempt to understand and remember, assembles the bits and pieces of experience into a story, beginning with a personal desire, a life objective, and then portraying the struggle against the forces that block that desire. Stories are how we remember; we tend to forget lists and bullet points.
Business people not only have to understand their companies’ past, but then they must project the future. And how do you imagine the future? As a story. You create scenarios in your head of possible future events to try to anticipate the life of your company or your own personal life. So, if a businessperson understands that his or her own mind naturally wants to frame experience in a story, the key to moving an audience is not to resist this impulse but to embrace it by telling a good story.
What makes a good story?
You emphatically do not want to tell a beginning-to-end tale describing how results meet expectations. This is boring and banal. Instead, you want to display the struggle between expectation and reality in all its nastiness.
For example, let’s imagine the story of a biotech start-up we’ll call Chemcorp, whose CEO has to persuade some Wall Street bankers to invest in the company. He could tell them that Chemcorp has discovered a chemical compound that prevents heart attacks and offer up a lot of slides showing them the size of the market, the business plan, the organizational chart, and so on. The bankers would nod politely and stifle yawns while thinking of all the other companies better positioned in Chemcorp’s market.
Alternatively, the CEO could turn his pitch into a story, beginning with someone close to him—say, his father—who died of a heart attack. So nature itself is the first antagonist that the CEO-as-protagonist must overcome. The story might unfold like this: In his grief, he realizes that if there had been some chemical indication of heart disease, his father’s death could have been prevented. His company discovers a protein that’s present in the blood just before heart attacks and develops an easy-to-administer, low-cost test.
But now it faces a new antagonist: the FDA. The approval process is fraught with risks and dangers. The FDA turns down the first application, but new research reveals that the test performs even better than anyone had expected, so the agency approves a second application. Meanwhile, Chemcorp is running out of money, and a key partner drops out and goes off to start his own company. Now Chemcorp is in a fight-to-the-finish patent race.
This accumulation of antagonists creates great suspense. The protagonist has raised the idea in the bankers’ heads that the story might not have a happy ending. By now, he has them on the edges of their seats, and he says, “We won the race, we got the patent, we’re poised to go public and save a quarter-million lives a year.” And the bankers just throw money at him.
“If you can harness imagination and the principles of a well-told story, then you get people rising to their feet amid thunderous applause instead of yawning and ignoring you.”
Aren’t you really talking about exaggeration and manipulation?
No. Although businesspeople are often suspicious of stories for the reasons you suggest, the fact is that statistics are used to tell lies and damn lies, while accounting reports are often BS in a ball gown—witness Enron and WorldCom.
When people ask me to help them turn their presentations into stories, I begin by asking questions. I kind of psychoanalyze their companies, and amazing dramas pour out. But most companies and executives sweep the dirty laundry, the difficulties, the antagonists, and the struggle under the carpet. They prefer to present a rosy—and boring—picture to the world. But as a storyteller, you want to position the problems in the foreground and then show how you’ve overcome them. When you tell the story of your struggles against real antagonists, your audience sees you as an exciting, dynamic person. And I know that the storytelling method works, because after I consulted with a dozen corporations whose principals told exciting stories to Wall Street, they all got their money.
What’s wrong with painting a positive picture?
It doesn’t ring true. You can send out a press release talking about increased sales and a bright future, but your audience knows it’s never that easy. They know you’re not spotless; they know your competitor doesn’t wear a black hat. They know you’ve slanted your statement to make your company look good. Positive, hypothetical pictures and boilerplate press releases actually work against you because they foment distrust among the people you’re trying to convince. I suspect that most CEOs do not believe their own spin doctors—and if they don’t believe the hype, why should the public?
The great irony of existence is that what makes life worth living does not come from the rosy side. We would all rather be lotus-eaters, but life will not allow it. The energy to live comes from the dark side. It comes from everything that makes us suffer. As we struggle against these negative powers, we’re forced to live more deeply, more fully.
So acknowledging this dark side makes you more convincing?
Of course. Because you’re more truthful. One of the principles of good storytelling is the understanding that we all live in dread. Fear is when you don’t know what’s going to happen. Dread is when you know what’s going to happen and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Death is the great dread; we all live in an ever shrinking shadow of time, and between now and then all kinds of bad things could happen.
Most of us repress this dread. We get rid of it by inflicting it on other people through sarcasm, cheating, abuse, indifference—cruelties great and small. We all commit those little evils that relieve the pressure and make us feel better. Then we rationalize our bad behavior and convince ourselves we’re good people. Institutions do the same thing: They deny the existence of the negative while inflicting their dread on other institutions or their employees.
If you’re a realist, you know that this is human nature; in fact, you realize that this behavior is the foundation of all nature. The imperative in nature is to follow the golden rule of survival: Do unto others what they do unto you. In nature, if you offer cooperation and get cooperation back, you get along. But if you offer cooperation and get antagonism back, then you give antagonism in return—in spades.
Ever since human beings sat around the fire in caves, we’ve told stories to help us deal with the dread of life and the struggle to survive. All great stories illuminate the dark side. I’m not talking about so-called “pure” evil, because there is no such thing. We are all evil and good, and these sides do continual battle. Kenneth Lay says wiping out people’s jobs and life savings was unintentional. Hannibal Lecter is witty, charming, and brilliant, and he eats people’s livers. Audiences appreciate the truthfulness of a storyteller who acknowledges the dark side of human beings and deals honestly with antagonistic events. The story engenders a positive but realistic energy in the people who hear it.
Does this mean you have to be a pessimist?
It’s not a question of whether you’re optimistic or pessimistic. It seems to me that the civilized human being is a skeptic—someone who believes nothing at face value. Skepticism is another principle of the storyteller. The skeptic understands the difference between text and subtext and always seeks what’s really going on. The skeptic hunts for the truth beneath the surface of life, knowing that the real thoughts and feelings of institutions or individuals are unconscious and unexpressed. The skeptic is always looking behind the mask. Street kids, for example, with their tattoos, piercings, chains, and leather, wear amazing masks, but the skeptic knows the mask is only a persona. Inside anyone working that hard to look fierce is a marshmallow. Genuinely hard people make no effort.
So, a story that embraces darkness produces a positive energy in listeners?
Absolutely. We follow people in whom we believe. The best leaders I’ve dealt with—producers and directors—have come to terms with dark reality. Instead of communicating via spin doctors, they lead their actors and crews through the antagonism of a world in which the odds of getting the film made, distributed, and sold to millions of moviegoers are a thousand to one. They appreciate that the people who work for them love the work and live for the small triumphs that contribute to the final triumph.
CEOs, likewise, have to sit at the head of the table or in front of the microphone and navigate their companies through the storms of bad economies and tough competition. If you look your audience in the eye, lay out your really scary challenges, and say, “We’ll be lucky as hell if we get through this, but here’s what I think we should do,” they will listen to you.
To get people behind you, you can tell a truthful story. The story of General Electric is wonderful and has nothing to do with Jack Welch’s cult of celebrity. If you have a grand view of life, you can see it on all its complex levels and celebrate it in a story. A great CEO is someone who has come to terms with his or her own mortality and, as a result, has compassion for others. This compassion is expressed in stories.
Take the love of work, for example. Years ago, when I was in graduate school, I worked as an insurance fraud investigator. The claimant in one case was an immigrant who’d suffered a terrible head injury on a carmaker’s assembly line. He’d been the fastest window assembler on the line and took great pride in his work. When I spoke to him, he was waiting to have a titanium plate inserted into his head.
The man had been grievously injured, but the company thought he was a fraud. In spite of that, he remained incredibly dedicated. All he wanted was to get back to work. He knew the value of work, no matter how repetitive. He took pride in it and even in the company that had falsely accused him. How wonderful it would have been for the CEO of that car company to tell the tale of how his managers recognized the falseness of their accusation and then rewarded the employee for his dedication. The company, in turn, would have been rewarded with redoubled effort from all the employees who heard that story.
How do storytellers discover and unearth the stories that want to be told?
The storyteller discovers a story by asking certain key questions. First, what does my protagonist want in order to restore balance in his or her life? Desire is the blood of a story. Desire is not a shopping list but a core need that, if satisfied, would stop the story in its tracks. Next, what is keeping my protagonist from achieving his or her desire? Forces within? Doubt? Fear? Confusion? Personal conflicts with friends, family, lovers? Social conflicts arising in the various institutions in society? Physical conflicts? The forces of Mother Nature? Lethal diseases in the air? Not enough time to get things done? The damned automobile that won’t start? Antagonists come from people, society, time, space, and every object in it, or any combination of these forces at once. Then, how would my protagonist decide to act in order to achieve his or her desire in the face of these antagonistic forces? It’s in the answer to that question that storytellers discover the truth of their characters, because the heart of a human being is revealed in the choices he or she makes under pressure. Finally, the storyteller leans back from the design of events he or she has created and asks, “Do I believe this? Is it neither an exaggeration nor a soft-soaping of the struggle? Is this an honest telling, though heaven may fall?”
Does being a good storyteller make you a good leader?
Not necessarily, but if you understand the principles of storytelling, you probably have a good understanding of yourself and of human nature, and that tilts the odds in your favor. I can teach the formal principles of stories, but not to a person who hasn’t really lived. The art of storytelling takes intelligence, but it also demands a life experience that I’ve noted in gifted film directors: the pain of childhood. Childhood trauma forces you into a kind of mild schizophrenia that makes you see life simultaneously in two ways: First, it’s direct, real-time experience, but at the same moment, your brain records it as material—material out of which you will create business ideas, science, or art. Like a double-edged knife, the creative mind cuts to the truth of self and the humanity of others.
Self-knowledge is the root of all great storytelling. A storyteller creates all characters from the self by asking the question, “If I were this character in these circumstances, what would I do?” The more you understand your own humanity, the more you can appreciate the humanity of others in all their good-versus-evil struggles. I would argue that the great leaders Jim Collins describes are people with enormous self-knowledge. They have self-insight and self-respect balanced by skepticism. Great storytellers—and, I suspect, great leaders—are skeptics who understand their own masks as well as the masks of life, and this understanding makes them humble. They see the humanity in others and deal with them in a compassionate yet realistic way. That duality makes for a wonderful leader.A version of this article appeared in the June 2003 issue of Harvard Business Review.