In one line: Facts inform, but stories move people. Leaders use stories to carry values, explain where the organization came from and where it is going, and make abstract goals feel personal.
Core idea
Every organization is implicitly asking the questions of an epic: how did we get here, what made us successful, and where do we go next? Leaders who answer them with stories rather than slides make the answers memorable. Stories engage emotion and imagination, survive retelling, and let people place themselves inside the narrative. Many of the program’s guest leaders demonstrated this: their most persuasive moments were stories, not data.
How it works
- Structure: a character with a goal meets an obstacle, struggles, and changes. Business stories follow the same arc: the challenge, what we tried, what we learned, what’s next.
- Authenticity: personal stories, including failures, build trust faster than polished success stories.
- Purpose: know which value or decision the story is meant to illustrate before telling it.
- Brevity and detail: one vivid, specific detail does more than a paragraph of generalities.
- Repetition: a few signature stories, told consistently, become part of the culture.
In practice
A good starting exercise is one paragraph about an event that shaped you. For many engineers it is a moment of early inspiration: seeing a machine, a launch, a documentary or a mentor at work, and thinking “I want to do that.” Origin stories like this explain why you do the work, which is often more persuasive than what you do. In technical settings, a short story about a specific failure, how it was found and what changed, often makes a design rule stick better than the rule itself.
Questions to ask yourself
- What is my own origin story as an engineer, in three sentences?
- Which story would best explain my team’s values to a new hire?
- When I present data, what story does it tell, and have I said that story out loud?
Connections
- Carries: Vision and Mission. Delivery skill: Presenting with Presence.
- Research use: Studying a Leader. Change use: Leading Change (communicating the vision).
- Capabilities exercised: Communicating and Advocacy, Vision, Interpersonal Skills.
Sources
- Schawbel (2012) How to Use Storytelling as a Leadership Tool [1]
- Mackenzie - Storytelling Is at the Heart of Leadership [2]