Lead with a Story: Energizing the Team [ARR]

Following up an Environment for Winning is Energizing the Team which has useful and motivational stories about how to:

• Inspire and Motivate
• Build Courage
• Help Others Find Passion for Their Work
• Appeal to Emotion and
• The Element of Surprise

Let’s focus on the last two chapters as these are two elements that you can incorporate into your own stories.

Appeal to Emotion

Emotion plays a huge role in decision making. Sometimes reason and logic won’t help you influence people nearly as much as an emotional appeal, and nothing delivers emotional appeal better than a story.

Energizing the Team

Not just any emotion will do though. The emotion and the context must be relevant to your audience and to your objective in telling the story in the first place.

What’s in it for your audience? How will this advance your listeners’ goals, their careers, and their interests? If your audience doesn’t naturally care about your idea, figure out what it does care about and associate your idea with it.

A powerful and underutilized emotion in business is empathy. If you want to influence someone’s decision, find out whom that decision will affect and generate empathy through a story. But, empathy requires work. You need a personal knowledge of the subject of your empathy. Another great source for empathy is verbatim consumer research and qualitative research summaries.

The Element of Surprise

Grab your audience’s attention with a surprise at the beginning. What’s unusual or unexpected about your story? Open with it.

Does your story involve a noteworthy event? Lead with it.

Use unexpected candor.

Memories aren’t formed instantly like a photograph. Memory consolidation happens over a period of time after an event. Surprises trigger the release of adrenaline. Therefore, a surprise at the end of the story helps the audience remember it better.

No natural surprise at the end of your story? Create one. Hold back a key piece of information in your story until the very end, like the name of the person or company the story is about.

The next time you have an eye-opening ah-ha moment, write a story about it. These surprises lessons are the most impactful moments in business.