And finally, EMPOWER others. Even if your team is inspired, they can’t actually execute if they aren’t empowered. To effectively empower: ·          Delegate authority and give permission ·          Encourage innovation and creativity ·          Sales is everyone’s job ·          Earn respect on day one and ·          Recast your audience into your story Some final key takeaways…. In business, as in life, sometimes you need to ignore what you’ve been taught and follow your instincts. Permission stories give people the freedom to follow their instincts. They let people know it’s okay to trust their own judgment. EMPOWER others Innovators require time and space to play with ideas. A boss who thinks she’s keeping the staff focused might be squelching the creati...

(To refresh yourself with the previous chapter, click here ) In addition to motivating people, your stories will provide an added bonus if the listener can learn something new and useful in the process. To EDUCATE, the second to last section of Lead with a Story , you must: EDUCATE others Teach important lessons Provide Coaching and Feedback Demonstrate Problem Solving Help Everyone Understand the Customer and use Metaphors and Analogies Some key takeaways from these chapters were: You can’t tell people how to handle every situation that might confront them. “Two roads” stories, or in other words, stories wherein the protagonist had two options and chose one over the other, give your listeners a picture of what success and failure can look like. We generally learn more from our failures than from our successes. Unfortunately, people are generally hesitant to talk about their failures. Don’t be. Share your greatest failures so others can avoid them. They’...

by James Skay, Jr. Global Indirect Marketing Intern, SAP Working on a virtual team boils down to trust. It’s trusting that your team finds you competent and dependable, and that when you’re on a virtual team “working from home,” you really are working from home. It’s no small task to establish trust, but once you do, working for a virtual team is just as good as an in-person gig, if not better. When you join a virtual team, you first need to demonstrate your responsiveness and resourcefulness. They go hand-in-hand when a manager or coworker makes a request and you’re not really sure what they mean, or how to handle it. As opposed to an in-person dynamic, you can’t just pop by their office to clarify, and you really only get two or, at most, three clarifying emails before your team relegates you to the B-squad. Whenever someone makes a request, really think it through and put all of your questions in ONE email. Before you send that email, make sure you’ve checked the network an...

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 ...