Storytelling is a Leadership Competency

Identifying and telling stories is a powerful leadership competency and a skill that every effective leader should develop. Stories are memorable in a way that facts alone are not. And they are relatable, engaging more areas of the brain than traditional presentations do. Linked together, according to Carmine Gallo, the author of Talk like Ted, “stories plant ideas and emotions into a listener’s brain… Powerful narratives can persuade customers, employees, investors, and stakeholders that your company, product, or idea can help them achieve the success they desire.”

Let’s look at a specific example. In the past, the nonprofit Save the Children conducted fundraising by presenting worldwide data on how many children suffered from malnutrition across the world, and how funds raised by them would be used to address that. When they shifted their campaign to telling individual stories such as A Day in the Life in Mali with Rokia, donations increased twofold.

Science supports the impact of storytelling

Scientists scanning people’s brains can see which areas of the brain are activated when performing a task, such as listening or talking. Uri Harrison, a psychologist who conducts experiments at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, has conducted studies on the brain which show that personal stories cause the brains of both storyteller and listener to synch together or, as Harrison calls it, demonstrate “brain-to-brain coupling”. When stories are combined with facts or figures, they are twenty-two times more memorable, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss wrote in their Harvard Business Review article “Storytelling that Drives Bold Change”.

What does this mean for leaders? If you want to influence behaviour, think of a story that can trigger brain-to-brain coupling, or an engaging story that will win people over to your perspective or argument. Learn how to identify the stories that you want to tell and how to deliver them.

Different types of stories

What type of story would you like to tell as a leader? It depends upon your audience and overall intention. David Hutchens, writer of Circle of the 9 Muses: A Storytelling Field Guide for Innovators and Meaning Makers, believes there are four core types of stories:

• Identity
  The story of origin of an organisation, individual, or a product or team.
  o   Team example: “Think of a time when you or your team was operating at its best. What happened?”
  o   Leader example: “Who am I and how has my past influenced what I would like to accomplish today?”
• Vision
  A “Where are we going?” story.
  o   Example: “When did someone display an action or characteristic that is now needed across the organisation?”
• Values
  Stories of “how do we do things here”.
  o   Example: “What was a time when someone lived or embodied what is most important to you?”
• Change and learning
  Stories of how change has occurred or learning from mistakes or successes.
  o   Example: “When did you do something that didn’t work … and now you are doing something differently and getting better results?”

Storytelling across the organisation 

Storytelling takes place in organisations everydayevery day. While it is most often found in the communications-intensive parts of an organisation such as marketing, branding, and sales, it can be a powerful tool when used across functions.

 “Intentionally building a storytelling culture across domains and functions can provide value to all parts of the organisation,” Kemp, Gravois, Syrdal and McDougal explain in their article "Storytelling is Not Just for Marketing".

Examples of how storytelling can be integrated through an organisation include:

Department: Executive leadership/C-suite

Responsibilities: Set strategy, create culture, grow the business, provide mentorship

Storytelling applications: 

· Keep the organisation focused on predetermined goals and objectives

· Tell stories to media and investors that resonate with them

Department: Marketing

Responsibilities: Engage various audiences and communicate brand messaging

Storytelling applications:

· Use stories to enhance content across all channels, including video, social media content and email

· Use storytelling to enhance internal and external presentations

· Incorporate data visualisation to bring the organisation’s achievements to life

Department: Human Resources

Responsibilities: Talent acquisition, training and staff retention

Storytelling applications:

· View internal employee communications as an opportunity to mine for stories from within the organisation

· Use employee stories as a recruitment tool

· Tell stories during new employee inductions to set the tone of the organisation and promote buy-in

Department: Accounting and Finance

Responsibilities: Communicate through financial reporting

Storytelling applications:

· Use data storytelling to convey information

· Interpret financial information into data to show performance outcomes, including how the organisation is doing and where it is going

Department: Sales

Responsibilities: Engage potential customers and clients

Storytelling applications:

· Share customer stories to promote action in the form of purchases

· Use stories to get customer attention and drive purchases

Department: Research and Development

Responsibilities: Innovate and introduce new products and services

Storytelling applications:

· Tell a story to encourage innovation

· Rally teams to advance progress in the organisation

All departments

Responsibilities: Social media, presentations and conversations

Storytelling applications:

· Use storytelling techniques to create presentations that resonate with audiences

· Encourage conversations that showcase positive stories

· Encourage active listening skills to look for stories in all interactions

(Source: Adapted from Kemp, Gravois, Syrdal and McDougal’s "Storytelling is Not Just for Marketing")

Think about how to deliver your story

Structure – as we tell our first-year MBA students – is an important piece of any communication. Think about the structure to your story. Steve Jobs in his famous Stanford commencement address, viewable on YouTube and TED, structures his speech into three different personal stories – a structure that is easy to follow and relatable.

For other leadership stories, Hutchins writes about the structure of the STAR model:

• Situation (what was the context and when)
• Trouble (what went wrong)
• Action (mitigating actions and work done) and
• Result (impact and learnings from the situation)

A longer, five-act structure of a story can include:

• Setup (context)
• Rising action (what contributed to the context)
• Climax (what happened)
• Falling action (what was demonstrated) and
• Wrap up (learnings overall).

Stories should not live in isolation

An article in MIT’s Sloan Management Review by Douglas Ready, “How Storytelling Builds Next-Generation Leaders”, highlights how stories should be used to stimulate dialogue, reflection, and action. As mentioned already, powerful organisational storytelling should be linked to company culture and values, or an aspired intention. Storytelling is not in itself a means to an end – it should be a catalyst for discussion, facilitating insights, dialogue, and further conversations. For complex challenges storytelling could be combined with other methodologies to help drive systemic change.

Small ideas you can think about

What is a small step you could take to bring more storytelling into your leadership work? Think about a story that you can include in your next presentation or communication. It can be a personal story, a story about a client or customer, or perhaps related to your organisation’s brand. How can you bring in some real emotion that will land with your overall message and audience? What is a short, authentic story that might resonate with your audience?

Another powerful enabler to storytelling is listening: how well others listen to you and to what you want to say. If that situation is flipped, perhaps consider how well are you listening to others’ stories? Or do an environmental scan: what are the stories that are being told in your team or organisation generally? Is that creating the environment or culture that you want to achieve? If not, what else might you need to be paying attention to?

Closer to home: Absa’s Your Story Matters and We See Your Story campaigns

Stories can act “as a clear aid to memory, as a means of making sense of the world, as a way to make and strengthen emotional connections, and as a way of recognising and identifying with brands of any type,” Herskovitz and Crystal wrote in their 2010 article “The Essential Brand Persona: Storytelling and Branding”.

There is a rich culture of storytelling in South Africa and on this continent. Sydney Mbhele, group chief marketing and corporate affairs officer for Absa Group, led an intensive organisation-wide change programme to define the new Absa brand strategy, from which the new tagline “Your Story Matters” emerged for the bank’s 2024 campaign.

David Blyth, founder and CEO of Delta Victor Bravo, a boutique consultancy that helps empower brands through marketing effectiveness, highlights that “the intention was to address head-on the category issue that banks are typically out of touch with customer needs, seeing them in terms of their risk, rather than the potential in their individual stories.”

Mbhele explains that “with the new positioning we wanted to honour real customer stories and through that highlight the potential role and value of Absa as a bank with empathy at its heart, while delivering intuitive, seamless and integrated experiences in support of that ethos”.

Absa’s newly launched “We See Your Story” campaign, launched in May, celebrates South Africans as they are. Building on the foundations of Your Story Matters, this next iteration of the campaign shifts from recognition to action, and sees every story not just as something to acknowledge, but as a powerful opportunity for progress, empowerment, and meaningful investment.

The refreshed campaign puts the real journeys of South Africans at the centre of how the bank connects, serves, partners, and grows alongside its customers.

Mbhele explains: “Building on the momentum of Your Story Matters, this campaign reflects our belief that every customer journey is more than a series of transactions — it’s a story of resilience, ambition, and potential.”

Amy Moore is an adjunct faculty member at GIBS. She spends her time at the school working as an individual and team coach, lecturing on writing and storytelling, and writing teaching cases. Her work has featured in Forbes, Forte, and the Financial Times, and placed in ten international case writing competitions. She’s passionate about storytelling as a leadership competency and how stories can be used to create culture.

Reach Amy Moore on amy@linkthedots.co.za or via LinkedIn.