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How do you focus on strategies for effective, inclusive leadership during times of crisis? By choice. And the Black Lives Matter movement, gender gap, and under-representation of people of colour and women in leadership positions is part of the crisis. Many leaders realize diversity and inclusion must be fostered and in fact will help deal with the societal inequity, the pandemic and this new normal.

Inclusive Leadership – What is it?

Inclusive leadership is a leadership that focuses on inclusion, diversity and having the “differences” present and participating in the situation. It ensures all people are represented and treated respectfully and all people feel valued and belonging. Leadership that is inclusive of all disparities or dissimilarities is what is needed. These differences can span national origin, industry background, gender, race, sexuality, age, education, neuro-diversity, introversion/extroversion and thinking preferences.

What could you do to be that leader that brings those less-heard voices and underrepresented people to the forefront?

Benefits of Inclusive Leadership

Diversity is important for many reasons. Beyond just the fairness and justice of equality for all, the bottom-line benefit for organizations is financial. Numerous studies from the Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey to the World Economic Forum document that diversity leads to innovation and greater financial performance, often double-digit improvements in fact.

Every organization has innovation in its mission or vision or as a key strategy. Now most organizations need innovative ideas to deal with the unprecedented situation in which we all find ourselves. Diversity prompts innovation because different perspectives are present and hence we think differently. We question our assumptions. Challenging our assumptions opens ideas and solutions to potential thinking that wasn’t apparent from one’s insular perspective.

Strategies for Inclusion Leadership

The key to productive diversity is for it to be well-managed. Diversity that is poorly managed does not have the same positive returns. Here are some strategies for better inclusive leadership:

1. 1. Commit to being inclusive and be vocal about it. Make it a priority. If looking to hire someone new ask to see diverse candidates. Ask HR or your recruiters why diverse candidates aren’t being put forward if that’s the case. Require your leadership team or other leaders to mentor and promote underrepresented employees. Call out racism and sexism when you hear it and when you might say it. Be courageous in noticing it and naming it.
   2. Create psychological safety for people to participate. Psychological safety is present when someone is not afraid of a negative consequence (to their image or career) for who they are. Create safety by being engaged with your people, ask them questions and listen to the answer; have their backs especially when they take a risk; give them credit and appropriate visibility; condemn gossip and talking behind peoples’ backs; eradicate blame; give and ask for feedback; be self-aware and require others to be the same; build trust through being impeccable with your word; include others in decision making; explain why things are happening the way they are or why they are not happening; communicate openly, honestly and frequently.
   3. Be aware of your biases and blind spots and those of the organization. Look at your track record of hiring and promoting people. With whom have you historically surrounded yourself? Are they people just like you? How inclusive is the organization? Get the numbers on genders, POC, less-able-bodied, education institutions etc at all levels in the organization. What are the types of people the organization has fired or managed out? The numbers don’t lie. Ask people who are different from you about your biases and blind spots. Make it safe for them to tell you. Reflect for yourself on your thoughts when a woman asks for time off for a sick child versus a man (or do men ever ask?) or when you see a CV with the name Mohammed versus Michael versus Michelle.
   4. Invite all voices into the discussion. This is both a micro and macro strategy. On a micro level when you have a meeting ensure every person speaks. Encourage those who are reluctant. At this time of uncertainty, it’s good to periodically check in with everyone at the beginning of the meeting to get people talking and sharing to create a sense of all being in it together and to highlight how this situation is different for different people. On a macro level, bring different voices than usual into projects or discussions in order to challenge assumptions and provide different perspectives.
   5. Ensure equal access with remote working. Confirm all employees have tech and infrastructure to work at home if that’s continuing. Use closed captioning on virtual meetings and reiterate points in the chat box for those hard of hearing, or those that might need to be listening for a baby or child at that time, send info in advance of meetings so introverts and neuro-diverse individuals can process the information to prepare and therefore fully contribute.
   6. Be compassionate. Recognize and acknowledge that everyone handles things differently whether that’s with the pandemic, home life or work challenges. People are affected by things differently especially with all this uncertainty.
   7. Be humble. You don’t have all the answers, you might make mistakes, others might have better ideas and solutions. Your role as a leader is to unleash the potential in others to move towards the desired goal or outcome. Let others unleash their potential, don’t be precious about from where the next great idea or advancement comes.
   8. Be curious. Be curious with others to understand their differences, their differing opinions and ideas relative to the work. Don’t just stop at the superficial, delve deeper asking “what is it about that that is important?” Or “Tell me more” or “Help me understand what’s behind that”. Like a new puppy let loose in a playground, leave no stone unturned.
   9. Be vulnerable. Especially in an on-going crisis, acknowledge your challenges and vulnerabilities (those that are acceptable within your job; an accountant can’t say they are bad with numbers). Share the challenges of juggling work and home. This allows others to be vulnerable too and creates safety.

Consciously have diversity of people as a focus within your organization and strive to manage them well (if not exceptionally) to leverage each of them for the solid contribution they can make to each other, the organization and the goals.

What inclusion leadership improvements would you and your organization benefit from?

Book a complimentary coaching session with me here to assess your leadership and address what might be impeding greater success.

 

Endnotes:

¹ https://blog.capterra.com/7-studies-that-prove-the-value-of-diversity-in-the-workplace/ and https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/04/business-case-for-diversity-in-the-workplace/ and https://www.irelaunch.com/blog-diversity-in-the-workplace-benefits

 

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Now more than ever leaders and managers are having to lead across different generational groups. COVID-19 is showing two different trends among Baby Boomers: some being forced to retire due to organizational constraints and others staying in the workforce due to the poor economy and not able to financially retire. This means that many organizations have 4 generations of workers; a real breadth of ages, attitudes and experiences for leaders to manage and draw on.

Leading Across Generations

One of the best leadership styles for leading across generations is servant leadership. That means putting the needs of other people first over yourself; serving others in the pursuit of goals rather than using power to achieve.

Leading Across Borders and Generations – The How-To of Servant Leadership

Interestingly, the aspects of servant leadership that can help you lead better across generations can also help you lead better across borders such as, in multi-cultural organizations.

1. 1. Be self-aware about your beliefs, the stereotypes or biases you hold about the various generations. We all have some form of preconceptions towards others so reflect on what you might believe about Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials or Gen Z. Encourage your employees to be self-aware as well.
   2. Understand people as individuals rather than making assumptions about them or buying into generalizations based on age or generation. Everyone is unique. In your team, what are each person’s values, motivations, needs and working styles?
   3. Notice your impact on others and be intentional about what impact you want to make. Consider each individual and situation, what behaviour on your part would best serve this moment? This also means leading by example. As Gandhi said, “be the change you want to see in the world”.
   4. Listen. Everyone wants to feel valued and respected regardless of which generation they fall into. The biggest way to have your team feel valued is to really listen to what they say, and don’t say. Listen for the words and the emotion. Say phrases such as “what I think I heard you say is….” which shows you are trying to understand them and their ideas.
   5. Embrace differences and leverage them for the best outcome. Research shows that well-managed diversity improves organizational performance. Diversity makes us think better as an organization; we question our assumptions thereby coming to more innovate and well-rounded solutions. People of different ages, backgrounds, education, races, genders, and generations bring diversity by definition. Value those differences by creating space for everyone to contribute.
   6. Create an environment that allows people to perform at their best. What does each individual need to be their best selves? What are the strengths of each team member and how do you foster there use more? The first step in this is asking people what brings out their best and what are their strengths. The key is for both you and them to consciously know. Too often organizations focus on weaknesses, gaps or development areas rather than having people use more of their strengths more often. Share among the team who is great at what.
   7. Be courageous and vulnerable. You won’t get it right all the time when managing individuals. Sometimes you’ll have a bad day, sometimes others will have a bad day. Be courageous to continue trying new behaviours and saying new things. It takes vulnerability to try new things and risk making a mistake or looking foolish.
   8. Give constructive feedback consistently and ask for feedback about yourself. Constructive feedback is positive feedback (what they do well that you’d like them to continue doing) and developmental (what you’d like them to do differently for improved effectiveness). Research shows that high performing organizations give 4-6 pieces of positive feedback for every 1 piece of developmental. Leaders give constant feedback throughout the organization and they accept feedback, solicit it in fact about themselves.
   9. Create trust or psychological safety amongst members in the team. Many of the previous behaviours such as listening, self-awareness and understanding others will help build this safety and trust. Additionally, have your employees’ backs, if they fail or make a mistake, support them and strive for learning. Give them opportunities to shine. Banish blame. Promote positivity, openly squelch negativity. Involve the team in the bigger picture and in key decisions so they are engaged.
   10. Coach team members rather than problem solving for them. Coaching helps people figure out their own solutions to issues. The leader needs to listen, ask questions, suspend making assumptions, refrain from giving them ‘what you think the answer is.’ It might take more time initially which will pay off in the long-run as it breeds inner resourcefulness in staff.

Leading Across Generations Training

You can probably find some training for leading across generations and my belief is that most of the elements that make leaders successful at managing across generations are the same elements that make leaders successful in managing people, as individuals are unique. Practice the 10 behaviours and approaches above to improve your effectiveness with any team. Encourage the team members to talk to each other, share ideas, leverage their unique strengths and value the differences rather than disparage the differences.

If you are lucky enough to have multiple generations working in your organization, leverage each of them for the solid contribution they can make to each other, the organization and its goals.

What cross-generational leadership improvements would you and your organization benefit from?

Book a complimentary coaching session with me here to assess your leadership and address what might be impeding greater success.

 

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

No leader likes admitting they make mistakes, let alone making the mistake – and this is often the best way to learn. By reflecting on what we’ve done, and what made it be a mistake, is the best way to determine what to do differently next time to have a more positive effect.

Biggest Leadership Mistake

The biggest leadership mistake I see the most across my executive and middle management coaching clients is FAILURE TO GIVE FEEDBACK. There is a reluctance to give both positive and ‘negative’ feedback. Yes, leaders don’t even tell their people what they do well.

The reasons leaders fail to provide feedback are numerous: don’t know how; takes too much time; it’s obvious workers should know already; to side-step perceived confrontation; to circumvent demotivating the employee; don’t notice the good things; raises employee’s expectations for a raise or promotion; to avoid the employee being hurt or feeling bad; many of which stem from the leader’s fear (of doing it wrong, making a mistake, someone crying, anger, looking foolish).

Solution:

1. Learn a model for giving feedback such as the COIN model by Anna Carroll here. This easy 4-step structure can be used for giving both positive and ‘negative’ feedback (of note, positive and developmental feedback should both be constructive). Practice with the positive first, practice at home or when out and about (eg. with wait staff). For more tips check this article out

2. Have a visual reminder to look for what employees do well. Research says financially successful companies give positive feedback 5–6 times for every 1 piece of negative feedback given¹. Few leaders do it this frequently. A reminder might be having a post-it note on your wall to remind you to find the positives.

3. Deal with your own fears. Maybe you can’t be with compliments like one of my clients. Do the self-reflection work to learn how to be with your good qualities so you can help others be with theirs. Maybe you’re afraid of the employee crying or yelling. Do the self-reflection work to be comfortable with emotions. And, if you use a model and practice it often, the chance of any outburst is low. People are usually grateful you value them enough to take the time.

Common Leadership Mistake My Clients Commit

The next mistake I see clients commit is NOT BEING CLEAR ABOUT GOALS AND EXPECTATIONS. Leaders give context, leaders define a vision and what success looks like.
The reasons leaders are unclear are: they assume everyone knows the context and what success looks like; they feel it’s obvious what a ‘good job’ is; they don’t want to demotivate people by micro-managing; they don’t believe they have time; employees should know. Leaders think employees should know what good is except leaders often can’t define it to me when I ask. They don’t spend time thinking about what success for the goal or task is and therefore wouldn’t know what to tell employees if they were asked.

Solution:

1. Before assigning a task or giving an employee a goal, be clear what ‘good’ or successful completion means. Think beyond deadline and budget. Think about what the employee should be doing in terms of behaviour, what are the parameter s of the project, what’s important about this work relative to the company’s purpose. Share those thoughts with the employee.

2. Take responsibility for the employee understanding the message, not expecting the employee to ask for clarity. Ask “what request have you heard from me?”. “what’s your understanding of the successful conclusion of this work?” “what more can I share to make you confident in fulfilling the expectation I’ve outlined?”

3. Notice your assumptions when defining goals and setting expectations. Put yourself in your employee’s shoes at that moment you are talking to them: they are not in your head nor have they just come from the meeting you attended nor read the email to which you are referring. Don’t assume anything, they probably have their head in a totally different project than the thing on your mind.

A Leadership Mistake to Avoid

In the hundreds of 360° reports I’ve reviewed with managers the majority of direct reports say that their managers do NOT DELEGATE ENOUGH. Yes, the very people that would end up doing the work are asking for it.
Leaders don’t delegate because they think no one will do it as well as them; worried they will overload their staff; they think it’s faster to do it themselves; others won’t do it their way/the right way; worried they’ll lose control or power and nervous they’ll be outdone by your team.

Solution:

1. Identify what’s stopping you from delegating. Be honest with yourself. Once you know what prevents you from delegating, change your mindset to start delegating. See my article on creating a new behaviour here.

2. Ensure you have the right people in the right positions with the right skills. Make sure you delegate the specific jobs to the appropriate team member – someone with the skills and motivation. When you do their development plans include projects and work that you can delegate to them to grow their abilities. Detail what updates you want on the progress of the work and when you’d want those updates.

3. Tell your team to hold you accountable to delegating the work they should be doing. This includes you not being copied on emails they should be handling for the delegated work. It’s about you letting go and them being empowered.

Client Admitting His Mistake in Leadership

Clients I coach want feedback from their manager and staff to know where to focus. Very often the client already knows their development area. Two recent clients admitted their mistake of NOT MAKING TIME FOR YOUR TEAM. That means making time to do some of the other mistakes listed above (give feedback, set clear expectations, delegate) and also to develop their teams, have conversations about professional growth and career.

The main reason this doesn’t happen is time; prioritizing other things, usually the work which is short term. If you don’t invest in your people they will stagnate, burn out or go elsewhere.

Solution:

1.Make time to think about each individual. What are their needs and aspirations? Pull out last year’s performance review if you don’t know where to start. Where do you think their talents could take them in the organization?

2. Book time to meet with your people beyond just performance reviews. Plan that time in your schedule before all the other stuff takes up your time. You need to be planning your big priorities ahead other peoples’ priorities for you. If you haven’t done this before then the first conversation is listening to their needs and aspirations to check if your thinking was accurate. Get curious about differences, their beliefs about themselves, what they want.

3. Identify work and profile opportunities that would help them grow into their potential. This could be work you do or meetings you attend (see delegation above). Again, meet with them to discuss, listen for their emotional reaction as well as their thoughts – excitement and nervousness can be too sides of the same coin.

Last Common Leadership and Management Mistake

BEING TOO FRIENDLY. A recent client, Sally, recognized herself in the leadership discussion about needing a balance between being close and being distance with colleagues. Everyone wants an approachable boss, you want people to trust you so they share concerns and issues with you and you have to have some distance from your team when the tough decisions need to be made.
Reasons leaders are too friendly is that as humans we want to be liked; means they are relatable; leaders assume that being liked and friendly will motivate people to do what’s needed. Wouldn’t you rather be respected?

Solution:
1. Notice if you are better at being close to people or if you are better at being distant with people you lead. If you are too close, practice pulling away, verbally not sharing as much about yourself, asking about others, not hanging around informally too much with your team. If you’re too distant, think of a couple of stories about yourself that make you interesting and relatable, share those. Being close isn’t about disclosing inappropriately.

2. Leadership is contextual, so you need to assess each situation to determine the appropriate level of interaction and disclosure with others. For example, if an individual is often not meeting expectations, prepare a simple message about that and what you expect to be different after the conversation. Keep the discussion work-related, factual, be clear with your message.

3. Think of leaders you respect. They can be people you know, people in the public eye, fictional leaders. What has them be respected? What could you learn from how they lead? Think of the best boss you had and the worst. What can you learn from the best and avoid of the worst? Practice some of these ideas you’ve identified.

Most of the mistakes are about what leaders don’t do so one broad rule of thumb to avoid making mistakes might be to try things, to act, to pro-actively do something different in a given situation. As Mark Twain said, “…you’ll be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did.”

What leadership mistakes might you want to learn from?

Book a complimentary coaching session with me here to assess your leadership and address what might be impeding greater success.

Endnotes:
¹https://hbr.org/2013/03/the-ideal-praise-to-criticism

Telling is a useful skill to have as a leader, telling people what to do and how to do it. You have years of experience, you’ve seen lots of issues and been in numerous complex situations. You have lots to share. There are many people in your organization who want your contribution to assist them with their responsibilities.

And sometimes telling is detrimental. It creates dependency, it’s slower in the long run if you always must tell, as you don’t enable someone to think for themselves, and it limits diversity of ideas as it’s always your thoughts you are perpetuating.

Coaching on the other hand builds independent and diverse thinking. It is a skill, a set of tools and a mindset. What I’m presenting here is coaching as a skill and set of tools. This will not make you a certified coach; this will assist you in using coaching skills as an option in your toolbox of leadership skills.

Benefits of Coaching

• People learn to think their way through a situation, enabling them, making them less reliant on you.
• People bring their ideas and thoughts to the situation which might result in new, unique solutions and more creativity and diversity of thinking.
• It’s less work for you in the long run as you train them to figure it out (make them more independent and empower them when it is done well).
• You don’t have to know everything all the time (which might be a blow to your ego).
• People feel valued and heard and often are more engaged as they are genuinely asked to explore their ideas.
• You develop leaders, grow greater talent, thereby growing the organization’s capability (and it just might be more fulfilling for you).

How to Coach an Employee

Coaching is the creation of a reflective space for the employee to figure out their own solutions and ideas in relation to a topic. This is done by the coach (or leader in your case) listening in a deep and non-judgemental way and asking open (sometimes powerful) questions that help the employee discover ideas and possibilities in themselves.

Coaching can be 10 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour or longer – depending on the situation, topic, what they want out of it and the time you have.

• Listening is the starting point for great communication including coaching. Through my coach training with Co-Active Training Institute (CTI), I learned there were three levels to listening¹.

Level 1 – Internal Listening/ Focused on self: Your focus is on yourself, your thoughts, feelings, issues. When someone mentions a topic you immediately go to your thoughts, feelings and opinions on that topic. It’s about your internal narrative or conversation.

Level 2 – Focused Listening on the other: Your focus is on what the other person is saying in a laser-like fashion, as though you’re under the ‘cone of silence’ in the old Get Smart TV program. When someone mentions a topic, you want to know that person’s thoughts, feelings and opinions about the topic. You have little awareness of the outside world.

Level 3 – Focused on the whole or Global Listening: Your focus is on everything, the space, what’s going on inside you and with the other person, what’s going on energetically. This is where intuition or gut-feel might come in; the action, inaction and interaction.

• Questioning is the second important factor to good coaching; it’s about being curious, so the employee gets curious. Formulate your questions based on what the employee says; use their actual words to formulate questions that help them delve deeper to greater understanding. Use open questions (which can’t be answered with ‘yes’ and ‘no’). Keep the questions short (as this focuses the thinking and doesn’t confuse things). Ask “so what?” after almost any question to get the employee to keep thinking or go deeper.
• The GROW model is a widespread coaching framework (Goal, Reality, Options, Way Forward), first published by John Whitmore in his book Coaching for Performance in 1992. When clients have practised this they are struck by how often they just want to tell the person the/their answer; how they have so many ideas going through their own head they find it hard paying attention to what the other person is saying; how often they ask closed and leading questions; and how they want to speed up the process, even if the person is not ready. Some have been amazed at how often the coachee generated tremendous value from the exercise even if the coach had no idea what was being talked about!

Coaching for Employees – Use the GROW Coaching Model

When an employee approaches you asking what they should do about something they are working on rather than you telling them, try this approach. The following are the 4 steps in GROW, the explanation of each step and examples of actual questions you can ask to your employee in each step.

GOAL – What’s the goal?

This is to help define what, in fact, the problem or issue is. What’s the objective? What are you trying to achieve or accomplish? This can take a few minutes or quite a while, depending on what clarity the employee already has.

• What is it you would like to discuss?
• What would you like to achieve?
• What do you want to get from this discussion?
• What would you need to happen for you to walk away feeling that this time was well spent?
• What do you want to be different? What outcome do you want?
• What would you like to happen that is not happening now?
• Can we do that in the time we have available?
• Will that be of real value to you?

REALITY – What’s the current reality or situation?

It’s valuable to explore this area so the employee is very clear what is going on. This could highlight assumptions they have and gaps in knowledge – about the situation or themselves!

• What is happening at the moment?
• How do you know that this is accurate?
• When does this happen?
• How often does this happen?
• What effect does this have?
• How can you verify that this is so?
• What have you or others done previously about this?
• What other factors are relevant?
• Who else is involved?
• What is their perception of the situation?
• What have you tried so far? What did you learn?

OPTIONS – What are the possible options?

This is where you want them to brainstorm about alternatives. Continue having them generate ideas until they’ve reasonably exhausted the options.

• What could you do to change the situation?
• What alternatives are there to that approach?
• Tell me what possibilities for action you see.
• What approach/actions have been used in similar circumstances?
• Who might be able to help?
• What are the benefits of that option? What might the problems be?
• Which options are of interest to you?
• Would you like suggestions from me?
• Would you like to choose an option to act on?

WILL DO OR WAY FORWARD – What’s going to happen? What will you do? What’s your way forward?

This is the time to have the employee define next steps and create accountability. What will they do? When? How will they ensure success?

• What are the next steps?
• When will you take them?
• What might get in the way?
• Do you need to log the steps in your diary?
• What support do you need?
• How will you enlist that support?
• How will you know you are making progress?
• What else needs to be done?

How to Coach Employees – The Don’ts

• Don’t necessarily try to complete all four steps at one time.
• Don’t just focus on O and W, spend time in G and R, as so often people skim over these and later find out they were solving the wrong problem!
• Don’t work so hard. Let the employee do the work. For example, using their actual words in your questions, pausing and being in silence so they can figure it out.
• Don’t use closed questions. Use open questions that ideally start with WHAT, at least initially (WHY makes people defend what they just said, HOW focuses on doing and you might be jumping to a solution before clarifying the true problem).
• Don’t use assumptive questions – a question that comes from an assumption you’re making. For example: “What makes you uncomfortable about this?” Only ask this if they’ve told you they are uncomfortable, not if you’ve assumed they are. Ask them: “What are you feeling about this?”
• Don’t ask leading questions – where you include possible ideas or solutions to lead the person in a certain direction. For example: “What are your plans to cut costs, reduce headcount, cancel a shift, or limit travel?” Notice you’re leading them down a path, probably the typical path you would be pursuing.
• Don’t answer when someone says, “I don’t know.” This is an easy way out for an employee especially if you’ve always just given the answer in the past. Either be silent to let them think or ask something like “if you did know, what would you say/do?” or “if some part of you knew, what would it say?” or “what would an expert on this say?” This line of questioning helps people find their resourcefulness within.

Coaching Employees – Top Tips:

• Use a compassionate and curious tone of voice rather than making it an interrogation.
• Acknowledge them through the process, noting what they do well and how they are being during the journey (e.g. “You’re open. You’re reflective. You’re creative. You’re courageous for trying something new and unknown”).
• Encourage the employee at the end of the process with their identified actions, e.g. “Those are some good actions you’ve identified. Go for it. You’ll be great at that” (be more specific, related to the actual action).
• Champion them, stand up for their potential and value, especially when they aren’t feeling it, by saying what you see when they are at their best.
• Silence is good, it means someone is thinking and isn’t that what you pay people for?
• Practise, even if it’s just asking one question, before you jump in with the solution.

What aspects of your leadership would benefit with a coaching style of leadership?

Book a complimentary coaching session with me here to assess your coaching leadership style and to experience the benefits of being coached first-hand.

Endnotes:
¹ Witworth, Laura and Karen Kinsey-House, Henry Kinsey-House, Phillip Sandahl. Co-Active Coaching. Davies-Black Publishing. P34-40, 2007

A good story can positively influence your audience – whether they are employees, stakeholders, customers or consumers. Stories have the power to impact people more than what charts, graphs or data can do. Stories can appeal to our heads, our hearts, and create connections and communicate origins, purpose and values.

My focus here is on how to use storytelling in business to influence, motivate and inspire your teams. In fact, this is often one of the biggest challenges facing senior leaders I coach.

Why Storytelling is Important

People are emotional creatures, and stories are a great way of connecting with people since good storytelling is so emotive. That’s what makes the great books and movies they tell such engaging and emotive stories. Have you ever had feedback that you need to be more motivating or inspiring? If so, storytelling could be the answer. Here are some positives to adding storytelling to your business technique repertoire:

• You appeal to the emotions of your employees, stakeholders or customers.
• You share part of yourself with others, to connect personally.
• You make your point in an entertaining or descriptive way.
• You can merge data, facts, fun, story and purpose together.
• You can simplify complex ideas and concepts, which is especially helpful for change and innovation.
• You show flexibility in communication style, thereby being more relatable to different types of people.

Storytelling in Business

The way to start storytelling is to have a small inventory of 3–5 in your mind to use when the situation warrants. For example, when a colleague says to you that they are struggling to give needed feedback to one of their team, tell them the story (which you’ve already prepared) of when you had a similar situation and what you learned (in addition to showing them the feedback chapter in this book). Or if one of your employees made a visible (but not a gross) mistake, share your story of when your mistake was a growth opportunity and how it improved your performance dramatically. Sharing your story is a way of motivating and inspiring people in difficult situations to excel.

Storytelling Techniques

Want to hear the secret of storytelling? It’s about thinking of your stories before you need to share them. That’s right; plan them in advance. The process is the same for your professional or personal stories, depending on your audience. It’s not as complicated as the following nine steps imply. I’ve just broken it down in detail to walk you through the process step-by-step.

1. Peak moments – Think about your professional journey, what have been the highlights, low points, key lessons learned and crossroads along the way. Think about what matters to you as a leader and where that purpose or motivation came from. If you’re struggling, think of some things you’d like a graduate to know about leadership and remember where you learned that lesson in your own career.
2. Your situation – From the specific events and moments identified above, think about your situation – your thoughts, feelings, motivations and relationships with those involved in each of those peak moments.
3. Lessons – Identify the lessons you learned from each of those peak moments. In other words, what is the moral of each of your peak moments? This will become the ‘so what’ of your story and be useful in identifying which story to share and when to share it.
4. Choose – Which topics, values or morals are the most applicable to your current leadership situation? Which might be helpful to the challenges your team members are facing now?
5. Create – Take the topic or moral from above and create the story, including the situation, the learning moment, the feelings and the ‘so what’ or moral.
6. Elaborate – Put in more emotion (you probably have skimped on feelings as so many people do), share the angst and the light bulb feeling, include specific details to add flavour and paint a picture, and lastly, reveal how that transformed you from that moment on.
7. Refine – Delete some of the factual filler or extra words. The length of your story should be about 3 to 5 minutes. You could have a slightly longer version depending on the application.
8. Practise – by yourself. First, read it over and feel the story. Then read it out loud to hear yourself say it (you don’t want the first time you hear it to be when another hears it). Read it in front of a mirror, occasionally looking at your face in the mirror. This increases your comfort level further. Hone the message and wording, if necessary.
9. Deliver – This isn’t about memorizing a story, it’s about knowing the structure and flow of what you want to convey. Try it out with a low-risk person and use your newfound awareness sensing skills to judge the impact. Or you could ask for feedback! Also, watch how others tell stories – what works and what doesn’t for them.

The Power of Storytelling

Authentic, impactful storytelling comes from your heart. It’s your expression of your experiences. It shows your foibles, your passion and your self-reflection. Where people so often go wrong is that they try and make up an inspiring story; which can end up being more fabrication than authenticity. They also strip out the emotions and context to communicate the facts, transforming a story into a patronizing one-line instruction such as, “I once missed a crucial deadline too and learned from it so now I ensure key stakeholders are engaged well beforehand.” Or as another client’s profound experience of having a suicide in their team would have been, “I once almost experienced burnout and learned to pace myself and not neglect looking after myself.” They could have read that in a book for the amount of personal inspiration it conveys.

Feel it – tell the story, ensuring you remember and feel the emotions of the time you are talking about. Feel the tiredness and relentless pressure you felt when approaching burnout (if we’re referencing Anthony’s story) and then the relief and self-compassion of coming out the other side.

Pace – change the pace during your story, use pauses, make eye contact, breathe. These things create variety for the listener, allow the emotion to come through and keep you present in the story rather than ‘just recounting the story’ as if memorized.

Tone of voice – what’s your usual tone of voice? What adjectives would you use to describe how you communicate – Funny? Colloquial? Polite? Chatty? Authoritative? Energizing? Expert? Reflective? Factual? I describe my tone of voice as direct and succinct. And I change it up sometimes depending on the audience.

Elements of Storytelling that can be the Cherry on Top

Front-line staff, those people in touch with customers or consumers, have great stories just from doing their jobs. Leaders can tap into those stories to influence other senior leaders and stakeholders.

Have a strong end to our story. We’ve all experienced movies and books with lacklustre endings that just fizzle out. Underline the hope or improvement the listener will experience, what’s the deeper take away for them to embrace?

Storytelling is an art, it’s not a technique or process although I’ve tried to break it down somewhat for you. Who in your organization does it well with whom you can partner? What stories have you seen told by other leaders or presenters outside your organization? Have a look at what they do for ideas and inspiration. Marketing departments and advertising agencies can often be good options for learning.

Telling stories can happen in various forms – verbally, audio, written or digitally.

Imagine the next time you want to influence or inspire, step into your audience’s shoes and share some of yourself with a story that plants the seed for them to consider what you’re suggesting. Stories are powerful ways of motivating and influencing people, especially those in your team with whom you have a relationship already.

Where could you benefit from developing your storytelling ability to motivate and inspire?

Book a complimentary coaching session with me here to explore how you can better influence and motivate your team.

Assessing your personal strengths especially and your weaknesses is key to improving your effectiveness and hence results. Improving your results starts with you because YOU are the only person YOU can change. I’m sure you’ve tried changing other people, such as your partner or boss. How did that go? You may have been lucky if they changed at all. The greatest opportunity for improvement lies in knowing yourself well and focusing on what’s within your control.

How to Identify Your Strengths

There are essentially two steps to identifying your strengths – looking at what you already have and then getting more input to ensure you have a well-rounded view. You want to reflect on your own thoughts about your strengths and you want the opinions of others too as you might have blind spots (strengths you aren’t aware of about yourself) and/or have an unrealistic view of yourself.

1. Start by taking an inventory of all the available data you have on you. Look for all the evidence you have accumulated from recent years, including:
   1. Performance reviews (this will have your manager’s perspective and probably your own as well as many companies get the employee’s input as well as the management’s)
   2. 360⁰ surveys (surveys that your boss, team and peers have completed on you)
   3. Awards and certifications
   4. What are your passions? What do you enjoy doing?
   5. Any feedback you’ve received, e.g. verbal accolades, congratulatory cards, letters and emails
   6. Any assessments you’ve had done whether about strengths, personality, behaviour, preferences or aptitude
   7. Comments from your friends and family (yes, really!)
2. If you don’t have any of the above, then initiate getting the feedback as other peoples’ opinions of your impact are important. One thing you can do is send a simple email to a variety of personal and professional contacts asking them for input. You can use the following verbatim to make it fast and easy for yourself, don’t overthink it:

I am working on my leadership development (always a work in progress I feel) and would genuinely appreciate your input. Would you please respond to the following 4 questions with as much detail or specificity as you can (bearing in mind, your initial, quick response is best for both you and me):

What should I start doing?
What should I stop doing?
What should I continue doing?
What is unique about me versus other leaders/people you know or with whom you work?

Thank you so much for your feedback.

How to Identify Your Weaknesses

Go through the same process as above and pull out your weaknesses, development opportunities and any complaints and criticism you’ve received. It’s especially important to ask for feedback from others so you have an accurate view of yourself as often we don’t know what we don’t know.

Personal SWOT Analysis

The SWOT model is commonly used in business and competitive analysis. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The model can also be used to analyse your leadership situation and career advancement. There will be overlap in some of the items because opportunities are often derived from addressing threats. Complete it for yourself. If you have a close colleague, ask them to complete it for you as well or do what I did when I started my coaching practice, I had a few friends complete it on my behalf. That made for ‘interesting’ reading.

Personal Strength List and Weakness List

A reminder that the list of your strengths and weaknesses aren’t just what you do; it’s also how you do things and how you interact with people to get the work done. The lists should include skills, behaviours, attributes, characteristics, qualities and mindsets and can be things you were born with or things for which you received training. Often my clients ‘forget’ some of the things they do well because they are so habitual to them. As I say, a fish doesn’t know fish swim in water. If you want to delve into yourself even deeper, do my exercise, A Development Activity to Learn, to identify more ingrained, sometimes subtler, aspects of yourself.

Personal Strengths – Use Them More

While every leader should have an understanding of their weaknesses, sometimes called development areas, in order to grow their leadership, I often focus on strengths. This view is rooted in positive psychology theory.

What strengths can you use more often? The benefit of doing so is that you’re good at those strengths already and you probably enjoy using them too. I start every coaching session asking my client to identify the strengths that have contributed to their accomplishments since the last coaching session. This reminds them of their good qualities rather than always focusing on the development or deficit.

How do you leverage your strengths to address a weakness? For example, if you are great at listening however, you avoid dealing with poor performance issues in your team, how can you apply your strength of listening to understand the performance issue and then address the issues?

Don’t overuse a strength as you could enter the ‘shadow’ side of that strength. If you have a strength of driving action to timely completion and that’s all you do, ignoring how you interact with the team doing those actions, you might demotivate them or cause burnout. Not every building project is solved with a hammer, you need a saw and wrench in your toolkit too.

Personal Strengths Test

There are a variety of strengths tests that help people identify their strengths and preferences including those they aren’t aware of, aka their blind spots. Examples are: Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), DiSC Workplace Profile, Discovery Insights, The Leadership Circle, Hogan, Belbin Team Roles Assessment, Point Positive, Realize Strengths, Gallup Strengths Finder, Enneagram, Princeton MCG Leadership Blindspot, 16Personalities, etc.

If you don’t have many of these types of assessments, you can find some of them online with free or inexpensive versions to complete now. It’s often best to review the learnings from these assessments with a coach certified in it to understand the results and get support to leverage the assessment’s full potential.

Where could you benefit from an objective view of your strengths and weaknesses?

Book a complimentary coaching session with me here to explore your strengths and weaknesses and identify some tangible actions for moving forward.