How to Craft Your Core Leadership Brand Stories

When defining your Leadership Brand, we suggest looking back and investigating the moments that shaped you as a leader. In our Leadership Brand Model, we start with this exercise:

Identify three to five highlight career stories you can explore to uncover insights about your leadership brand to date. Pick stories where you felt successful, you were proud of your accomplishment, or you felt like you were in flow. Or, consider situations that taught you a lesson that has stuck with you, that were challenging and were a struggle, or were moments of crisis that were difficult but you made it through.

Then, in our 4-weeks of exercises, we have you articulate: Your Purpose, Your Values, Your Beliefs, Your Leadership & Management Philosophy, and Your Traits.

To complement documenting your Leadership Brand, it’s helpful to tell and share these core stories that shaped you as a leader.

By crafting these into stories you can tell, you’ll be able to share your Leadership Brand in a more compelling and impactful way.

Craft your Leadership Brand stories following these tips:

  1. Start with your core message or lesson. This should support a core element of your Leadership Brand and should guide what you want people to think or do or how you want them to act based on telling this story. It could support your Purpose and why you have come to that Purpose. It could support one or more of your Values, such as why you seek to “Strive for excellence.” It could support why you hold a particular Belief about why your function should operate in a particular manner, such as championing the consumer in all you do or the goal of creating a frictionless experience for your customer. You could showcase a core management philosophy you have, perhaps of being a coach and a thought partner to your team vs. taking a directive approach.

  2. Layout your story elements.

    • Situation. What was the scene of your story? Where does your story take place? What’s the start of the adventure?

      1. Roles. Who are the character(s) in your story?

      2. Complication. What challenges or conflicts arise on the journey? What tests your resolve?

      3. Resolution. What barriers were overcome and why? What resolved the situation? How were you transformed in the process. What lessons did you learn?

      4. Future. How will you or your team apply this in the future? What does it imply for what can be and what is possible?

  3. Craft your story so it sticks. Apply the teachings of the Heath brothers and their book, “Made to Stick,” applying to your story their model of SUCCESs—Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story. So, keep it Simple; add Unexpected details; make it Concrete with specific, memorable attributes; add Credentials, such as statistics; and make it Emotional.  

  4. Get the story into your bones. Once you’ve written your story, practice telling it until it becomes natural. Know it deeply so it’s in your bones and you can access it in moments you need it.

  5. Tell your story more than once. Sometimes repetition gets annoying, yet we all know we need to hear things multiple times for messages to sink it. People also hear things differently each time they listen to the same point. Perhaps their perspective has shifted, or a person happens to be in a more contemplative or listening mood. You have to share stories or lessons more than once for them to have the impact you’re seeking.

We’ve all learned stories are powerful communication tools.

We suggest leveraging them to your benefit, as well. Great leaders have stories to call upon to impress their Leadership Brand on others in a way that will stick. And the benefit is not just so people know you, it’s also to set expectations and guide the creation of the culture you want to establish for your team.

Sources:

Kathy Oneto