Posted: January 25th, 2023

Storytelling Can Make or Break Your Leadership

Discussion Board Topic #1, Storytelling Can Make or Break Your Leadership
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The author of Storytelling Can Make or Break Your Leadership posits that telling a compelling story builds credibility for yourself and your ideas. He says that most effective stories share five characteristics: audience-specific, contextualizes your story, humanizes your story, makes it action-oriented, and allows you to show humility. Drawing on your current or past position, describe a workplace situation where storytelling would be helpful in getting a point across. What story would you use to support an idea? Support your example with specific observations about three of the five characteristics.
In my current position as a marketing manager, storytelling would be helpful in getting a point across during a team meeting to present a new campaign concept. The idea is to create a social media campaign that focuses on customer testimonials to showcase our product's effectiveness.
To support this idea, I would use a story of a customer who has had a significant change in their life due to using our product.
Firstly, the story would be audience-specific, tailored to my team members who are responsible for social media marketing and audience engagement. They would be able to relate to the customer's story and understand the potential impact on our target audience.
Secondly, the story would contextualize the campaign concept by providing a real-life example of how our product has helped someone. This would help to make the campaign more relatable and tangible to the team, rather than just being a theoretical idea.
Lastly, the story would humanize the campaign by highlighting a real person who has been positively impacted by our product. This would not only help to build empathy and support for the campaign within the team, but it would also serve as a powerful reminder of the impact our work can have on people's lives.
Storytelling can be a powerful tool in leadership, as it allows leaders to connect with their audience, provide context, and humanize the message. In this specific example, storytelling would be helpful in getting the team excited about a new social media campaign concept and to see the potential impact it can have on the customer's life.

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