At our September Impact Breakfast, Liz Warren, Director of South Mountain Community College’s Storytelling Institute, showed attendees how storytelling can help leaders build trust, communicate values, and create stronger connections.
Her message was simple: your stories are worth telling.
You do not need an extraordinary experience or a perfectly polished story. Instead, Warren encouraged attendees to notice the everyday moments already happening around them and ask, “Can I make a story out of that?”
Why is storytelling important for leaders?
According to Warren, the goal of storytelling is connection, not perfection.
Stories help people relate to one another and allow listeners to see and feel an idea rather than simply hear information about it. For leaders, that makes storytelling useful in presentations, team meetings, interviews, performance conversations, and other moments when connection matters.
Warren encouraged leaders to approach storytelling less like delivering a speech and more like visiting with someone and sharing an experience.
What makes an experience a story?
Warren defined a story as a narrative that documents change. Something is different at the end than it was at the beginning.
That change might be a new perspective, an unexpected challenge, a mistake, a moment of growth, or something learned along the way. As Warren explained, “a learning moment is always a story moment.”
Everyday experiences can be especially effective because audiences can often see themselves in them.
How can leaders structure a story?
One simple framework Warren shared was the Five Ps:
- People: Who was involved?
- Place: Where did it happen?
- Problem: What challenge or issue arose?
- Progress: What happened next?
- Point: Why does the experience matter?
From there, Warren encouraged storytellers to help listeners see the moments in the memory. Dialogue, sensory details, gestures, and facial expressions can bring those moments to life.
Her advice for telling a story in a professional setting was equally practical: know how you want to begin and end. The middle will often take care of itself.
What does storytelling look like in practice?
During the Impact Breakfast, attendees put Warren’s techniques to work. After choosing from prompts about challenges, mistakes, unexpected experiences, and moments of learning, participants paired up and shared a memory.
There was no script and no expectation of perfection. Instead, Warren asked participants to approach the conversation as a visit and give each other their full attention.
The room quickly filled with conversation, demonstrating one of the session’s central ideas: we relate to build relationships.
How can leaders use their stories?
Warren reminded attendees that stories are vehicles for values.
A story does not have to take place at work to be valuable in a leadership setting. A personal experience might demonstrate persistence, adaptability, empathy, courage, collaboration, or accepting help. Leaders can adapt the same story for different audiences by emphasizing the value most relevant to that moment.
Storytelling for leadership starts with paying attention to the experiences already around us. A challenge that changed your approach, a colleague who taught you something, or a moment that made you see your work differently could all become stories that help others understand what you value.
Warren explained that everyday stories of learning, growing, changing, pivoting, and resolving are just as powerful, sometimes more so than a story built around one big event.
The next time one of those moments happens, consider Warren’s question:
Can I make a story out of that?
You can find more details about upcoming Impact Breakfasts, as well as other training solutions for individuals and teams, by visiting our events calendar.