How a good leadership story has the power to engage hearts and minds

Stewart D. Friedman, Practice Professor of Management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in Philadelphia on how a good leadership story has the power to engage hearts and minds. It has these six crucial elements:

1. Draws on your real past and lessons you've learned from it.
2. Resonates emotionally with your audience because it's relevant to them.
3. Inspires your audience because it's fuelled by your passion.
4. Shows the struggle between your goal and the obstacles you faced in pursuing it.
5. Illustrates with a vivid example.
6. Teaches an important lesson.

If you have leadership stories to share, I would love to hear them.

Marquis Bureau

Posted via email from MBureau's posterous

Storytelling

Storytelling is an excellent method of giving speakers an opportunity for uninterrupted voice in a manner culturally conditioned for many diverse groups and rich in learning for the listener. The ultimate value of storytelling is to recreate a situation for someone who has not lived it through it, so the listener can benefit from the teller's experience.

Healing through stories is but one important aspect of synthesizing our relationship with ourselves and with the entire universe. As well as being entertaining and giving a sense of pleasure, stories arouse heightened mindfulness, a sense of wonder and mystery, and a reverence for life. As the story unfolds, a rapport develops between the storyteller and listeners.

Storytelling does not occur in a vacuum. Story tellers need an audience, a response, in order to make the telling a worth while experience.

When an experience becomes a story, it is passed on, given away, made sacred. The story intensifies the value of the events that have passed. Pain and rage can be released, isolation broken, triumph and ecstasy celebrated. What was a singular experience becomes woven into a larger context.

Source : Fyre Jean Graveline

Three Day Co-Facilitation

Donna Clark and I are in St. Andrews, New-Brunswick co-faciliting a three day meeting with 60 people on behalf of Environment Canada. Whole Person Process Facilitation will be used as the container. It will include Storytelling, Open Space Technology, and the Medicine Wheel Tool. Another example of a blended design and delivery as practiced in the Genuine Contact Program.

Another lighthouse being light.
Marquis