It’s finally happening—your team is getting a seat at the table. After months of trying to get a meeting in front of the C-suite, leadership has agreed to hear what your team has to say. The stakes feel high. Delivering a successful presentation will not only help get your project approved, but it could give your team the clout it needs for future opportunities.
Stumbling through it, however, could result in pushback from key stakeholders and position your team as inexperienced and ill-equipped to take on mission-critical initiatives.
Are you ready? Does your team know what to say, and even more so, do they have the communication chops to serve up a clear call to action, influence multiple stakeholders, and move people to a decision?
Getting your team up to par
The above scenario is a challenge most business professionals will face at some point, either individually or as a people leader. No matter what function you work in, chances are you have to influence across the business – whether you’re selling an idea, providing an update, or making a recommendation. For teams that support cross-functional initiatives, it’s even more critical to know how to uplevel the conversation.
Executive presence and reputation are table stakes in today’s cross-functional work environment, and influence, trust, and credibility are the prizes everyone is working toward.
Consider your team is trying to communicate to IT about the support you need for a new product launch. Or maybe they need to justify to the CFO why your initiative needs more budget. When everyone’s already short on time and stressed over these big moments, the last thing they’re thinking about is how to prepare for all the possible scenarios that could arise. But they need to be! The challenge of being pulled in different directions, presenting to diverse audiences across the business, and keeping the conversation on track adds another layer of complexity to an already high-stakes situation.
But if your team ends up data dumping, sharing text-heavy slides, and getting into the weeds about operational details, it won’t get your new budget passed, and they certainly won’t win any bonus time with executives.
For those of us in leadership roles who are already spread thin, reworking our team’s decks at the eleventh hour is NOT productive nor a financially responsible use of time. Neither is feeling the pressure to attend every meeting in case you have to helicopter in to redirect the conversation. This is especially true if you’re leading employees who are being thrust into leadership roles and have little experience leading a strategic dialogue.
A better way? Having a team that can create and deliver engaging and impactful content is critical to driving business forward. But to do this, they need the skills and confidence to communicate clearly and with impact during these once-in-a-blue-moon opportunities with key stakeholders.
To start, you need to get your team on the same page and equipped with a common language and framework – one that brings clarity and succinctness to every business communication (think emails, 1-pagers, or presentations). The sky’s the limit for the time you’d save, the business outcomes you’d achieve, and the growth potential for your team.
So how do you ‘teach them to fish’? (i.e., get everyone aligned and on the same page?)
Start with storytelling
The key is to get everyone speaking the same language, and that language is storytelling. Using the basic structure of story—setting, characters, conflict, a BIG Idea, and resolution—your team can build strong business narratives that make their presentations engaging, informative, and most importantly, actionable. You’ll be able to answer the question, “What do you want me to know and do in the limited time I have?”
A powerful way to demonstrate value to the business
Storytelling is an effective way to clearly and succinctly share project updates, pitch new ideas, or communicate change initiatives. When done effectively, teams can demonstrate their value to the business while also becoming more trusted advisors within the organization and to their audience. Leaders will take notice of a team’s vital contributions through storytelling.
But like any upskilling effort, building a storytelling muscle takes time, training, and practice. However, the payoff will benefit busy managers while making your team a more influential and integral part of the organization.
Here are some of the ways storytelling can transform the way your team interacts internally and with decision-makers:
- Storytelling helps democratize effective and influential communication. No matter their role or function, storytelling skills level the playing field and give team members the ability to express their ideas and influence conversations. This can help foster team unity, reduce internal conflict, and improve collaborative and innovative thinking.
- Storytelling improves confidence and helps build executive presence. With an impactful message and focused communication strategy, teams are emboldened to present in high-stakes situations and win over key executives. A great story decreases the odds of being derailed, facing challenging questions, or ending a meeting without buy-in. Plus, having a strong narrative as a foundation allows teams to display mastery of their material and showcase their expertise in an authentic way.
- Storytelling provides a mechanism for constructive feedback among internal teams. If teams are working from a common tool and methodology, it provides a way to have a non-biased conversation. There are no personal preferences involved. Instead, the question becomes: Does this fit into the narrative or not? This can also aid in breaking down cultural or language barriers because everyone is speaking the same language.
- Storytelling increases team productivity. With everyone on the same page, teams can avoid rework, multiple review cycles, and having senior leaders sit in on meetings or get in the weeds of presentations. This makes the whole team more productive and focused on strategic priorities.
- Storytelling can elevate the visibility and reputation of a team within a company. Teams with strong communication skills earn trust among internal stakeholders, which can open up new opportunities to collaborate. This also helps individuals gain visibility and improve their potential career mobility for leadership roles.
Strength in numbers
As any leader knows, teams are only as strong as their weakest link, and storytelling is one way to level up each and every member. When used strategically, business storytelling can build your team’s collective skill set, improve its reputation, and most importantly, help gain the visibility and influence you need when it matters most.