I once heard it said that the leader of any organization must be the best storyteller. Leadership is about more than organizational skills or merely giving orders. Leadership, at its best, is about inspiration; and stories inspire. For this reason, blogging can be a useful tool. It is a perfect avenue to tell the stories that need sharing. It allows you to tell stories that induce a response from your audience. Let’s take a look at three types of stories to tell, to help make your blog more effective.
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Stories of Success
The first type of story is probably the most widely utilized on blogs, advertisements, brochures, and anything else that businesses can put in front of an audience. Stories of success show how a service or product has done what it was supposed to do, and successfully. They showcase employees that have gone above and beyond for clients. This type of story is proof that the projected goals are not some lofty ideal, but are in fact attainable. Sharing several positive first-person testimonials from customers and clients is a great way to tell stories of success.
Stories of Failure
Sharing this type of story seems a bit counterintuitive for many businesses, but if done well can be very useful in building trust with an audience. The key is to make clear the failure, then offer a lesson learned and a new way forward. When we share a story of failure, we are admitting that we are human, just like everyone else; but further, it shows that we are committing to improving.
When telling a story of failure, humor can go a long way to getting our message across. If you merely spout out in detail how poorly you handled a situation, your audience can get the impression that you don’t know what you’re doing. However, if you tell the same story with a bit of humor – as a sort of comedy of errors – there is a better chance that your audience will resonate with your shortcomings and subsequently trust you more.
A Vision for the Future
This kind of story can allow you space to share what your company is all about. Sharing an account of what you hope to see accomplished or produced, helps everyone, including customers and employees, get behind the shared values and direction of the business. Every individual wants to be a part of something bigger than just themselves. Casting a shared vision for what the future holds allows people to join in together to accomplish it.
The key to telling this story well is knowing it. This information may seem obvious, but it is not uncommon for a business to start strong, only to falter because there wasn’t a strong sense of vision. If the leadership can’t tell this story well, it shouldn’t be a surprise when nobody wants to follow.
As humans have done for thousands of years, you want your audience to cozy up to the glowing fire of your blog and gain wisdom through the tales you share with them. Now, instead of sitting around a bright fire listening to stories, they will be glued to a glowing screen reading your blog. People read your blog to gain wisdom from you. Thankfully, sharing that knowledge through stories has always been, and still is effective.