Leadership Presence, Part 1: Light Up The Brain with Storytelling

Leadership presence is a critical factor for leaders and often can determine or significantly influence their success.  So what is leadership presence?  You may not know the formal definition yet but you undoubtedly have experienced it.  Presence, on its most basic level, is the ability to command attention, and leadership presence, as defined by Halpern and Lubar (2004, p. 8) as “the ability to connect authentically with the thoughts and feelings of others in order to motivate and inspire them to achieve a desired outcome.”

You’ve been in a room with someone who has presence and maybe you’ve seen them give a presentation.  Presence is that thing that makes you want to listen to them.  At this point, you might be thinking presence is a talent that you’re born with.  “How is one blog post going to make me into George Clooney or Angelina Jolie?” you ask.  It’s true that there are no magic wands here, but you can learn to develop your leadership presence skills. One of those skills is storytelling.

Imagine you are listening to two presentations.  The first presentation is about the invention of Scotch tape. And the presenter does a competent job of presenting facts, nicely summarized in bullets and arranged in beautiful PowerPoint slides.  The second presenter talks about a similar topic, the origin of the Post-It note.  This presenter also has bullets and slides but also tells you this:

It was 1968 and just past the Summer of Love, a scientist for 3M invented an adhesive that had some interesting qualities but wasn’t consistently sticky enough to work on tape. He played around with it for a while but just couldn’t make it work with any of his projects, so he shelved it.  In 1974, another 3M scientist named Art Fry had a problem at church.  He sang in the choir and his bookmarks tended to fall out of his hymnal, so when he had to sing the same songs at the church’s second service, he would fumble around because he’d lost the pages he’d previously marked.  A bookmark didn’t work but tape wouldn’t work either.  Mr. Fry needed something in between, something that would stay in place but wasn’t permanent.  He went back to the lab and applied a bit of this odd adhesive he’d heard about to little slips of paper.  He tried them out on a Sunday and…and voila!  No more lost places in the hymnal!  Hallelujah!

Which presentation would you rather listen to?  More importantly, which content would you remember? 

Our brains are hard-wired to respond to stories.  Neuroscience researchers have found that the sensory cortex of our brain lights up when we hear descriptive phrases like, “The singer had a velvet voice.”  Action descriptions – “Pablo kicked the ball” – and scent descriptions – “The delicious scent of coffee” – light up the parts of our brains associated with action and scent, respectively. 

Based on this and other studies, brain researchers now believe that our brains don’t make much of a distinction between experiencing something, like that velvet voice or that wonderful coffee, and hearing about it.  Hearing facts and figures ignites your neurons, sure, but hearing facts within a descriptive story engages many more parts of your brain, including your emotions, thus increasing the likelihood of engaging you and helping you remember what was said.

Leaders must do this every day.  Leaders have to have a vision but they must also engage others in that vision and inspire them to act.  Storytelling, then, is a critical communication skill for leaders.

Now that you know the “what” of leadership storytelling, next week we will get into the “hows” of specific tips for strengthening your storytelling ability. 

Cited:

Lubar, K. & Halpern, B.L. (2004). Presence:  What actors have that leaders need.  In Leadership Presence (p. 3).  New York: Gotham.