Business-worthy storytelling skills are must-have communication skills. Especially for individuals targeting a leadership trajectory, regardless of their current professional disciplines.
First, business-worthy storytelling skills require understanding more than one professional language.
If you only are comfortable speaking your discipline’s specific professional language among peers, the amazing stories you have to share are lost. Lost on colleagues outside your department or professional language, who do not understand – or are intimidated – by your terminology.
Leaders create communication bridges across professionally-specific vocabulary and acronyms. Otherwise, they only end up leading within their professional discipline, instead of across and throughout people and disciplines.
Are you comfortable using terminology and acronyms from various professional languages when telling your business-worthy stories? What is holding you back from expanding your professional terminology?
Next, business-worthy storytelling skills require translating across more than one professional language.
How comfortable and conversant are you, when translating across different professional vocabularies and their respective mindsets? Are you an active participant in cross-discipline communication? Or, do you sit back and observe and occasionally nod your head? Because you are not quite sure you understand the terminology being used.
Effective leaders ask questions when they do not understand the conversation, instead of faking their comprehension. Once they gain clarity of context, they acknowledge their comprehension. How? By asking a business-worthy question to correlate the story’s relevance and value to business strategy.
Do you incorporate this professional habit when listening to business-worthy stories? If not, what aspect gives you reason for Pause?
Then, business-worthy storytelling skills require patience and curiosity while fielding questions related to your story’s insights.
This part of understanding, communicating and incorporating business-worthy storytelling skills is an art form. And fun! You see, you also have business-worthy stories to tell. As you ask that business-worthy question from the last section of this blog post, you connect everyone’s story: into an even bigger story that benefits everyone’s success and retention.
Ultimately, leaders combine stories, plus data, plus use-cases or business-cases into a bigger picture story: their vision. And they invite everyone to combine their stories into this bigger vision, in order to innovate client-focused outcomes.
Which next steps do you need to take to learn how to tell business-worthy stories? Stories which impact not only your own professional success. But also, stories which catalyze the success of your entire organization, instead of being limited to a specific department or professional discipline?
Babette Ten Haken’s One Millimeter Mindset® Storytelling for STEM Professionals and Left Brain Thinkers Keynotes, Workshops and Coaching catalyze your purpose-driven professional success. Become more visible, relevant and valuable to your organization by contacting Babette by clicking on this link, right here. Her playbook of communication hacks, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com.
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