Storytelling for Thought Leaders — Helping Your Diversity and Inclusion Stories Come to Life!

When it comes to diversity and inclusion, two of the biggest challenges for senior organizational leaders include:

1. Sharing your personal stories on D&I in an authentic, vulnerable or powerful way to inspire, impact and connect with your employees

2. Investing in the stories of your employees to better understand them and to empower to have a voice in your organization

The lack of interpersonal communications and storytelling in the workplace can result in a lack of belonging and low motivation.

We teach participants to effectively communicate key messages with greater influence and impact. We also explore emotional resonance and persuasion using the art of storytelling. There will be a customized focus on stories around diversity, equity, and inclusion. Storytelling will have a greater impact on your speaking, events, meetings, and digital content including blog posts, social media updates, and videos. It will also enhance your overall thought leadership brand.

The course content is designed to solve these challenges through the following techniques, strategies, and content elements.

• Extracting your diversity, equity, and inclusion story from your experiences.

• Sharing data on how to build rapport and an emotional connection with your audience.

• Reviewing case studies of powerful thought leaders in the diversity and inclusion space.

• Giving participants a clear design and structure for their D&I stories and direction on developing a short 3-minute story of their own.

• Demonstrating and sharing information about the positive impact of senior leaders sharing their stories and encouraging their employees to do the same.

• Getting a few participants to share their stories and get feedback from the instructor and the group.

• Next steps to build on your story and tactics to empower the stories of your employees.

Key Benefits to Organization:

• Enhance your organizational agility & get departments to communicate better
• Stronger decisions and results from improved interpersonal communications
• Build stronger cross-functional collaboration and community from increased clarity, conciseness, and connection
• Greater morale and a more effective culture that is open, innovative, diverse, and drives stronger loyalty, satisfaction, and productivity

Key Benefits to Individual Leaders

• Knowledge around how and when they can use storytelling to effectively persuade, influence, and inspire others.
• The ability to approach storytelling more strategically, ensuring they are telling the right story at the right time to shape the way their audience thinks and feels, and motivate them towards the desired action.
• One powerful leadership story which they will be encouraged to develop in the workshop. Some will be given a chance to practice telling it in front of others, which will serve as a model for developing other leadership stories. Each participant will have the opportunity to join Bobby for a follow-up zoom group call to review and hone their prepared story.
• The framework for a diverse and eclectic library of strategic stories to have ready to use in a variety of communications situations and for a variety of leadership needs.