A Who I Am story helps the teller to build trust and credibility with her audience by sharing a story or experience that provides an insight to her listeners of the kind of person she really is.

In the 2008 United States presidential campaigns, both presidential and vice-presidential candidates spent a significant amount of time telling their personal stories as a way to forge a personal connection with potential voters. Regardless of your political views, it was important for the candidates to share their personal journeys with us so we could get a sense of the experiences and environments that shaped them, the challenges they faced and the obstacles they overcame. Their personal stories gave us a sense of their values, their leadership styles and their character. Were they someone we would trust with the multi-faceted and complex responsibilities of the highest office in the land?  In The Story Factor (2006) author Annette Simmons says,

How can we expect people to trust us, to be influenced by us when we don’t let them know who we are? When we separate our attempts to influence from who we are personally, we neglect the most important criteria most people use to decide whether to listen to us or not (pp. 7-8).

According to Simmons, we spend way too much time focused on communicating with our listeners’ rational brains and not enough time communicating with their emotional brains.

In The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling, organizational storytelling guru, Stephen Denning, suggests that our uniqueness as individuals does not lie in the roles we play or the abstract values we claim to have. We are the “one-of-a-kind” people we have become through the experiences we have had and the way we have responded to them. Telling your audience the story of one or more turning points can help listeners to get inside your life and go through what you went through so they can experience the kind of person you are.

Denning provides the following key elements to consider when developing and telling a Who I Am story:

1. Reveal yourself implicitly. Rather than tell someone what you value, share a personal story in which you demonstrate the value you hold through the actions you took.  
2. Exploit the fractal nature of identity stories. You don’t need to communicate an entire lifetime of experiences for people to understand who you are. A small sample, or even a single story, can help your audience determine who you are.
3. Be authentic. Be sure you embody the story you are telling about yourself.
4. Focus the story on a turning point in your life.
5. Tell a story with a positive tone. As a leader, you need a story that shows how you overcame an obstacle, learned an important lesson, or derived something positive from the experience.
6. Tell your story with context. Your story should follow the lines of a traditional story with a situation, a hero or heroine (most likely you), a plot, an obstacle, a turning point, and an ending.
7. Use humor to brighten your story.
8. Use emotion to spice up the story of who you are. You’re trying to make a strong, emotional connection with your audience with this kind of story. Your story should be one in which you felt some emotion in a situation where the audience can identify and empathize with you.
9. Don’t overstate your good qualities. Talk about overcoming adversity. Be generous and gracious to others who contributed to your success.
10. Make sure the audience wants to hear your story.
11. Understand the audience’s story.
12. Make sure the audience hears the story you tell. Each listener has his or her own internal filters that influence the story they hear. Get some feedback to make sure the underlying message of the story you intended to tell was communicated effectively to your listeners.

Often a Who I Am story leads into a Why I Am Here story, which conveys the intentions of the storyteller in the specific situation in which he or she is speaking.  Is there a situation in which you need to establish trust and credibility with your audience? Consider crafting and telling a Who I Am story to make the connection.

[tags] The Story Factor, Annette Simmons, The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling, Stephen Denning, Who I Am Stories, leadership communication, building trust and credibility [/tags]

My mother tells me that I read my way through third grade. Less interested in multiplication facts or the elementary school games of my peers, my nose was often buried in a book–cozied up in the top bunk in the room I shared with my sister, curled up on the living room love seat with a slice of American Singles to snack on, or plopped down outside under a tree. With Peter, Paul, and Mary, Mama Cass and, later, the Beatles often providing the background music, I found a lot of opportunities to snuggle up and venture into other worlds during the cold North Dakota winters and long Minnesota summers of my childhood.

My favorites were stories about people–real people who did interesting things, had adventures and made a difference: the Mayo brothers who founded the famous team-centered Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota; Elizabeth Blackwell, who became the first woman doctor in the United States; Helen Keller, who lost both her vision and hearing after an early childhood illness and her tutor, Anne Sullivan, who helped Helen learn to communicate and live a full and functional life; and the title character in Kim: A Gift from Vietnam, about a young girl who was adopted from a Vietnamese orphanage after the war and who struggled to fit in to a new country and a new family.

Barry Marshall, 2005 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Medicine, also remembers The Mayo Brothers book from his childhood. He recalls a great “story within a story” and the impact it had on him.

“When people say, is there something that got me into medicine? My grandmother used to have condensed Reader’s Digest novels and biographies. I remember early on reading The Mayo Brothers. There were the two brothers, it was approximately 1910, I think. I think their dad was a surgeon. There was this interesting story of their puppy develop[ing] a bowel obstruction or something and dad was away and the two kids chloroformed the dog and opened him up, did a laparotomy and fixed the puppy. That really captured my imagination. I was always interested in medicine.”

As a child, I learned that stories could spark my imagination and open up new worlds. As an adult, I still love to read stories about pioneers and adventurers who are doing interesting things and making a difference in the world around them. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business by Danny Meyer
• Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story by Ben Carson, M.D with Cecil Murphey
• Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Greg Mortenson

Today while my bookshelves are full with all kinds of fiction and non-fiction titles, I go back to real-life stories like these when I want to be inspired by ordinary people making extraordinary things happen. What stories have sparked your imagination and opened up new worlds to you?

[tags] Peter, Paul and Mary, Mama Cass, the Beatles, Mayo Brothers, Elizabeth Blackwell, Helen Keller, Anne Sullivan, Kim: A Gift from Vietnam; Barry Marshall, Danny Meyer, Ben Carson, M.D., Greg Mortenson [/tags]

In the Community of Learners group to which I belong, our topic of discussion yesterday was leadership. What do we mean by leadership? What is the essential task of a leader? What is the essence of leadership? What are the convening issues that motivate leaders to ask for help? A huge topic–way too much to cover in one conversation. We agreed to continue our exploration at a future gathering.

If you scan the the business section of your local bookstore or library, you’ll find many titles that reference leadership in one form or another. A recent search using the key words leadership books on www.amazon.com resulted in a selection of over 22,000 options. A Google search of the key words leadership training turned up over 24,000,000 listings! Obviously, there is a lot of interest in leadership these days. But what exactly is leadership?

Dictionary.com lists four definitions (noun):

1. the position or function of a leader: He managed to maintain his leadership of the party despite heavy opposition.
2. ability to lead: She displayed leadership potential.
3. an act or instance of leading; guidance; direction: They prospered under his leadership.
4. the leaders of a group: The union leadership agreed to arbitrate.

Not too helpful. Here are a few more definitions for your consideration:

• The online encyclopedia, Wikipedia lists several definitions for leadership, including the “process of social influence in which one person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task” and “Leadership is ultimately about creating a way for people to contribute to making something extraordinary happen.”
• James Kouzes and Barry Posner (The Leadership Challenge, 2007) define leadership as “a relationship between those who aspire to lead and those who choose to follow.”
• John Maxwell (Developing the Leader Within You, 1993) says that “leadership…has to do with casting vision and motivating people.”
• In Toyota Culture: The Heart and Soul of the Toyota Way (2008), authors Jeffrey Liker and Michael Moseus cite Toyota’s internal document, The Toyota Way 2001, when they describe “thoughtful leaders” who are defined as “[having] the ability to energize and invigorate others, willing giving realistic challenges and developmental opportunities and fostering a sense of accomplishment in subordinates.”
• Founder and CEO of the Institute for Women’s Leadership, Rayona Sharpnack defines leadership as “the ability to speak, listen and evoke action on behalf of a compelling future.”
• At the recent Learning Leaders Symposium, I heard leadership defined as “the ability to change, direct, or affect the behavior of others without ordering or threatening.”

Do these definitions fit with your experience? How would you define leadership?

[tags] leadership, James Kouzes, Barry Posner, The Leadership Challenge, social influence, John Maxwell, Developing the Leader Within You, Jeffrey Liker, Michael Moseus, Toyota Culture: The Heart and Soul of the Toyota Way, Institute for Women’s Leadership, Rayona Sharpnack, Leaders Learning Symposium [/tags]