Personal branding through storytelling: the superpower CEOs need to create for themselves and the entire leadership team

The concept of personal branding is well established, but CEOs need to recognise the scientifically-backed power of storytelling, dedicate attention to their own personal branding and do more to democratise that power throughout the leadership team.?

In early 2010, in the storied halls of Princeton University, Professor Uri Hasson and his fellow researchers set out on a journey to once and for all discover the scientific power of storytelling.

Each of us knows what happens when we hear, read or watch a good story. Sitting in a darkened cinema, or lecture theatre, or sitting comfortably on an armchair with a good book, time seems to fly by. We may describe ourselves as ‘gripped’, ‘consumed by the story’ or maybe ‘lost in the moment’.

But Professor Hasson was interested at a deeper level than this. When we describe these feelings, when we hear a story, what is actually happening in our brain to create these feelings and how can we leverage them?

The team carried out a range of experiments, coupled with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which creates a graphical representation of brain activity at any given moment.

In one experiment, a participant was asked to watch a TV episode. They then recorded their audio recall of what had happened in the episode. This recall - a story - was then played to a second participant.

In a separate experiment, the (fMRI) scanner was left on to see what happens in the brains of five participants when another tells a personal story to the group.

The results of both experiments are what Hasson calls ‘alignment’.

In experiment one both participants had incredibly similar brain patterns and activity , even though only one of them had seen the episode in question. The act of the first participant retelling the story to the second participant had stimulated the brain in exactly the same way as if they had watched it together.

Experiment two is perhaps even more revealing . The fMRI scanner initially revealed the five participants' brains to have completely different activity. Once the story started though, their brain activity became aligned and, not only that, became aligned not only with their fellow story-receivers, but also with the person telling the story, with just a few seconds delay.

Hasson had proven beyond doubt that telling stories doesn’t just produce positive emotional responses; it literally creates connections between those participating in the listening and storytelling activity.?

The act of telling a story may be the simplest, most available technique we all have to increase our connections and spread our influence. So why do so few CEOs use that very technique? Why do we dedicate so little attention to personal branding when storytelling, a key part of that branding, could help us to such a significant degree?

Personal engagement vs corporate presence

“The shortest distance between a human being and the truth is a story.”

Anthony DeMello

Why do LinkedIn company pages almost always perform poorly when compared to the personal pages of active users of the platform, who work for the same company?

Two weeks ago, the Microsoft company page posted about a hot topic: the power of AI . Microsoft has over 19 million LinkedIn followers. To date the post has received 134 total engagements of any sort, meaning Microsoft succeeded in engaging, at most, just 0.000007% of its available audience.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft Chairman and CEO, posted on the same topic at a similar time . Satya has almost 10.5 million followers and his post received around 38,500 engagements, engaging up to 0.0037% of his total followers.

This may also seem low, but Satya’s post achieved an engagement score 52,000% higher than the Microsoft post, whilst increasing the number of engaged followers who interacted with the post by more than 28,000%.

Imagine if you could increase engagement metrics by that sort of percentage increase. Your social media team would likely need to expand to keep up with the weight of responses.

There are some simple learnings here, from looking at company vs personal pages and Professor Hasson’s research, that have enough statistical backing to compel CEOs to act.

1. Personal outdoes corporate, every time. The Satya and Microsoft example is backed up by wider statistics. Employee shared posts on LinkedIn, for example, achieve 561% better reach , on average, than corporate posts. The reasons for this are clear; we much prefer genuine personal interactions than faceless corporate ones. We relate to people and shared experiences. We consciously or subconsciously crave personal connection and interaction. With this in mind, why don’t CEO’s spend more time and money on their personal brands, and that of their employees, than on their own corporate brands?
2. Empowering your leadership team to pursue effective personal branding boosts corporate reach. In a leadership team of ten you, as CEO could leverage effective personal branding and social media engagement to increase social media performance by 561% or 28,000% or 52,000%. Now what if the other nine members of your leadership team are working on their personal branding as well? What if all of them have successfully branded themselves as thought leadership experts in your area? The power of the CEO to lead and inspire in this area is greatly underutilised and that of the wider leadership team even more so.
3. Personal branding featuring storytelling creates neurologically proven connections that are hard to break. Because of the deep impact storytelling has on our brains, storytelling has the power to influence us. As Professor Hasson puts it: “storytelling shapes and reshapes our future thoughts and behaviours ”. Leaders pursue personal branding because they want to shape behaviour or feeling towards themselves or their brand. This is, in essence, the job of the CEO. Storytelling makes this even more likely. It is a superpower that increases the chance you can successfully convince your audience to do, buy, participate in or otherwise come round to your thinking and position.

What if your next talk was your last?

There are many reasons why personal branding and storytelling can be a challenge for CEOs and, by extension, their leadership teams.

It is easy to feel vulnerable and uncomfortable about sharing something personal. CEOs may feel sheepish about talking about themselves when the wider company seems so much more important. The personal story may not seem ‘businesslike’, even though it is genuine. But the results, as we’ve examined above, can be dramatic.

How can you get started?

In a consulting engagement a new CEO asked me to review her first speech. She was taking the reins of a new digital entity, which was part of a larger conglomerate. She was not necessarily the obvious choice for the appointment and it would be fair to say there were doubters in the audience. She needed the first speech to win people over, to make a lasting impression and to establish the tone of her stewardship of the company.

In trying to do this, she had written a speech that was full of things she thought someone in her position should say. There was a lot of corporate jargon, very little to establish who she was - her personal branding - and no storytelling. The speech was positive, but it was not high impact, memorable or emotional.

Think of Hasson and the ‘alignment’ the brain gains with a speaker. In this case we would have all been nodding along with the new CEO, but our emotions would not have been piqued and we certainly were not about to get swept along together on a wave of positively charged brain activity.

My challenge to her was simple: write the script again but pretend you are on death row. You have one chance to say everything you want to say and to pitch for survival.

A little dramatic, but not too far from the professional truth.

The result was one of the most passionate, personal and emotional speeches you could imagine.

The new CEO didn’t talk about KPIs or targets or bottom lines or operational efficiencies. She told a story about childhood and her children and the children of everyone in the room and the feeling that she had and that her children had when they could feel proud of what she did.

There was raucous applause and at the end of the speech the CEO had connected with everyone in the room, through storytelling, and set herself on a personal branding pathway towards being a better, more human, more empathetic CEO.

Given the benefits of doing just that it’s now her job, and the job of every CEO out there, to;

• Embrace personal branding and storytelling as your superpower. It is not a self-centred exercise; it holds your ability to convince people that your company is the way forwards.
• Empower your leadership teams to do exactly the same thing. A CEO who embraces personal branding and storytelling can skyrocket company performance. Now imagine you had a team of people who were doing the exact same thing.

How can you build a leadership team that knows the power of personal branding? How can you encourage and show that storytelling plays a part in convincing your audience of whatever it is you want them to do? And how can you show that the statistical importance of both things could be the difference between failure and success for you, your team and your business?