by Nick Kindler
Most of the senior leaders I work with rose quickly in their careers. They’re experts in fields like digital, security, technology, pharma, and finance. In my first book, Impact, I called them “ingenious experts.” At some point, their role changed. Now they have to stand in front of large groups and get those people to understand something and act differently because of it.
That’s a big shift. Keeping people informed isn’t enough anymore. They’re accountable for results, and the main way they get those results is by explaining complicated information to people who don’t share their expertise.
They’re also busy, so most of the time they’re focused on getting through the next presentation. I understand that. But even with help on one deck and one talk, there will be another one next month, and another after that.
What they need is a skill they can bring to every one of those moments, including the hallway conversations and one-on-ones in between.
That skill is storytelling, and I believe it’s now a core leadership competency.
Why every leader needs narrative skills
Senior leaders have always worked under pressure, and the last couple of years have added a lot more of it. They’re leading through geopolitical instability, trade pressure, and an unpredictable economy, plus a little thing called generative AI, which is changing how almost everyone works.
Their teams look to them to explain what all of this means and what to do about it. Leaders have always needed to tell a good story. The difference now is that they notice very quickly when they can’t.
I’m not the only one saying this. NYU professor Scott Galloway recently called storytelling the most durable skill of the AI era, because it stays valuable no matter how industries change. Earlier this year, LinkedIn put executive and stakeholder communication on its list of rising skills for 2026. And more companies are adding storytelling roles to their teams.
Some companies now have a chief storytelling officer. I’m glad to see it, because it means they take the problem seriously. But one person can’t tell the story for a whole organization. Every leader who stands in front of a team needs to be able to do it.
People have been telling stories around the fire for at least 100,000 years. Somewhere along the way, business started relying on spreadsheets and slides instead. Now we’re relearning something we already knew.
Why facts alone don’t move people
When I say story, I don’t mean “once upon a time,” and I don’t only mean anecdotes. I often describe story as meaning-making. It answers why something matters right now, and a good story also tells people what part they play in it.
Data and facts are essential, but on their own they just sit there.
Every week, leaders tell their teams things like “We need to hit our Q2 targets,” or “Margins are under pressure in the U.S. market.” Both may be true. Neither tells anyone why it matters to them or what to do differently on Monday morning, and most people won’t remember either one by Friday.
An aircraft carrier and a lollipop
One of my favourite examples of leadership storytelling in action is Jeff Guthrie. We first worked together years ago, and he’s since become a good friend. At the time, Jeff was director of operations at Moneris, the company behind the card terminals in stores across Canada. The business was growing fast. Jeff had to speak at the national sales meeting, and, as I later learned, had a significant fear of public speaking. I helped him build his presentation.
Jeff asked the room full of salespeople to picture the flight deck of an aircraft carrier: jets parked inches apart on a ship rolling with the sea, and engines so loud nobody can hear a word. Nearly everything on the ship runs on digital systems, yet every plane still moves, launches, and lands safely because of the crew on deck. Directors in yellow shirts guide each aircraft into position with hand signals, and the pilot follows every one.
He opened with that image and came back to it at the end. In between, he explained what happened after every sale. Each time the sales team signed a merchant, from a corner store to a national chain, operations and the call centres had to bring that merchant on board and get their terminals working.
In a room full of salespeople, the operations teams, whose work usually goes unseen, became the deck crew guiding every plane in safely.
He could have said, “Our completion rate is 17%, and we need to get it to 22%.” Nobody would have remembered that the next day. What people remembered was the aircraft carrier and where they stood on the deck.
The talk worked so well that Jeff gave one like it every year, and each one set the story for his team for the year ahead.
My favourite Jeff moment came later, and I was on the wrong side of it. I produced an event where he gave the opening talk, and he wanted to play Drew Dudley’s six-minute TEDx talk on everyday leadership in the middle of his 25-minute speech. I told him I didn’t think it was a good idea. He did it anyway, and he was right. In the video, Dudley learns that a small, playful moment with a lollipop changed someone’s life, and he hadn’t known it. Jeff built his message around it: we have more impact on our customers and on each other than we realize, so we should tell each other. After his talk, we handed a lollipop to everyone in the room.
For years afterward, people kept those lollipops on their desks.
A good metaphor ties something new to something people already know, and people remember what they can picture. Jeff chose those images on purpose. That kind of deliberate choice is the skill I’m talking about.
Jeff later moved from operations into marketing and then sales. He eventually became the Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at Moneris. In 2022 he became CEO of the Canadian Credit Union Association.
Story is still a big part of how he leads.
Why story matters to the business
Jeff’s talks changed how the people in those rooms understood their work. When people can see where they fit, they make better decisions when no one is around to tell them what to do. That’s how story shows up in business results.
A strategy only works when the people carrying it out understand it well enough to make decisions with it. Culture works the same way. It’s the story people tell each other about how things really get done, and people act on the story they believe, whether or not it’s the one their leaders meant to tell.
When that story is missing, a strategy arrives at the front line as a list of priorities nobody can connect to their own job.
When that story is missing, a strategy arrives at the front line as a list of priorities nobody can connect to their own job. Each executive describes the direction in their own words. Every version may be accurate, and people still end up unsure what to do next.
You can see it in engagement, too. Gallup found that global manager engagement fell to 22% in 2025, down from 30% in 2023. Managers are the people who carry the story to everyone else. If they can’t see where the company is going, they can’t help their teams see it either.
Most organizations still treat storytelling as a soft skill. They pay for that every day, but the cost never shows up as a line item.
Why most leaders find this hard
If storytelling works this well, why don’t more leaders do it? Most have never been trained in it. The work that got them promoted was built on facts and analysis, and story can feel like a different language. I hear the frustration across industries: “We hired a brilliant Stanford grad for $250,000 a year, and nobody can understand what they’re talking about.”
Leaders have been rewarded for data and expertise, so when they get ten minutes in front of people, they want to spend all ten on the “important” information. A metaphor or a personal story feels like a waste of time. Telling a story well also means performing a little, and a personal story means being more open with your team than you may be used to. I’ve seen plenty of leaders build a strong opening story and cut it the night before because it felt uncomfortable.
That’s a shame, because the uncomfortable part is usually the part that works. It connects the facts to something people feel, and that helps them hold on to the facts. Susanne Chishti, chair of Fintech Circle, made the same point about earnings calls in Raconteur: investors rarely remember every metric, but they remember the story that gives the numbers meaning.
What it takes to build the skill
Think about getting in shape. One session with a personal trainer gets you a plan. Maybe you stick to it for a month, or six months if you’re disciplined, and then life gets busy and the old habits come back. I’ve been that client more than once. What works is regular coaching until the habits hold and you can keep going on your own.
Storytelling works the same way. Help with your next presentation is useful. Building the skill makes every presentation and conversation after it easier. Writing about McKinsey’s work in Forbes, Carmine Gallo notes that stories motivate people only when they’re shared constantly and consistently throughout the organization.
Think of the best boss you’ve had. I’d bet they were the one who made it clear where things were going and what your part was.
How our firm is evolving
For years, Kindler & Company has helped leaders communicate with impact, and we still do. But the more coaching and training we did, the more often clients asked us for one thing: “Tell us more about the storytelling.”
Executives who saw what it did for them started asking us to bring it to their teams, and then to their whole organizations.
That demand set our direction.
Today, we have a growing faculty of facilitators and coaches who work with large organizations. Our work covers a leader’s biggest moments and the stories whole organizations run on. Storytelling is at the centre of it.
We’ve also just launched a new website, where we’ll be sharing client stories and practical resources.
We also have something big coming before the end of the year.
Which brings me back to the experts. Maybe you’re one of them. You know your field better than almost anyone, and now your job is to turn what you know into something other people can act on.
The good news is that this can be learned.