Your Leadership Story

Your Leadership Story is Important! People remember stories --they don't remember PowerPoint slides or spreadsheets. They remember authenticity and connection. Your story provides a glimpse into what makes you tick as a leader and how you approach your position, and how this, in turn, affects those who work for you.

You can craft your story by following these 3 steps:

➤Name Your "What"

➤Claim Your "Why"

➤Articulate the "How"

Your "What" are your life events and experiences from highlights, to times of struggles, to mentors and watersheds moments.

The "Why" is connecting these events and experiences and and making sense of why they shaped you as a leader.

Your "How" is an action statement on how you will now lead based as a result of your life events and experiences supported by your "why"

An example would be as follows:

VISION: I will always get to know the people that I lead: I will get to know what they care about, what they love to do, their concerns, and their dreams ( the "How")

STORY: The reason tis is so important to me is that, early in my career, I have a number of supervisors who only cared about me showing up and completing the tasks they had assigned. The I changed jobs and had a supervisor who talked to me, shared with me, taught me - and I came alive. I could not wait to get to work; I felt appreciated, I felt safe, and I gave 100%. ( the "What") I made a decision based on my experience that if I was ever a leader, I would be a leader that knew - really knew - my team, and I would take the time to bring out the best in them. ( the "Why")

Part of my Leadership Story is about being authentic and connecting. I share with you a poem that I would read to my team at various points in our journey as a way to remind me what was important.

THREADS

Sometimes you just connect, like that, no big thing maybe but something beyond the

usual business stuff. It comes and goes so quickly so you have to pay attention. A change

in the eyes when you ask about the family. A pain flickering behind the statistics about a boy and girl in school, or about seeing them every other Sunday. An older guy talks about his bride, a little affection after twenty-five years. A hot-eye achiever laughs before you want him to.

Someone tells you about his wife's job or why she quit to stay home. An old joker needs another laugh on the way to retirement. A women says she spends a lot of her salary of an au pair and a good one is hard to find but worth it because there's nothing more important than the baby. Listen. In every office you hear the threads of love and joy and fear and guilt, the cries for celebration and reassurance, and somehow you know that connecting those threads is what you are supposed to do and business takes care of itself.

--James A. Autry --

If you would like to craft your Leadership Story, I would be happy to assist.