Most corporate leaders overestimate their listening skills. A 2015 survey conducted by Accenture that included more than 3600 professionals from thirty countries found that 96 percent of respondents thought they were good listeners. Anyone who has spent a day in an office knows this isn’t true.

– Marissa King, Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Yale School of Management, Author of Social Chemistry - Decoding the Patterns of Human Connection

It is estimated that less than 2 percent of the population have participated in organized listening training. Of that 2 percent, the vast majority have been trained on active listening only, which focuses on content, ignoring emotions and feelings.

They lack a listening framework for “emotional detection” or empathy.

We believe one of the key reasons employees “quit managers” is the misuse of authority.

In the corporate world, many leaders use authority to get people to do what they want them to do because it is much easier to tell people what you want them to do than to take the time and effort to connect with them emotionally.

When leaders lack the skills for influencing and inspiring their team, they tend to overplay their authority card. Authority is a blunt instrument, and its overuse erodes trust and connection.

It takes much more time and emotional energy to listen to them, earn their trust, use your stories to guide and inspire them, and influence them to volunteer to follow you. It takes effort to invest in a relationship with them, rather than telling them what to do. Most adults and teenagers we know do not like being told what they ‘need to do.’

A negative ‘trust spiral’ is hard to reverse once begun.

Why do many corporate managers misuse their authority to influence their people to choose new thoughts and behaviors?

Our observation is that many operate from a ‘command and control’ paradigm.

They interpret power as something imposed on others from the top down.

Reasons for many include their time in the military, growing up with overcontrolling parents, and more recently in the news, playing for NFL head coaches.

Experience in the military has ‘tainted’ the concept of leadership for many Americans.

They have no real clue how to influence their subordinates because, in the military, they were not attempting to connect, inspire and influence. They just gave orders, and their subordinates followed them. Their comfortable use of authority within the military’s hierarchical ‘command and control’ environment became a habit – they assumed people would do what they told them to do in the corporate world.

People only choose to follow people they trust.

Over the years, we have witnessed many didactic managers finding out too late that they had lost the room and subsequently lost their jobs.

Think about meetings you have attended where it is clear to you that the person at the head of the table has lost the room.

When we observe managers who have lost their rooms, our usual conclusion is they were oblivious to the emotional reactions of the people in the room.

People must grant a leader their cooperation for any idea to work.

They have to volunteer to follow.

People must grant a leader their cooperation for any idea to work.

They have to volunteer to follow.

It pains us to say this, but there are many things most ‘command and control’ oriented executives could learn about inspirational leadership from politicians.

Many politicians from both sides are much better at getting people to volunteer to follow them than most business leaders. However, in too many cases, their lust for power and lack of morality eventually causes many followers to lose trust in them.

It does beg the question, though, “why are politicians so much better at getting ‘volunteer’ followers than corporate managers?” First, politicians have to be good at influence because they have no authority over the voting of their constituents. Most political “spin doctors” understand the importance of controlling the story narrative – how the power of a story can be used to influence.

Political operatives know how to craft and tell stories that express empathy and vulnerability.

Politicians use stories to inspire, influence, and motivate people to choose new thoughts and behaviors. Yes, many of them have morality issues, but many corporate executives and managers have inspiration and connection issues, leading to trust issues.

The art of story is something that great leaders understand and encourage in their people. They know that being able to construct a narrative draws people in and helps them relate to you and your message.

-Rishad Tobaccowala - Author of Restoring the Soul of Business - staying HUMAN in the age of data

The best inspirational leaders we know are good at crafting and telling stories. Stories that inspire, stories that influence, stories that motivate people to choose new thoughts and behaviors.

You can’t make people change, but you can create a culture where they choose to.

Inspirational leaders understand how telling a good story can lead people to emotional conclusions.

If you decide to transform from a didactic manager to an inspirational leader, your first task is to build and practice your inventory of ORAL leadership stories.

Here are a few stories you can begin building and practicing today:

• ‘How I Got Here’ story
•  Why I Joined this Company’ story
•  ‘How Our Offering Empowers our Customers’ stories
•  ‘Mission/Vision/Values’ story(s) for your organization
•  ‘Post-Merger/Acquisition’ story

Effective stories possess certain key elements. They must be verbally expressed in a way that your potential audience, team member, or client identifies with the hero of that story and experiences the EMOTION of the story arc through that character.

We recommend using a company standard storyboard/story component methodology when building your stories. This will allow your organization to institutionalize best practices. First, craft them to be deliverable in 60 seconds or less. Then, if your listeners are participating, you can extend them.

Many of our workshop participants struggle with the 60-second objective. When we inform them that Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address lasted two minutes and two seconds, they begin to believe in brevity.

Inspirational leaders understand how telling a good story can lead people to emotional conclusions.

If you decide to transform from a didactic manager to an inspirational leader, your first task is to build and practice your inventory of ORAL leadership stories.

Here are a few stories you can begin building and practicing today:

• ‘How I Got Here’ story
•  Why I Joined this Company’ story
•  ‘How Our Offering Empowers our Customers’ stories
•  ‘Mission/Vision/Values’ story(s) for your organization
•  ‘Post-Merger/Acquisition’ story

Effective stories possess certain key elements. They must be verbally expressed in a way that your potential audience, team member, or client identifies with the hero of that story and experiences the EMOTION of the story arc through that character.

We recommend using a company standard storyboard/story component methodology when building your stories. This will allow your organization to institutionalize best practices. First, craft them to be deliverable in 60 seconds or less. Then, if your listeners are participating, you can extend them.

Many of our workshop participants struggle with the 60-second objective. When we inform them that Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address lasted two minutes and two seconds, they begin to believe in brevity.

Do not just build and practice these stories alone! Instead, make use of a trusted peer, subordinate or expert coach to listen to you and give you feedback on how they emotionally resonated with your story.

As you fine-tune your leadership stories, your power and influence will start ramping up noticeably. A good story informs but a GREAT story change how we feel, think, and what we choose to do.

Your entire organization will notice your improved ability to lead at scale.

• Here is a 14-minute TEDtalk by leadership consultant Karen Eber on how the best leaders earn trust and shape organizational culture through the power of storytelling and creating empathy.

Real influence, trust, and connection emanate from listening. Before you can be a connected leader, you must first become a connected listener – what we call a ‘story seeker.’

In our opinion, the very best thing you can do for your new managers is to teach them to become connected listeners.

Teach them how to build connections and trust with their direct reports by empathic, connective listening, verbally reflecting both content and feelings.

As with many talented people, great connected listeners do it intuitively. To get better at something, the first step is to admit to yourself you are not very good at it. We developed a way to teach most people who are not good intuitive listeners to use a listening framework. A model for seeking and verbally reflecting the stories of their team members.

One final story.

In a Story Seekers leadership workshop, the night two ‘homework’ assignment was to use the storyboard to tend the story of someone you love for 30 minutes. (We remind them not to share that they are doing a homework assignment.) Examples could be anywhere from “Tell me the story again of how you decided to leave your first husband” to “tell me about your day.” They are tasked with tending both the facts and emotions of each story element before they summarize and confirm, “Did I get You?”

The following morning, the vice president of Engineering for a manufacturing company shared his story-tending experience with his youngest daughter:

“I am the father of four daughters. The oldest three range from 18 to 23, and my youngest is 11. I went into her room after dinner, sat down, and asked her to “tell me what it’s like to be the youngest person in our family?” To make a long story short (call us if you want to hear the extended version), he vulnerably admitted to the group that he had never spent that long (45 minutes) one on one with that child. He had the whole room in tears.

How do managers grow and transform into inspirational and connected leaders?

Here are a few topics we cover in our Connected Leader workshops using experiential learning exercises with expert coaching.

• The importance of vulnerability, authenticity, and integrity to build trust
• The power of emotional reciprocity
• The power of story for influencing and inspiring most human beings
• Figuring out what stories they need in their repertoire as leaders
• A framework for practicing empathic, connected listening

As consultants to business leaders, we have observed that many have a predominant leadership style – either connecting or inspiring. What if you could get good at both? Over the years, when we experienced both those talents in one human being, that human being eventually started their own company!