Storytelling has a remarkable ability to connect people and inspire them to take action. They provide context and structure that aid in understanding complex ideas. By presenting information within a narrative framework, storytelling helps people visualize concepts more effectively. People remember stories when they include both positive and negative emotions.

The most compelling narratives honor the past, help us understand the need for change, and offer practical ways forward. They are a crucial step to harness your organization’s energy and direct it toward strategic change.

Behaviours are the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for organization values. They provide the framework and metrics for assessing leadership and the culture it creates. However, defining these everyday behaviours can prove to be a challenging exercise. Behaviours are tangible expressions of values, the actions we can see or hear, and are the building blocks of a thriving organizational culture. They are objective, meaning that two people could describe it the same way. Behaviours can be recorded by a video camera.

Leadership development is one of the key ways successful organizations can become more strategic and operate even more effectively. As an executive, I sponsored and was part of a number of really great executive development programs as well as some that were interesting and fun but didn’t yield the long term impact that we hoped for. What I observe as the difference to success was integrating the program into everyday business so that leaders can put ideas and concepts into practice with real activities or experiments to make progress.

When your leaders have the opportunity to work on real topics that matter to the organization and themselves, your leadership program can have lasting impact and reinforce the culture you want.

Here are six principles to consider when building your leadership development program

Effective leadership teams and strategy go together and each strengthens the other. It’s hard to be a team working together towards the same future without clarity of purpose, priorities and how we define and measure success. To have your team truly operate as team vs a working group, its essential that the team also has clear vision they are working together to achieve.

One paradox we face as leaders is how difficult decisions get made effectively with our teams – we know it’s helpful to gather perspectives to inform better decisions and yet we are also supposed to be bold and act decisively – so which is it? I think the answer is in the choices we make between these two polarities to fit the situation at hand.