Leah's Leadership Guide - Part 1: Storytelling
Leah's Leadership Guide - Part 1: Storytelling
How language, credibility and simplicity are tablestakes for any great leader
Hi, my name is Leah Tharin, and this is my Substack: hot takes on product-led growth/sales and organizational scaling.
I advise companies on how to not burn everything down in the process. I run cohorts on PLG every two months; join me!
I wrote an article on the topic of why Alignment is at the heart of every great leader; it was one of my most-read articles to date:
Leadership, to me, is about leading people in a given direction, not necessarily managing them. At the heart of it is the art of creating alignment and inspiring people to move.
While I think that every manager is, to some degree, a leader, not every leader has direct reports, and IC Leadership (leading without managing people) has been a huge unlock in my career to understand that you lead more people than you manage.
In this 5 part series, I’ll dive into each one of these critical components:
Great Storytelling (This article)
Experimentation skill to learn, not succeed (coming soon)
Part 1: Great Storytelling
If alignment is the direction we are all pulling towards together, then Inspiration is the fuel that gets us there.
To inspire people, we need to know how to communicate our intentions, and great storytelling is an underappreciated tool for any leader in this regard.
If you were a company, then storytelling is your marketing department. No matter how great your product (your ideas and stories) is, if you can’t tell someone why they should bother trying it out, then they won’t.
Great storytelling is not to convince an audience of a different viewpoint. It’s to make them consider it.
Enough information to have an inner dialogue with whatever I said to decide whether they accept or refute it. If they accept it, there is a chance for a change of action in that person’s life.
To “maximize” this chance, great storytelling has three obstacles to overcome:
Can people understand what I say → Language
Can people believe what I say → Credibility
Can people retain what I say → Bandwidth
Language
The language we use is much more diverse than, for instance, English vs Spanish. It’s how simple or complex we choose to talk about what we talk about.
To find the right language, we must know who we talk to and in what context.
Respect your audience
A concept I learned relatively late in my career when it comes to managing and leading others is that giving yourself 5 minutes before every presentation or important conversation to ground yourself is doing wonders:
Who am I talking to
What is their context right now? (After lunch, listening to another presentation, weekend?)
What will be important to them before they can listen?
But the operational reality is that we’re a couple of minutes late to every meeting. “Sorry, back to back.” “I hope you don’t mind that I’m late.”
And usually, people do not mind. But the real problem is that you just came from a different context and may not have had time to think about the above points. So you just wing the standard program.
But you’re leaving something important on the table; let’s look at them one by one:
Who am I talking to? Seniority and topic familiarity
Knowing who you talk to sets the tone you employ and the depth of your message. As you would when marketing a product, we adjust our story to the recipient, not the sender.
A simple frame of mind here is to consider two dimensions. Seniority and topic familiarity.
How senior are the people in my audience? I like to gear whatever I say to the ‘lower’ end of the group regarding complexity.
How familiar with the topic is my audience? This is a tricky one, especially as a head of anything for example.
In my recent role at Jua as a Head of Product, I was constantly surprised by how much I overestimated the familiarity of people with a given topic:
I talked about company strategy almost daily with the other executives and leaders in the company. And yet when I did surveys about these topics with our employees, it turned out that they were confused about key aspects of our strategy.
This was not a problem of their seniority but that they were just not that familiar with the topic on a day-to-day basis.
I’ve given a couple dozen presentations on product-led growth in 2023 alone at this point, and I have to force myself all the time to at least give a short and simple introduction to what the term means, no matter who I speak to. Not a single time did I get feedback: “That explanation was unnecessary.”
Assume that you overestimate peoples familiarity with a topic.
Abbreviations
Abbreviations are a great point to illustrate this: You say “SQL!” - you mean sales qualified leads - and there are three possibilities:
They are understood correct. You sound smart
They are misunderstood and create confusion because for your engineers SQL is a query language and not a sales-qualified lead. It takes time to realize, “Hmm, that doesn’t make sense”; it results in unnecessary cognitive load.
They never heard that term before and wondered what it could mean. Frantic googling ensues, and more attention is paid somewhere else.
I sometimes have this problem when introducing new abbreviations in my material. PQLs (product-qualified leads) and PQAs (product-qualified accounts) are great examples.
No matter how well I introduce them initially, it takes time for my audience to learn a new word.
Even if they know what a lead is and a product-qualified lead… if you start to weave abbreviations into sentences, you risk losing attention.
For instance:
“I’m not a fan of how we handle MQLs. We should focus on PQLs, who live inside of PQAs, they are an important tool to track and execute the entire buyer journey.”
Even if you understand all of these abbreviations, if you don’t use them daily like I do, it will take you time and energy to decipher the sentence. All while I keep talking, and you’re still thinking. Another presentation where you can’t quite follow but are afraid of saying something because… you also don’t want to look like someone that doesn’t know.
None of this is news to you. But chances are you’re not noticing what’s common to you and alien to your audience:
When in the slightest doubt, don’t use abbreviations. Your goal is not to finish fast. Spell it out. Talk in the language of your audience.
If we talk about longer-form content like a book or a blog post, it is still good practice to spell it out at least the first couple of times.
You will have people giving you negative feedback, “I didn’t know all these abbreviations. It was confusing.”
But you won’t hear, “I wish you would have used more abbreviations.”
People appreciate common language.
Context: Adjust to the moment
Any time you step in front of people, whether that’s your team, the entire company, or a room full of strangers… something happened before that and will happen after that.
Sometimes, you can make little adjustments to fit in better:
If you speak after someone else at a conference or in a meeting marathon
Can you reference something from the talk your audience listened to beforehand as a relevant opener?
The meeting right after your talk is their lunch
Keeping people from their food by going over time is not the best thing
A practical example is from a high-impact keynote I gave in Brazil as the last presentation after two days of a back-to-back program. I knew I had to wake my audience up since I was going last:
“Why the f*** does our Esign product not sell in Brazil?”
It was my first content slide.
I clarified with the organizers and some audience members how light-hearted I could be since I didn’t know how appropriate it was to swear on stage in Brazil.
I included an anecdote that was very specific to my Brazilian audience and said the swear word on that slide in Portuguese, and people loved it.
I’m not advocating using swearing as your weapon of choice; the takeaway here is that spending a little bit of time to show your audience that you care about them can go a long way to start.
In this case, I paid homage to who they were and that they probably were tired from listening to everything else that day.
What is important for your audience? Preface it.
I’ve been through a couple of reorganizations in my professional life, both as the person who had to communicate it and as the one who had to experience it suddenly as an operator.
The feelings that I remember from the ones where I was on the receiving end are not good.
These meetings were often structured in a way that they told us for 30 minutes how tough the economic situation was, some other facts that we simply didn’t care about, and how incredibly hard all of this was for them.
Whether you communicate something good or bad, the fact remains that if you don’t think beforehand about what’s essential for your audience, you have a big chance of missing your goals altogether.
For instance, in the example of a reorganization/layoffs, employees care about three things:
Is my job and pay safe?
Who is my new manager?
Who will be my new team and surroundings? Are my colleagues safe?
Cut the crap. Deliver clear answers to most people's top three questions almost immediately. The “why” can and should follow, but you will not have their undivided attention until you ensure the answers (and your position on them) to the above questions.
If there are pressing questions like these, answer them first. Otherwise, people just zone out and wait for those points to appear.
Credibility
If your language is your marketing department, then your credibility is the actual product. Marketing cannot fix a broken product.
Phrases that sound dishonest, like “we have to cut our costs a little” while people lose their jobs, will be sent immediately in the inofficial WhatsApp company chat that you are not part of.
In that case, you tried to soften the blow by minimizing people’s concerns through your language. And people see through it immediately.
Don’t dress up a bad product. If you have bad news to deliver, the only antidote to that is to address it head-on.
Get to the point fast.
My mother had a talent for upsetting me before she got to the point of what she wanted to talk about:
“Don’t get mad, Leah, but I need to tell you something,” Which usually entailed an unnecessary two-minute speech that was followed by the actual request. Cleaning up my room or something else that’s ordinary. Like any child, I didn’t listen to the two-minute speech before that. I got mad because she told me not to get mad, and I rolled my eyes profusely.
And just as I knew the structure of my mother's storytelling, so do the people around you know yours.
I like to keep things as simple as I can.
The last two bigger strategies that I had to communicate had a really simplistic first principles summary. I didn’t give people a 30-minute introduction on the methodology first and then the learnings.
Don’t explain why pigs can fly or prepare me slowly for the reality that pigs can fly. Show your audience first that the pig does fly. Make a simple, challengeable statement, for instance:
“Pigs fly. We give them wings.”
(Pause)
Give people time to digest it. Let them think.
If I tell a room full of senior executives that we need to escape upmarket in the next two years, they know what that means.
The same message to the entire company requires an explanation of what upmarket means and a longer pause to digest what that means for their context and work.
Reasoning & Making a Case
Consider this first part the trailer of a movie. How well you reason your points now is the entire movie.
Instead of trying to “sell” your audience on whatever you claim, it helps to be very selective on your arguments and shine a light on the weak points.
For instance, when I talk about product-led growth, I pay a lot of attention to making a few strong arguments for it instead of dozens.
I also include proactively the most common concerns where product-led growth simply doesn’t work. I don’t try to argue against those concerns. Instead of drinking the cool aid I usually assume the “it depends” position.
Find a good balance between why your story is special, but don’t become an unreflected fan of your own stuff. Making three good arguments usually wins over ten good and a bad one.
Your credibility overall will suffer if you make a really weak argument that people (rightfully) latch on. They won’t remember the good ones in that case.
Cut the weak points or proactively admit that they exist. Honesty, along with vulnerability, is the best foundation for lasting credibility.
Real and fake vulnerability
I didn’t get the message about vulnerability for most of my professional life. I was too focused on constantly giving the impression that I was perfect.
Talking explicitly about mistakes you made and that you don’t have everything under control is important. Or simply admitting that you’re not sure about something.
But be honest about it:
Fake vulnerability as a tool to make yourself seem to be part of your audience when you aren’t is just as harmful as appearing overly perfect
The best example of this that I can think of is influencers on social media conjuring up made-up stories to appear relatable or executives pretending to be working like operative ICs.
You can usually spot those by their being nonspecific. They also tell you how you should feel about them: “I was fired from my job once, and it was terrible.”
A good storytelling mantra (which I also use for PLG) comes to mind here: Show, don’t tell. If you did get fired, be as specific as you can, and don’t tell people that it was terrible; describe the actual circumstances. If you’re truthful, they will convey that it was indeed terrible.
Let’s go again to the layoff example. As an executive who announces layoffs, you’re not in the same position as your audience. No amount of storytelling will change that. You may feel terrible about it, and people might appreciate you showing emotions, but there is a time and place for it.
Some are about to lose their job (context), and you’re probably not. Most of the time, it’s not about you; don’t try to make it about you if it isn’t.
Bandwidth
The final obstacle if we talk the same language and are credible in what we say is our audience bandwidth.
Simply put, the amount of information your audience can retain is limited. You can only influence one part of this equation: the information.
I think about this in two dimensions:
Amount - How much and what you want your audience to remember
Simplicity - How good you are at summarizing it
Amount - Stick to what you want to move
Whether we stand in front of a big audience on a stage or in an intimate one-on-one setting, or simply convey our ideas through a document… there are expectations from both sides.
Presentations in front of strangers are a good example of what we think is important when it isn’t:
Most stage talks start in the same format:
An introduction of the speaker: the speaker goes on stage…
Introduce themselves again.
Then, the topic.
Hopefully, applause from happy people.
We love telling others who we are. To give credibility so others believe our competence. To give context. It’s how we do things. But it costs attention:
I gave a talk two months ago at Productized in front of a 500-person product audience. Some of them knew me, but most probably didn’t.
My first slide was this:
Followed by this one:
The full presentation on Youtube, on product-led growth (25min)
There was no introduction. It was uncomfortable at first but I thought to myself: I wouldn’t really care who the speaker is, I want to see what they offer first, then I maybe care. I come to these talks for the insights, not people’s CVs.
The amount of time I obsessed over my introduction slide in every presentation, podcast, and all-hands meeting for the first time… Does it really matter that much?
Probably not. It’s good to tell people who you are for sure if they want to follow up with you. But no one cares anymore about what I did 20 years ago at Microsoft. They will care, though, if the next 30 minutes of my talk make them go, “Oh, that’s really interesting/relevant to me.”
It shows how important it “feels” to us to tell others who we are and how much time we dedicate to it. Many of us have this bias of overemphasizing self-presentation when it’s really not about us.
Trusting your material and that things move in the right direction for everyone in the room instead of your credentials is tough but an important fundament of great storytelling.
It’s about the value we deliver or the alignment we’re trying to create. Talking about something irrelevant occupies bandwidth unnecessarily.
Do your homework on the few things that matter.
Just as in the previous section about credibility, the more you cut the crap the more likely people will retain what you tell them. You would be surprised at how little people can retain vs what you were talking about.
No one keeps you from moving in-depth data and extra material into links for people to study afterward. Including these as a good practice helps you, as the storyteller, to cut the crap.
Simplicity & Summarizing
There is one thing that I wish people would master: summarizing and keeping things simple.
Keeping things simple means to cut the crap not only overall but also per individual point. It takes me a long time to simplify a message to the point where it just rolls off as a sentence instead of five slides:
Whether you use visual aids or summarize in a document, it’s sometimes about giving an overview before you hit someone with the full thing. In this example, I used this visual representation to align teams on the processes/meeting structures we used:
This one started as a vast document describing all meetings in detail. The overview summary in visual form helped to put everything into context and was very important to create alignment. It did not replace but enriched the overall document with detailed explanations.
One of the most popular slides I use at the end of every presentation is this summary slide. I summarize, again, what it means to do product-led growth for the different functions in a company.
I’ve made these points multiple times throughout the presentation when they see this slide. But I want people to remember these three points as a minimum. This is what I leave them with:
I make these points at the beginning of my presentation as a promise of what’s to come. (Marketing & Language)
Then, I use the body of my presentation to explain why I believe them to be true (Product & Credibility)
The summary slide and explanation at the end is to reinforce the key learnings from point 1 again. (Bandwidth & Simplicity)
It’s up to you, but summarizing and simplifying is, in the end, hard work that pays off.
At this point in my career, I have a lot of experience in summarizing, but no matter how efficient I am compared to anyone else, I still need to invest time and remind myself constantly:
I probably overestimate my audience’s bandwidth and underestimate the complexity of my topic.
Summary
It’s difficult to be a good storyteller, but if you can’t communicate at a certain level, you will struggle to be a good leader. At the very least, try to remember for high-stakes communications:
Can people understand what I say → Language
Can people believe what I say → Credibility
Can people retain what I say → Bandwith
What’s next?
That’s it for the first part of this 5 part series on this Leadership guide, stay subscribed if you want to be notified about the next one in the series
Great Storytelling (This article)
Experimentation skill to learn, not succeed (coming soon)
Very helpful!
As a senior-level IC, I find it challenging to determine the appropriate amount of context to include in my reports. When communicating upwards, I tend to write in a concise, bullet-point style to provide information. However, when communicating with peers or subordinates, I prioritize providing more detailed context to better facilitate understanding.
I often received feedback that my reports were too long, causing colleagues to skip them. However, if they were too short, my documents were flooded with comments asking for more context.
I’ve begun writing TLDRs at the beginning of my reports and create slide decks to provide the complete story in a shorter and more reader-friendly format.
It’s been more work for me, but it allows my colleagues, up and down, to receive my message in a format that best suits them and their situation.