Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Despite the well-documented power of storytelling, far too many leaders and organizations are nothing short of awful at telling stories that make authentic connections to what people care about the most. Leaders commonly prep for change by creating catchy tag lines, slogans and rallying cries to communicate their ideas.

These sound bites might be rich with data, numbers, statistics, and analytic driven acronyms, but they’re devoid of authentic meaning. The end result? Seventy percent of the workforce is left phoning it in because their leaders haven’t told a compelling story that makes them feel connected to their jobs or the company as a whole. Consider this: if engagement scores haven’t changed in 30 years and we still have the vast majority of people sleep-walking through their work-a-day-life, something is not working....

Martin Luther King Jr. seems more legend than man.

But if we peer into Dr. King's life, we can see that he was more and less than myth: a person with interior complexity and exterior grace beyond what a textbook can tell you. So let's get to know his intense, hilarious, and prescient sides below.

HE WORKED WITH HIS ANGER

MLK was a person, which means he had a range of emotions, just like the rest of us. But, as we've mentioned before, the highest functioning people exercise what psychologists call emotional agility, where you notice an emotion like anger when it arises and then choose a response—rather than suppressing it or getting overwhelmed....

Here’s a question. What is leadership? And why, though we seem to train and indoctrinate people in it, and when that doesn’t work, beat people over the head with it, don’t we seem to be able produce many leaders worth following? Here’s my tiny theory: because much, maybe most, of what we suppose, assume, and believe is leadership isn’t.

A morally conflicted world is in desperate need of moral leadership. A way of life that offers us convenience — but is costing us the planet. Technology that delights us — but takes our jobs. Economies that reward us — but frustrate us with stagnation. Tribes we compete to belong to — which cost us ourselves. Social contracts which are broken — but no one quite knows how to rewrite. Such are the fraught moral dilemmas of the age....

Work customs and culture vary from country to country. For instance, meeting attendees in the U.S. seat themselves in no particular order around the conference table. But if the most junior person on the team were to take the seat farthest from the door in Japan? That's a no-no. This behavior flies in the face of Japanese custom, where the seating arrangement is determined by professional seniority (the most senior people sit farthest from the door, and the most junior people closest).

But while there are no doubt differences in work styles around the world, there are also similarities. After surveying nearly 200 leaders located in 15 different countries, Quantum Leadership Group recently discovered the most important leadership trait worldwide: High ethical and moral standards.In a Harvard Business Review article covering the data,

Sunnie Giles, president of Quantum Leadership Group, categorized this response along with the third most important trait ("clearly communicates expectations") as qualities that "creat[e] a safe and trusted environment."...