The impact of Storytelling on Leadership Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

The impact of Storytelling on Leadership - Essay Example Many people have perfected the art of storytelling and have become more widespread and more powerful than data and figures. In the contemporary society, all human knowledge is based on the stories that people listen to in their daily life. The human brain can be said to consist of the cognitive memory that helps people to understand and remember stories. According to Kouzes and Barry (10), storytelling has various impacts on the leadership of any organization in that stories teach people on different lessons. Stories help people learn on how to tackle the daily challenges that arise on a daily basis. Leaders are forced by circumstances to make critical decisions under instances of extreme emergencies for example the firefighters or critical care nurses who are required to make decisions in the shortest time possible. Under the emergency situations, leaders do not use the universal classic model for decision making but instead they use a non-linear approach that entails the use of intuition, and mental motivation (Fog 49). Kouzes and Barry (19) points out that through storytelling, lessons learnt from highly complex and the most challenging situations are passed down to other people. Stories that are meant to transfer knowledge are supposed to be true and objective since its main objective is to transfer knowledge to the audience and not generating any action. In this context therefore, stories that are meant to teach the audience tend to elaborate on the drawbacks of ignorance and cause the people make right decisions when seeking knowledge. Glassner (9) affirms that stories are usually effective tools that can be used in education since listeners can easily become engaged and therefore be able to remember. The audience become engaged and therefore is able to create new perspectives thus inviting new perspectives thus inviting new perspectives that can help individuals to transform their lives.