Storytelling skills as a CoS
Telling a story, both digitally and verbally, is incredibly hard and takes a ton of practice. As a Chief of Staff, you will most likely be storytelling in a good portion of your job. Simplicity is important but details matter. Presentation format should be cohesive but if you get lost in design you’ll get lost in your story. Concise points will always be preferred but you need enough context for the audience to understand what you’re talking about. Commanding a room is a learned skill, and often out of your control. It comes naturally to some and still requires a lot of practice for everyone. Here are some of the different projects you will work on that require great storytelling, and 7 tips to get you started.
Storytelling in Practice
Storytelling will show up in a number of ways in your Chief of Staff role. Some include: board presentations, investor updates, internal meetings, sales presentations, event speaking notes, internal and external commuications, recommending an idea or product to a leader… the list goes on. It’s important to know how to organize the information you want to share in a compelling way, and deliver it well.
Storytelling Tips
"Tell them what you’re going to tell them. Then tell them. Then tell them what you told them." Meaning, structure your presentation this way: summary of what you're going to say, then the meat of the content, then a summary of what you shared.
First create your story, then build your visuals. This sounds simple, but it's not easy. Often when we are new at creating visual storytelling documents, it's instinctual to start with the design and the slides. This will lead to you trying to fit your story into a given visual and it will be difficult to do so, and diffucult to remember your story. If you first build your story, you will then be able to create visuals that guide the presentation along.
Building on # 2, rely on your slides/visuals to help you tell your story so that you don't need notes. Because you have built your slides to match your story, your slides can act as visual prompts to help guide your presentation. Basically think of your slides as notecards.
Remember to be consistent with branding, formatting, font, sizing, colors, etc. This may seem tedious or unimportant… but have you ever sat through a presentation with wording, grammar, and formatting off? Not only is it unprofessional but it’s distracting from the purpose of why you’re there.
Slides/visuals should be simple, varied, compelling, and nice to look at. Cohesive with brand, formatting should be varied at least slightly from page to page, and visuals (photo, graph, grid, heatmap, icons) help a lot.
Verbal presentations should be practiced, timed, and presented calmly, slowly, and with room for discussion as you go. Smile, make eye contact, and treat it as a well-rehearsed conversation.
For verbal presentations, if you forget something - keep going! The people you are presenting to won't know what you left out, only what you include. If you had 5 great points but only delivered 4 of them - to them you had 4 great points.
Looking for more? Check out the Chief of Staff Certification for more practical tips and real-life on-the-job practice to prepare you for a CoS role.