For several years, StoryCorps has been running stories of everyday people on National Public Radio, and in the process has evoked memories of people coping and celebrating the challenges and joys that life presents.

While StoryCorps is focused on personal stories, it teaches us key lessons that leaders can practice.

One, listen to one another. StoryCorps invites relatives as well as close friends to venture into their special recording booths to tell their stories via personal interviews. Leaders need no booths or recording devices. They simply need time. And time is what few leaders have, but savvy ones realize that if they can carve out time for their people, dividends in the form of information and insight are valuable. Surveys and polls cannot share the up-close and personal views that individuals carry with them. Listening in can open the leader’s ears to what is happening as well as what is not happening.

Two, share your experience. StoryCorps interviewees become interpreters of unique experiences, such as coping with loss, raising a child, caring for an elderly person, or helping a neighbor. A bond between interviewer and interviewee is shared by radio listeners. The same can occur, but much more directly, when leaders sit down and converse with their people. Genuine leaders are those who can make their listeners feel as if they are the only people in the room. That creates a foundation of trust that is essential to getting things done right, especially in tough times.

There is a third lesson, as evidenced by the vast collection of stories gathered by StoryCorps: all of us have a story to tell. Leaders need to spread the stories of their people as a means of creating meaning as well as purpose to their organization. These stories come in all flavors. Celebrate the good things that employees do for customers. Most often this comes through in customer service people going the extra mile for their customers. But they also come in the stories of volunteerism. So many organizations encourage their people to participate in community service programs, even on company time. The best way to encourage such participation is to allow people to share their stories through the corporate website. Do it via podcast or simple videos, or simple newsletter items.

Stories, as StoryCorps reminds us, are acts of sharing that enables others to gain insight into your own personal experience. Leaders who spread stories are encouraging the practice of learning in ways that extend behind words to create experiences reinforce organizational culture and purpose.

Photo courtesy www.sxc.hu.

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