Storytelling isn't one skill. It's three.
Look at almost any job description right now and you’ll spot it. Product roles. Marketing. Sales. Customer success. UX. People and culture. Even some analyst and engineering JDs. Whether you’ve been hiring, job-hunting, or just scrolling LinkedIn out of curiosity, the word turns up everywhere.
The data backs up what you’ve been seeing. According to LinkedIn data reported in The Wall Street Journal, the percentage of US job postings mentioning “storyteller” doubled in the year to late November 2025. “Strong communicator” – once the boilerplate phrase in any leadership role – is being quietly replaced by something more specific. Organisations have decided storytelling is no longer a soft skill. It’s a competency.
Here’s the bit most haven’t worked out yet: writing the word into a JD doesn’t put it in the team.
Because storytelling, the way it actually shows up in a working organisation, isn’t one skill. It’s three. And most development plans – whether for a team or for yourself – only cover the most obvious one. At The Pickering Group, we focus on the following:
The Spotlight Story. The short, illuminating personal anecdote a leader uses to bring a point to life – the customer call that changed their thinking, the project that nearly derailed, the moment they got it wrong. Most leaders dismiss these as too small. They’re the most powerful stories they’ve got. The five-step anecdote generator I share is built entirely around finding and shaping them.
The Story Map. A structural skill, not a creative one. The ability to take a long, complex piece of communication – a strategy, a pitch, a quarterly update – and shape it as a narrative arc rather than a deck of bullet points.
Story-listening. The least-trained of the three, and the one that turns storytelling from a broadcast skill into a leadership one. Story-listening is the discipline of inviting your people’s stories into the conversation, not just sharing your own. Leaders who do this well build commitment, not compliance. They surface the stories the organisation already has – and channel them.
If your team’s competency framework – or your own development plan – lists “storytelling” as a single bullet point, there’s more work to do than you think. The good news is, all three are learnable. The better news is, they compound.
If you’re thinking about lifting storytelling capability across a team, our Leading with Stories programme is built around exactly these three skills. And if you’re a past participant looking to sharpen up – or want a refresher on the Story Map or anecdote generator – drop me a line. Always happy to talk story.
Spotlight Stories, Story Maps and story-listening are the three skills Leading with Stories is built on. Leading with Stories runs in-house, for leadership teams, anywhere in New Zealand. Tell us about your team.
Russell Pickering – founder of The Pickering Group, author of Step into the Spotlight.