Kristiana Corona:
Today we're gonna dive into seven of the most common influence gaps and how you can start turning those around for your team
Ever feel like everyone else has leadership figured out and you're just making it up as you go? I've been there. I spent two decades leading design and technology teams at Fortune 500 companies, and for years, I looked like I had everything pulled together on the outside. But on the inside, I felt burned out, overwhelmed, and unworthy of the title leader.
Then, a surprise encounter with executive coaching changed my life and dramatically improved my leadership style and my results. Now, I help others make that same shift in their leadership. This podcast is where we do the work, building the mindset, the coaching skills, and the confidence to lead with clarity and authenticity, and to finally feel worthy to lead from the inside out
Hello, and welcome back to the Worthy to Lead podcast. I'm your host, Kristiana Corona. So glad you're here to join us for today. So my goal for today is to have a deeper conversation about a really important topic that I've seen come up over and over, over the past 20 years as I've helped lead innovation for design and technology teams at Fortune 500 companies.
That topic is strategic influence and storytelling. There are so many brilliant leaders in design, in engineering, in product, in marketing, in research who have big ideas that could actually change the trajectory of the business, but they have no idea how to pitch those ideas to get buy-in from executives.
And so what happens is they fail to connect the dots, and those ideas die in the conference rooms before they ever get explored. That is a really frustrating pattern and one that I'm determined to see change because companies can't afford to lose those big ideas or those big thinkers, especially with AI accelerating the pace of innovation.
Today, we're gonna dive into seven of the most common influence gaps and how you can start turning those around for your team. This work was inspired more than 10 years ago by a partnership that I did with Techstars Accelerators at Target, and I've used these strategies ever since. We took the strategies that helped startups gain funding and translated those into what actually works in the real world for tech teams inside of corporate environments.
I'll share the gaps to watch for, the reasons why corporate storytelling can feel so unnatural, and a free resource that you can use to start supporting your team's executive influence today. With that, let's dive in. First off, I want to share a story that will probably sound familiar. In one of my recent storytelling workshops, I worked with a leader whose ideas kept getting shot down consistently.
I'll call her Carla. Carla had spent weeks preparing for this pitch, and she knew the information backwards and forwards. Her slides were polished, and she had spent time preparing in advance, so she knew exactly what she wanted to say. So she got to the room, and she took a deep breath, and she started presenting.
A few minutes in, she took a pulse and looked around the room, and her heart started to sink. Everyone had their head down. There were people who were clearly multitasking, and then someone had put in the chat, "Didn't we try this last year and it failed?" Another person raised their hand and interrupted to say, "How does this actually relate to our organizational goal of increasing customer acquisition by twenty-five percent in the next quarter?"
And then the final kicker: the executive with final decision-making authority had a conflict and had to leave early, so they didn't even get to hear the end of her presentation. Carla was totally deflated. All of that effort, and the idea never even got off the ground. Does that sound familiar? Because Carla's not alone.
This is happening in conference rooms everywhere, every single day. A study by the Project Management Institute and the Boston Consulting Group, published through MIT Sloan Management Review, looked at what determines whether a project outcome is going to be successful. And guess what? It wasn't the size of the team, it wasn't the size of the budget, and it wasn't whether the team had headcount to do the work.
It was whether that project had an actively engaged executive who was willing to sponsor the effort. Think about what that means. That means you could have all the right ideas and all the right talent on the team to build exactly what you want to build But the work could still stall out without a leader in the room who is willing to champion it, and that sponsorship can be won or lost in the way that your team shows up as believable strategic influencers or not.
See, Carla is brilliant at her craft, and she knows the customer problem very well. And she wasn't unprepared. She had simply done what so many talented people do. She had prepared a presentation when what the room actually needed was a story. I like to call these influence gaps. I'm going to cover seven of the most common influence gaps where ideas are just lost in translation as you're trying to influence upwards.
As I run through these, think back about the influence moments that you've been a part of and see if you recognize any of these. Number one, they spend too much time on all the project details. They walk through every detail of how the work got made from beginning to end to somehow showing all of their homework as proof of their competence.
But sharing that laundry list of activities is treating this meeting like a glorified status update. It's not giving the executives anything that they actually need. Meanwhile, the executives are just waiting to hear about why this work matters, what the risks are, and what is it that you actually need from them.
Failing to give a crisp executive overview is a surefire way to lose the room. Second, they never make a clear ask. They don't come right out and say, "This is why we're here, and this is what we need." Instead, those asks stay buried at the end of the presentation in the next steps or even on the last slide instead of leading with the main point up front.
Inevitably, executives will get distracted as we all do. They'll have conflicts. They'll have to leave early, and they won't even get to hear the punchline. The goal is to frame up the ask right at the beginning with clarity, so there's no surprises about why you're there and what it is that you want.
Three: They bury all the insights. They create dense slides with paragraphs of copy, and they have generic headlines like "Our Research Process." Instead, the goal is to create golden takeaways in clear, precise headlines, with clear headlines like you would read in the news that are very shareable and easy to transfer into the next meeting.
Each slide should be concise and clean and share one thing that matters. Without that, the cognitive load is so high that it's almost a guarantee that they won't remember anything. Number four, they fail to connect the dots to strategic goals. How does this work align to what we've committed to in our one-year, three-year, or five-year plans?
How does this support our goals of delighting the customer or improving operational efficiency? Without drawing a direct line to the KPIs and organizational goals, the connection will get lost. Most leaders assume that everyone knows what those goals are and will connect the dots automatically, but that doesn't happen, so you need to be explicit.
Five, they don't demonstrate impact using data and evidence. I'm sure you've heard things like, "We think that this is a good idea. We think this will work," or, "Customers said that they wanted this." All of those things are opinions. They're not evidence. Without the right data and customer insights, this will not stand up to scrutiny.
Great pitches must be quantifiable and grounded in data. And if you don't have the data, go find someone who does. And if they don't have the data, go test your ideas and gather that data in real time because that is the thing that will land your story or not. And if they don't have the data, go collect that data through experimentation and testing.
Find ways to make this concrete because without data, you don't have a story, full stop. Number six, they miss making an emotional connection. Perhaps they have all the facts and all the data, but they never went through, what was the customer journey actually like? What were the pain points that they felt?
Where within the organization are things falling apart? Or what is the risk if we just do nothing? You want to make your audience feel the pain of the way things are today and the relief that your solution brings. One of the most important elements of storytelling is making people feel something.
Here's a crazy fact: fifty to seventy percent of the new information that we take into our brains each day is lost or forgotten within twenty-four hours. There's just so much noise and so much competition for our attention. So what are we to do with that? Well, if you make a connection to something emotional, it changes the way that your brain actually encodes that information and makes it easier for them to remember and recall later, and it's more likely to motivate them to take action.
The before-and-after transformation of your solution must feel visceral, or it's a guarantee that they won't remember anything. And number seven, the last one, which is probably the biggest gap that I see, is a failure to anticipate objections. The moment they get challenged or asked a tough follow-up question, they suddenly get flustered or intimidated or even defensive.
They aren't sure how to respond, which is an instant way for people to start losing trust. However, if they take the time to consider the point of view of their executives, what is it that they care about most? What are they most concerned about? What is keeping them up at night? And they think about ways to respond to those things in advance, it can change the entire outcome of a presentation.
In fact, the best pitches actually weave the answers to those objections into the storytelling narrative itself. They also include the voices of stakeholders and other experts and consult with them ahead of time so that their points of view are woven into the narrative as well. Helping your team anticipate and prepare for objections is probably the most effective way for you to help them increase their strategic influence.
Now, as we went through this list of seven, if you recognized a few of these different gaps on your team, it's really important that you do something about it now. Because if these gaps persist and your leaders continue to walk out of the room discouraged, they're going to stop bringing big ideas to the table.
They're going to decide that it's not worth the effort to keep getting shot down again and again. They won't bring those big, daring, innovative ideas that your organization desperately needs, and these cycles of failed attempts are costing you more than you think. First, your best people are going to start to disengage.
Repeated rejections with no clear path to improvement breeds discontent and then disengagement and eventually turnover. You end up losing the very people that you most want to keep because they feel like their voices aren't being heard. Also, you become a bottleneck. Every important decision has to be championed by you, their leader, because the team does not yet have the credibility to carry the work forward on their own.
That puts a ceiling on how much your organization can accomplish, and it requires you to stay in your role because you don't have a successor that can viably show up in the boardroom the way that you do. And finally, what happens? Your competitors start to gain the advantage because every quarter that your team is wasting, spinning, trying to get approvals from executives, your competitors are launching things that could disrupt the industry.
The good news is this is a very learnable skill, and once your team learns it, it is durable for a lifetime. But it begs the question: Why don't we naturally operate this way and become effective at storytelling within corporations when we want to pitch our big ideas? We're smart. We have expertise. We've had plenty of practice presenting.
Shouldn't this just come naturally? So here's the catch. When your team is deeply skilled in their craft, they lean into what they know best, and that is where their confidence lives. So when they're under pressure, they go immediately into the details and the process and how we work, because those are the things that they're super confident in, and that's their comfort zone.
Presenting in this new way, stripped down to a few precise and clear points, takes far more time and mental cognition, and for some leaders, it can feel completely foreign. It's like giving a performance on a stage. That is very uncomfortable for many people, and so they retreat to the safety of the details without realizing what it is costing them in strategic influence.
When storytelling is done well, it instantly engages the listener You're so deeply immersed in the flow of the story, you don't even know what's happening. And from the outside, it can feel effortless, but on the inside, it's often not. So if this feels uncomfortable for you or for anyone on your team, just know this is a very normal part of the process.
Any leader that you admire as a public speaker has done far more work preparing behind the scenes than you are even aware of. And corporate storytelling is an art form that is very learnable, especially when you have a repeatable framework and plenty of practice. Your team can gain fluency much faster than you think, and this is exactly what happened for Carla.
When she came to my innovation storytelling workshop, she was ready for change and ready to try a new approach. During that workshop, she learned a repeatable process for building a pitch that actually gets funded. Based on the best practices that I learned through that collaboration with Techstars Accelerators, we cover everything that stands between a good idea and a yes.
The evidence, the strategic alignment, the objections, the audience, the performance, and the story that ties everything together. Once your leaders rework their pitches this way, they're going to start seeing entirely different outcomes. They're going to experience increased engagement. They're going to see more discussion and debate, the good kind.
Their partners are going to start advocating for their work and prioritizing that work and showing up and defending it. And the best part is that executives are going to show up already interested because your team has built a reputation for being strategic, and because they've already heard about the idea from their peers before the meeting even starts.
None of this requires becoming a different person. It doesn't require you to become an extrovert or have endless charisma. What it comes from is structured practice. And as your team practices, something deeper starts to shift in how they see themselves. They go from asking for permission and hoping for buy-in to becoming strategic voices that belong in the room and partner to make decisions.
They're there to help the business make the right call, and they start to carry themselves with a different level of authority, no matter their title. Executives start to notice this difference immediately because what they're really evaluating is trust. They're asking themselves, "Does this person understand how I think?
Do they know what matters most to this organization? And can I trust them to own the work and actually move it forward?" As I've taught these skills, I've watched leaders go from zero strategic influence to earning a seat at the table two and three levels above them. So much of this shift is deeper than learning a new skill.
It's creating an identity as a strategic, trusted advisor, and that is honestly what I'm most excited to develop in leadership teams because it can unlock a whole new level of organizational change. Before we wrap this up, I want to leave you with something that you can start using with your team right away.
The next time someone on your team is preparing for a big pitch or a high-influence moment, there's a short set of questions that you can walk through to identify any influence gaps and help them prepare. You'll talk about identifying the ask and where to position that within the presentation, who the key stakeholders are and what do each of them care about, connection to organizational priorities, handling objections before they're even raised, and so much more.
I pulled all of these into a free guide that you can download for your next one-on-one. You'll find that guide at worthytolead.co/influenceguide. And once you've had a chance to use it and see how it works with the team, you may find that you want some additional support and training to help really embed these into the culture of your organization, and that's exactly why I built my series of innovation storytelling workshops.
It's created for design and product and engineering teams who are tired of seeing good thinking go nowhere. Through these fun and hands-on virtual sessions, leaders will bring real ideas to the table, will gain a reusable framework, and will be able to have the building blocks of a great pitch that they can start working on the same day.
If you want to learn more about my workshops, go to worthytolead.co/storytelling. Here's the truth. The future is going to belong to the teams whose ideas actually get heard and funded and built, and that starts with helping them to overcome the influence gaps that they can't yet see. Thank you so much for listening today.
I hope you found value in this episode. If you'd like to hear more episodes like this, feel free to subscribe to the Worthy to Lead podcast so you never miss a future episode. You can subscribe at worthytolead.co/subscribe. And if you enjoyed this, share this with another leader who is committed to upleveling the strategic influence on their team.
As always, keep showing up, keep doing the work that matters, and keep leading like you're worthy to lead because you are. We'll see you next time
