What’s Your Story?
It is no secret that successful leaders create dynamic and supportive cultures within their organizations. As an integrated system of learned, shared ideas, behaviors, and artifacts, organizational culture is the backdrop against which businesses flourish or flounder. While a seasoned leader can make this look easy or instinctive, candid conversations generally reveal that they expend significant effort to intentionally shape and develop the culture of their organization. While every leader will develop unique ways of doing so over time, perhaps the most common, effective, and easily scaled technique is storytelling.
Stories and myths are among humanity’s oldest and most effective mechanisms for distilling and transmitting shared ideals, values, and beliefs. Stories lend importance to otherwise banal events and create narrative structures that help individuals organize, process, and understand their collective human experience. Myths are created, whether organically or with intention, around important events, milestones, or periods of transition. “They have been always very important to people, because they help to systematize an [otherwise] incomprehensible sequence of events” (Boguszewicz-Kreft, Kreft, and Żurek p. 23). The details retained through repeated tellings, and the dramatic elements emphasized, guide listeners as they assimilate both the plot and the underlying values and norms that go with it. If you are what you eat, stories are the metaphorical nutrition that leaders feed their organization to continuously encourage it to become what they want it to be.
In times of uncertainty and setbacks, past “war stories” are revisited and new ones emerge as a personal, organizational, and cultural defense mechanism against individual and collective threats. Past uncertainties can be safely mined for fresh insights on how to respond in the present. Chaos in the present tense is rendered understandable through the process of translating events into narrative form (mythologization). Shared stories create cultural examples, real and imagined heroes, that help inculcate new community members and deepen solidarity. To cite a Texas example, cries of “Remember the Alamo!” worked as a rallying cry only when those that heard the cry knew the story of the Alamo as told, and retold, by leaders fighting the Mexican army of Santa Anna and assigned similar meanings and principles to it.
The stories that business leaders at all levels of the organization choose to tell, and retell, constitute a form of mythologisation that shapes how the organization sees and understands itself. It is the mechanism through which moral leadership emerges as the organization comes to understand the values and guiding principles to be applied when the right thing to do is not always apparent. Stories paint narrative pictures of what it means to restore or be in right relationship with each other and our work amidst rapidly changing circumstances.
As the coronavirus crises unwinds, it is my hope that leaders at every level are thinking carefully about how they are telling the story of their organization. From the firm’s origin story to tales of past victories and losses, how leaders recount the firm’s history matters. As fallout from the pandemic continues to unfold, employees at every level will look with increasing need for evidence of what their organization holds itself to be when circumstances demand its people be at their best.
How will you, your team, and your organization remember the great pandemic of 2020 and its aftermath? In the coming years, will pandemic stories serve as social proof that your firm holds tightly to its values? Or will they serve as cautionary tales from dark times when the firm lost its way? Will the heroes you recognize in the stories about today serve to embody the culture that you need to fuel future growth?
Every organization is unique, and shaping your firm’s culture demands sustained effort. If you have not given much thought to the myths and stories that circulate within your firm, rest assured that they exist whether you are aware of them or not. They will impact your team, one way or another. So find them, collect them, and harness them for good. Shaping your firm’s culture through effective storytelling won’t be easy, especially if this leadership domain has developed without direction. However, re-framing your firm’s history and being intentional about the organizational narratives that are elevated to the level of company lore is important. They are among the most powerful and easily scaled tools at your disposal to help your firm become the organization you hope for it to be. You can do it. Knowledgeable guidance and support can help.
Let’s get to work!
