This week’s newsletter is brought to you by two staggering statistics:

1️⃣ 95% of employees don't understand their company's strategy (HBR)
2️⃣ Employees are 30% less accepting of change than they were in 2016 (Gartner)

Surprised by these? Probably not. If you’re a leader in business today, you’ve more than likely found yourself on the receiving end of some “feedback” about why people aren’t getting on board with the strategy.

Why is this happening?

Well, there’s a lot to unpack there, including the lowest employee engagement levels we’ve witnessed in the past decade. Not to mention said “strategy” is likely:

• a collection of words (and at least one pyramid)

• in a deck of slides

• cooked by the executive team at an offsite

• living on a server somewhere

• waiting to become real in the minds of the people executing it.

Sound familiar? Keep reading.

Light a Fire, Leaders.

Storytelling has an incredible knack for making abstract values (like the words in that deck) accessible to humans. That’s because story is wickedly powerful and infinitely shareable. It’s humanity’s native tongue.

If you want to create a culture that not only executes the strategy, but outlives you, look no further than story.

The transformative power of storytelling shows up in different ways, depending on the organization and its history. Regardless of the type or trajectory of your company, here are five changes its leaders can expect when they build a culture of storytelling:

1. Engagement Increases

We all want to know we matter. When leaders promote story, we connect actions… to values… to the reality of the work, creating digestible morsels of what success looks like.

2. Strategy Sticks

We transform from random acts of business to alignment on a narrative spine and a unified reason for our actions as a company. Employees’ behaviors mimic the ones they hear about in the anecdotes that support the narrative. Things. Get. Done.

3. Customers Stay

When employees embody the brand, their consistency and humanity keep customers coming back.

4. Recruiting Gains Velocity

A storytelling culture lifts real employee voices, making your workplace magnetically attractive as candidates see themselves there. The line between employer brand and consumer brand blurs, in the best way possible.

5. Change is Adopted

Not just announced. Story moves people emotionally. And when people feel the “why,” they’re more likely to embrace the “how.”

Speaking of “How…”

So you’re sold on the outcomes and you want to know more about what it takes to realize them? Of course you are! Because you’re an enlightened leader who wants more for their teams than to belong to an average culture.

But let’s acknowledge change like this can be intimidating. It’s not like you just fall asleep one night and wake up the next day defined by story.

No, this type of culture shift is what we call “soil work.” It’s slow and deliberate, but like any effort worth doing, so much of the joy can be found in the work itself.

For now, here are a couple of mindset shifts you can make that will begin to bake story into your culture:

1. Start small.

Start with hallway conversations. Staff meetings. One-on-ones. Promote sharing the “why” behind a decision. Lift up a moment from a win that reflects the behaviors you want to see. Or tell the story of a failure that can teach you more than any metric ever could.

Little by little, look for ways storytelling can take root. Look for personal, specific, living stories. Told by and about people who care. Anchor them in company values, not vanity metrics like clicks or application volume.

And for the love of all that’s holy, look at your intranet and ask yourself how many albums Taylor Swift has dropped since it was updated. The best way to make our employees feel like they don’t matter is to keep making them click Inception-level deep into Sharepoint to get the answers they need.

2. Start now.

There’s a poster in your break room. You’ve been staring at it for months, and you’ve wondered if it actually means anything to anyone. Go find out. Bring it up in a team meeting and ask people if they understand it. Better yet, ask them if they can share examples of when they’ve seen those words being lived.

There’s a deck open on your laptop. You’ve maximized it, then minimized it, 17 times in the last three weeks, lost on how you can make it make sense for someone. Close it for good, because your instincts are right: No one will join you in your mission because of something they read in a deck. Instead, look for opportunities to share the stories in that deck. The challenge. The transformation. The victory. The return to the ordinary, having changed.

Building a culture of story really is that simple.

I didn’t say it would be easy. But it’s not that complicated either.

🔥 Hi, I’m Eric, and every week, I share insights, observations and tools so you can ditch decks and light a fire in your high-stakes presentations. If you like what you see here, follow me on LinkedIn.