How Stories Drive Organizational Culture
Photo by Silvana Carlos on Unsplash
Every company in existence is marked by a story. Last week when I told someone I worked for 25N Coworking, the response was “oh I know about coworking — it’s like WeWork! I watched that Hulu documentary about Adam Neumann. What a con!” They didn’t speak about coworking in conceptual terms (“oh wow, that’s probably a great resource during a loneliness epidemic”), their reference point for an entire industry is based on a story.
The errs of our coworking forebears aside, the power of story is undeniable. How about this for a more redemptive spin on the same reality:
Your employees’ biggest reference points for your company’s culture *aren’t* your remote work policies, benefits package, or brand. Not even what their manager is like or if you painted your team values above the door or not (although we love some Ted Lasso). The largest culture-shaping force in your organization is the stories they hear from you and their teammates, and the stories they tell when their friend asks “how was your week?” on a Friday over drinks.
Neuroscientists are still debating why stories are so powerful, but research suggests they’re associated with a cocktail of chemicals that dump into the brain:
cortisol, which assists with the formulation of memories;
dopamine, which regulates our emotional responses and keeps us engaged;
oxytocin, which activates our empathy and creates bonds and strengthens relationships.
We remember better, listen better, and connect better through stories than through data.
Anecdotally though? Stories are gripping. We all feel it. And strategically used, they can impact the health of your organization in 2 profound ways:
They shape organizational culture.
They’re a powerful indicator of how your team is actually experiencing the culture (despite what your marketing materials say).
Let’s start with #1:
Imagine — a boss opens up a meeting with 2 different stories:
Approach 1: A story about working over the weekend: “Ugh that contractor read an old copy of our pitch-deck, so all the deliverables came in wrong on Friday at 4PM. I worked all Sunday to catch up…I’m pretty exhausted.”
This story, though small, communicates a strong cultural meta-narrative: “Here, we work on weekends. I’m the hero when I work on weekends. You can be too if there’s a crisis and you give your whole weekend to it.” or even “I’m burnt out this week, so don’t bother me with any of your questions.”
Approach 2: They lead out with “did you hear that Maya went above and beyond to clinch that sales deal last Friday before close? Let me tell you how she did it…”
See how these two stories communicate vastly different messages about the implicit cultural values of your organization?
Mara, our CEO, loves to tell a story from the early days of our company. To stave off a crisis (it’s a long story), she and our COO Meagan rallied their families over Thanksgiving weekend and moved our entire Geneva, IL location to a new building 3 blocks away. The tone is joyful and passionate. It’s a story of connectedness and “the team as the hero”. It’s a story of commitment to delivering the best possible member experience, and rallying the support necessary to make that happen while still feeling fulfilled.
When 25N rolled out our Team Values, we didn’t do a hypothetical exercise teaching the team how we’d like them to live these values out. Instead, we told stories. Where did we see ourselves and our teammates having already lived out these values? “Christine, our CFO, demonstrated our ‘growth-minded’ value last week when she asked her team to show her this faster Excel formula”, and “let me tell you about the time Brittany thought on her feet during a tornado warning in the area and embodied ‘resilience’…”.
The stories told in your company shape your cultural norms. They show people what is valued and rewarded–especially when the storyteller is someone with organizational power.
Next, stories are also a reflection of your team’s values and daily experiences. The stories your team share are a continuous measure of the culture they’re living in. Every time they tell story, they’re giving you incredibly valuable data on how what it’s like to be in their role, on that team, in your organization. These stories are often more authentic and hard to “fake” than data you get from retention rates and/or employee experience surveys.
“Ohh yeah, last week my teammate and I had to cancel all our regular meetings to handle this huge influx of guests. But we’re catching up now!”
What does this story tell you, despite it’s positive slant?
Listen to the stories. Then, ask yourself storyboarding questions like a Pixar exec:
What’s the central theme of this story? What’s the “moral”?
Who’s the protagonist and who’s the villain?
What’s the central conflict?
Did the story have a resolution, or is it a cliffhanger?
If the heroes of your team’s stories win at the cost of someone else, there might be a trust gap or insecurity on your team that needs shoring up.
If the central conflict is unresolved, it might be worth digging into more on your next 1–1.
If a resolution was met but the story ends with “so we’ll see how it goes from here,” you probably need to set a calendar reminder to check back in with that person about that thing.
You can track storytelling from every level of your company (our interns tell stories as often as our CEO) and across every medium: Slack, email, the 5 minutes of unproductive Zoom time before the meeting agenda officially kicks off, the team happy hour... you get it. Don’t miss opportunities to discover how your team is *really* doing.
I know of a company with a tremendously people-oriented brand presence. They prize themselves in being open-handed with their staff’s career plans, and they talk about that all the time in their marketing material. And it isn’t all fluff–-they even have policies and initiatives that seem to back it up! They developed a high-level career training program that helped employees discover their long-term passions and career goals so that, once they left the company, they could go do that thing.
But the stories the team members told each other were not aligned with the public-facing story. Despite this company’s branding and people-forward policies, the narratives the team was living was that the organization was an unstable antagonist in all of their lives. The team felt betrayed: expendable and replaceable instead of empowered and valued.
While the brand told one story: “we’re empowering”, the team’s experience told another: “we feel expendable”. And the disparity (and upper level management’s lack of awareness about it) cost the company tremendously in talent, trust, and long-term recruitment.
Whether working to shape your company culture or learn more about what’s going on in the trenches, don’t stifle storytelling in your organization — lean into it. Stories are contagious. The good ones inspire the best in us…and the bad ones get around, too.
(Related: Millennial and Gen Z workers tend to “keep the receipts” of organizational incongruence more than any other generation, too, but that’s an article for a different day.)