How "Stories" Can Drive Alignment or Sap Morale

As teams and companies scale, the “stories” that teammates tell themselves and each other become one of the most powerful ways to drive alignment or sap morale. By learning more about stories---both what they are and how to shift them---you can become a much more effective leader of a fast-growing team. Stories scale way faster than your individual voice or in-person presence ever can. 

What are “stories”? Why are they important in team dynamics?

The “stories we tell ourselves” are how we make sense of the world around us. Stories are the words we use to narrate what is happening. They are the headlines we use as a shortcut to describe the events, actions and characters in our day-to-day lives. 

In an individual’s internal monologue, a story has a short one-liner quality to it. “Stories”  tend to sound preachy and, because of how short and definitive they are, they usually lack nuance. 

Here are a few examples of stories people tell themselves at an individual level: 

As you can imagine, the stories we tell ourselves influence how we see and experience the world, and can either limit or expand our choices for how we respond to stressful, new or unclear situations. The stories we tell ourselves directly influence our emotions, our behavior and our decisions. In some settings, they help keep us interpersonally safe and help us to succeed. But in other settings, those same stories can hold us back. For most of us, our stories operate subconsciously---like a pair of feather-weight glasses we don’t even realize we have on. Yet those stories shade and filter what we see happening around us. Sometimes our stories are accurate, but most times they are not because reality contains a lot more nuance and complexity than simple one-line judgments or perceptions. 

Now, as a team of individuals grows or as a company scales, collective stories take on a similar pithy one-liner quality, but the focus of the stories is less about the individual or how the individual should behave in the world and more about what a team or company “really” is or how it “really” operates. 

Here are a few examples of stories that teammates at scaling startups might tell themselves: 

What makes stories particularly important at the team and company-level is they are both contagious and sticky. One teammate’s casual comment or grumpy complaint about “how things really work around here” can be passed on in just a few seconds. And then that same seed of a story can lodge into another teammate’s mind, grow and persist for weeks, months, or even years. Once someone hands you those tinted glasses and you try them on, you can’t help but see the world through those subtly (or wildly) biased lenses. 

As leaders, it’s important to understand “stories” as a team dynamics concept for two reasons: 

1 - When you can inventory or keep track of the false or threatening stories that are reducing morale, distracting teams or fostering a lack of alignment----you are in a much better position to take action as early as possible to confront the stories and mitigate or reverse those impacts. 

2 - When you know how to intentionally promote the stories you do want the team to believe and pass on, you can increase your ability to influence the team---at scale---to work together in an engaged and productive way. 

Can we simply present facts or context to correct inaccurate stories? 

Sometimes when you hear a story that is clearly false you can challenge or shift the story just through sharing more facts or more context: 

Your Teammate: I heard the leadership team is cutting the budget for monthly team dinners. We raised all this money last round and yet they’re getting stingier! It’s starting to seem like the bigger we get, the less they care about employees. 

Leader: Actually, they didn’t get rid of the budget for monthly team dinners, but re-allocated all that budget to the new People Ops team. Someone on the People team will have to sign off on our team dinner receipts, but we can totally still have them once a month.  

Teammate: Oh! What a relief! That’s good to hear, I must have spaced when they said that in the last allhands meeting. Hey -- can we try that new Korean BBQ place down the street this month? 

Other times those disclosures alone won’t be enough to dislodge the story:

Teammate: Oh really?! Well that’s a relief, I guess. Are you sure this isn’t just a transition phase to cutting team dinners altogether though? I’ve noticed a bunch of other ways they seem to be cost-cutting as we grow...

What can you do as a leader when you encounter a response like that even in the face of what you think are compelling facts or clarifications?

Generally speaking, there are three types of situations in which you’ll need to combat a story with more than just a factual clarification: 

1 - Perceived Pattern -  A clarifying fact might be enough to dispute one example, but it won’t eradicate a story if the person believes their story is built on a pattern of evidence. This is tricky because “stories” can be self-perpetuating in that our brains can fall into a confirmation bias trap. Once we have accepted a story or a headline, we can start to “see” how data points that used to be unrelated now seem to “fit” the story. We also subconsciously underweight, discount or even ignore any disconfirming evidence in order to continue to tell our story. One factual clarification will not shift a story if the story is based on the perception of a pattern. 

2 - Inherently Subjective Judgment Call - Sometimes a story is not based on “facts” but more on subjective judgment calls. For example, you could factually prove or disprove a story that “X team spent 30K more than budgeted last quarter”, but you can’t factually prove or disprove a story, “We have strayed too far from our mission” because that statement is inherently subjective. When people assert a subjective judgment call “story” that is different than your judgment or what the leadership of the company believes, then countering with different facts won’t be enough. The shift here needs to come from trust in the person, people or team who are asserting the opposite story that: “The new strategy is consistent with our mission.” 

If people reject your story because they don’t “trust” you, it usually comes down to them perceiving you either as one or more of the below: 

• lacking competence in some way

• not being reliable to follow through on what you say you will do

• not having enough personal connection with them that they can be open with you

• having intentions that are not good or not aligned with what they think the company is striving towards

If you find yourself needing to build (or re-build) trust in order to correct inaccurate stories, it can be helpful to think through how to take action in one or more of the four areas above in parallel or before promoting the new or more nuanced story. 

Once you rebuild trust, it becomes a lot easier to influence teammates to accept or at least stay open to your version of a subjective judgment call story. 

3 - When the Story (Used To Be Or Is Still Partially) True - Sometimes inaccurate negative stories are sticky and immune to facts of a single case because they used to be true or are still partially true (even if we wish they weren’t). In these cases, you won’t be influential by arguing for an opposite story, because people will experience you as defensive, blind or disingenuous. 

You will instead be more successful by advocating for more nuance in a story. 

Old Story: “Our executive team doesn’t know what they are doing.” 

Opposite New Story: “Our executive team does know what they are doing.” 

Nuanced New Story: “Before our Series B, we did struggle to attract executives with deep experience and we have a history of inexperienced leadership at that level. But if you look at the exec team now, 3 of the 5 have deep experience and the other 2 are working closely with outside advisors to upskill quickly. Our executive team is much more experienced now and is learning fast.”  

Another important step to take in these scenarios is to create an action plan (over weeks or months) to systematically eliminate the ways in which an undesired story is still true. When people see a discrepancy between what leaders say and what they see happen, their inferences of what they see will always win. Therefore, any steps you can take to eliminate present-day examples that undermine the story you want to be true will help your version of the story become the one that persists. 

What steps can leaders take to challenge and shift inaccurate stories?

As leaders of teams and companies, there are several steps you can take to track and combat stories that might be having a negative impact on your teammates’ morale, engagement or productivity. 

1 - Elicit stories so you know what they are and how widespread or entrenched they’ve become. “Elicit” refers to drawing out and I use that word intentionally here. Sometimes, you can elicit a story in a more reactive fashion when you hear a side comment in a meeting or overhear teammates talking in the hallway. “Hey I heard you saying X about Y….let’s talk about this more.” You can also gather stories proactively by asking teammates to share stories, myths, rumors they’ve been hearing about a particular event or upcoming change. This positions you not only as a leader who is open to hearing unpleasant perceptions of you or the org, but it also helps you to establish yourself as someone who can engage credibly on the discussion, clarification or debunking of any future stories.

2 - In the case of a single incident, share facts or context that convince someone instantly to let go of the old story. Sometimes “story-busting” can happen quickly, especially when it’s an isolated case and you’re privy to context or facts your teammate didn’t have, didn’t hear or misunderstood. The most skillful way to handle these situations is to validate any emotional reaction from the misunderstanding and calmly clarify the facts or context you have. Doing both of those helps your teammate not experience you as “defensive” and also helps them deal with any embarrassment/sheepishness they might feel at having to course-correct a story so quickly (i.e., helps them save face a bit). 

• “I totally get why you’d be pissed off about this given the info you had. Here is some more info I think might help you understand the decision and feel better about it..…” 

• “So, the additional context on that is _____X______. If I had been in your shoes and also missing that key piece of context,  I’m sure I would have felt similarly undermined in the meeting.” 

3 - Ask or supportively challenge people to shift their perspective, and share stories/examples that sow seeds for new stories to take root. In the other cases when a single factual clarification doesn’t close the gap between your two stories, you can confront the difference directly by introducing the frame that what they are asserting as “truth” is actually a story and there are other frames, stories or ways to look at the challenge. It’s important to not do this in a way that comes across as patronizing or that your own story is definitive truth (it’s not!), but more that your intention is to be a helpful thought-partner to them.  

With a perceived pattern, you can draw out the other examples that are causing a teammate’s story to stick and share the “headline” you’d put over that same collection of data points. 

“I understand how it’s easy to see based on those interactions that you think the new team is “out to get us.” The headline I put on those same things is a bit different. My story is that the new team is “feeling a bit insecure and extremely eager to prove their value to the rest of the org.”Neither of us knows for sure, but  if we try out my headline, what options does that give us for what to do to address the friction between our two teams? 

With a subjective judgment call, you can take steps to build up trust in the story messenger using your own social capital or by emphasizing messages or data that will tackle the underlying trust issue. 

“I know you haven’t spent as much time working with X. I have and my sense is that they are very skilled in that type of work, but where they struggle is in communicating to the rest of the team how skillful their work is. Can you go into the meeting with them next week with a different working hypothesis about them and see if you then find more reasons to be optimistic about their role on their team? In the interim, I’m asking you to trust me while you’re still rebuilding trust with them. Within a few months, I hope you’ll also build trust on your own directly with them.”

With a story that used to be or is still partially true, you can acknowledge the ways in which the teammate is validly holding on to an old story. 

“Look, you are totally right that we used to do that back in 2017. My sense is that the org has changed and evolved since then. I look at X and Y and Z as more recent examples of how that old story isn’t operating here anymore or is on the decline for sure. That’s my story and I respect that it’s not your story yet. I am curious though: What will it take for you to hit a similar reset button and feel more open to the possibility that the story has shifted? How can we make that happen for you?” 

4 - Proactively share more examples that nurture those new stories. Particularly in cases when you are tackling stories that have become entrenched over months (or years) you need to be prepared that it might take 2-3 months to start seeing meaningful shifts in stories. After you’ve asked or supportively challenged a teammate to at least “try on” a new story--- you need to nurture that with intentional and thoughtful disclosures that “feed” those new stories. You can do this by sharing these examples and explicitly linking them to the story you hope people are hearing. 

“I’m excited to share this update __________. As someone who is part of the OG crew here, this news is also meaningful to me that we’ve put the old habits of 2017 firmly in the past.” 

“Did you see how much X has improved at communicating their work at the team meetings? As I look at their performance over the last month I am really feeling more and more confident they are going to get past their old issues and really shine in the new role.” 

5 - Train teammates how to critically challenge their own stories or those they hear from others.  Leaders at startups often prize critical-analytical abilities in hiring for their teams. You encourage people to take a critical-thinking approach to many other parts of the business. You train them to question the status quo. You expect them to be open and to get curious. Why not re-deploy those same skills towards “stories”? 

You can do this via formal training. (i.e., run a small teaching session on “stories” and ask them to each help challenge stories they hear from others as an exercise to practice re-framing.) 

You can elicit and address individual stories in a 1-1 setting and show them how you use “challenging my story” techniques for your own benefit. (“It helps me to feel better, think more resiliently, and see more options for how to respond.”) 

You can also role-model it in how you give a voice to narrate your own actions or thinking as you update them on your experiences elsewhere at the company. (“At first when I was presenting to the Board, I thought ___X____but then I caught myself going off on an inaccurate story. At the break, I asked the CEO about ___Y____ and she said ____Z____. And that enabled me to change my internal story, and then I followed-up with the Board at the end of the meeting with a much more convincing argument for my position.”) 

Through training and role-modeling, you show your teammates that you value when people are clear with themselves and with each other about what “stories” are operating unbeknownst to others in our private brains. You show them how powerful it can be to “name” stories, get them out of your brain and onto the table, and engage in more direct dialogue about them. 

What if the idea of “intentionally influencing” stories makes me uncomfortable? 

Sometimes leaders learn the concept of “stories” and intellectually are convinced that stories are important to track, but they feel uncomfortable at the idea of taking action to influence stories on their team. Is this just a bunch of spin? Shouldn’t people just know? Can’t our actions just speak for themselves? 

First, as with any action to influence, it’s important for leaders to draw their own clear line between what is influence and what is manipulation. 

In this case, I might define influence as: enabling someone to construct their own belief and consciously buy into something they otherwise might not believe or accept on their own. You’re not lying to them or selling them a story you don’t believe. You are challenging them to break out of a thinking trap so they can see a situation differently and then decide for themselves if your version of the story is the more accurate one. Your underlying intention is to achieve the goals of your org, team or company which you genuinely believe to be in the best interest of the collective. 

In contrast, manipulation isn’t about building ability or retaining agency, but is more about exploiting someone’s psychology to get them to believe something that they fundamentally don’t or wouldn’t if they were made fully conscious of your true intentions. 

Second, to the concern about whether people should just know or the wish that actions could just speak themselves: I agree that actions do speak loudly, but what is even louder is the narrator voice in each individual’s head. In order for your action to have an impact on me, I need to tell myself a story about your action. And the story I tell dictates the impact your actions subsequently have. 

At the team/company level, you can’t shift to a new story if actions/behaviors continue to prop up the old story, but you also can’t shift to a new story by action alone is people are still suck with their old sticky headlines. Change will be much slower, more haphazard and there will be some folks who will never be convinced. And in the meantime, there will be a lot of unnecessary negative emotion and distraction as people chug along with the biased lenses of their inaccurate stories. 

How will we know when we are succeeding? 

There are three qualitative metrics to look at to see if, over the timeframe of months, your intentions to combat stories are working on your team or within your org. 

1 - The stories you hear are more in line with your more nuanced understanding of reality and the stories you want to promote. 

2 - You start to see other people on your team (managers, influencers, connectors) organically helping reinforce the new stories so you don’t always have to be the one to do it.  

3 - Teammates proactively come to you with feedback and stories they’d like you to challenge or debunk not with accusations or assertions of their truth. You might literally hear people say things like: “I’ve got this story that ___X____, and I’m hoping you can clear it up for me.” “Or “I know intellectually that X isn’t Y, but I keep coming back to this story in my head that X is Y. Can you help me get past this story?”

Photo by Yasin Yusuf on Unsplash