A Story of Culture, A Story with Culture

I work with organizations that seek to design and/or refine their culture. That work offers me amazing amounts of new learning. (At the age of 59, I experience a lot of re-learning, as well!).

Lately I've learned more and more how the story has power regarding an organization's culture. Whether the story tells of the organization's heritage or legacy, heroes or history, tribulations or triumphs--or all of the above--the story becomes instrumental to the culture by

• Illustrating
• Emphasizing
• Explaining
• Vitalizing
• Exciting
• Modeling

That's just to name a few reasons management should identify its story or stories and hone them as employee engagement tools. [Remember the CORE of Engagement; consider how story-sharing can be a part of any of those four components!]

OK. Let me give you more substantive explanations of the power of a story to your organization's culture.

Pictures and drama connect with employees' hearts. Articulate your company's values, commitments, and purpose as often as you want. However, you will more quickly get to employees' hearts by telling the the company story. When you repeat the drama of the company's beginnings in explicit, visible language, your story hits home. Actually, it hits heart; the heart hosts inspiration. The excitement of the company's early success (and failure?) generates emotional appreciation. Emotional appreciation packs more clout than intellectual awareness of goals and objectives.

Stories underscore the culture. You can share stories share of the company's building successes. They validly represent the culture. The concrete images represent what the company stands for, what it believes, and how it behaves. That makes up its culture. Culture has such a vital impact upon a company--either its success or its lack thereof--that every manager is responsible for the conscious effort to keep the culture a top of mind concept among employees. Story-sharing does that.

Stories propel the culture. Markets, politics, leadership, personnel, and more change (constantly). The organization's culture must be kept moving in the right direction, in light of those changes. Story sharing can keep the culture in alignment with both changing situations and basic values and commitments. Not every story must be from company heritage. Contemporary stories demonstrate success in the face of (and because of) change. These are stories whose participants you invite to share, as often as you can.

I hope you're interested in the story as a viable, valuable management tool. My Make Magic with Stories audio conference (Thursday, 5/22/08) offers 90 minutes of what, how, why, when and where of story-sharing in the workplace.