If you want to change your organization’s culture, start by building stories.

This is the “secret” of culture change—building stories that employees in your firm share with each other to demonstrate the values and norms of the organization. But where do you begin? What does story building mean? 

You must begin by engaging in actions that are radically different from your organization’s current culture—activities that establish a clear break from the past and demonstrate a clear path to a new cultural future. These actions then turn into stories that exemplify the culture you are trying to create, and they spread widely and rapidly throughout your organization

In short, as a business leader, you must do more than just “talk” about culture change or “walk” the culture change you hope to create. You must combine both efforts and “walk” culture change in a way that “talks” to the entire organization.

Before you can do this, however, there is an important distinction to understand: Story building is not the same as storytelling, especially when it comes to creating culture change. 

What is the Difference?

Let’s begin by pointing out that telling simple, engaging, and inspiring stories is an important phenomenon in most organizations—a moving story about an athlete overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds, a political figure’s struggle to right some horrible wrong, or how an entrepreneur transformed an obscure business idea into a Fortune 500 enterprise. All of these stories can serve as motivation for employees, but they rarely have any transformative effect on the entire organization. 

Hearing someone else’s culture change story might even be the source of inspiration for building your own, but nothing will change within your organization until you take action. 

Remember this: 

Culture change is about you being the culture you want to create by acting in ways consistent with the new culture and inconsistent with the current culture.

You must commit to building stories, even if you don’t fully know what that future culture will be, and even if almost everyone else in the organization thinks you might be mad. It’s the only way a true shift will happen. 

How to Encourage Story Building Within Your Organization 

Leaders, when you take the first step toward building your own stories, you will notice a ripple effect. If the culture change efforts you make are successful, your story will cascade throughout the organization—people from all departments and at all levels will feel empowered to rethink the culture in the part of the business where they work. As they do so, they will build their own stories, which will lead to other stories, and so on. 

There is no ideal culture to which all organizations should aspire, and other people’s stories are never going to align perfectly with the change your organization needs. 

In the end, building your own stories is the first step toward changing your organization’s culture. And changing your organization’s culture is often critical in efficiently and effectively implementing your strategies to realize their full potential. 

Our upcoming book, The Secret of Culture Change: How to Build Authentic Stories That Transform Your Organization, contains several culture change stories that we hope will inspire you to begin building yours. Pick up your copy today.