A mission statement is what a company does, based on a set of values. A strategic narrative is a long-term plan and vision for not only the company but its employees, customers, and impact on the world. It’s a story that all constituents understand and believe in. It gives everyone a reason to come to work in the morning, to buy the company’s products, and to invest their time. It enhances employee performance and creates customer loyalty because it explains to them how they directly contribute to a better world.
The live event as campfire
Slideshows alone cannot alter employees’ emotional link to the company but people can do that.
In-person company-wide meetings present the best opportunity to successfully launch a new storyline. Town halls, regional meetings, or global summits are the occasions when a plan moves beyond conceptualization and instead, a large group of people senses it together in a room. Unfortunately, most companies view these meetings as merely the sharing of information, versus becoming the defining high point.
The style of how the material is delivered is on par with the actual content held within it. In other words, when organizations tap into motivational inspirational speakers in combination with their managerial team – they bridge the gap between what management intends the employees to feel and what a glossy but void-of-emotion presentation will achieve. An outside inspirational speaker doesn’t substitute for emotionally involved leaders, but rather presents a clear example of how to do this in addition to signalling that the meeting is so important to the company that they’re willing to invest additional resources in its success.
More importantly, the storyline must come across as pressing. This is even more pressing in the case of remote employees, as through the computer screen they must feel the rush.
What a strategic narrative actually is
A strategic narrative is not a tagline. It’s not a rebranded version of your vision statement. It’s a live account of where you’ve been, what you’re fighting against right now, and where you’re going – with the employee cast as the hero who makes that journey possible.
This difference matters because slogans age out. Narratives evolve. When the market or the wind changes, a good narrative bends with it. A mission statement just sits on the wall looking increasingly optimistic.
The structure that works best borrows from storytelling frameworks most executives don’t think to use. There’s a villain – the market condition, the industry problem, the competitive threat your company exists to solve. There’s a superpower – what your company does that no one else does quite the same way. And there’s a promised land – the concrete, emotionally resonant state your people are working toward together. When those three elements are clear, the strategy stops being something leadership does and starts being something everyone lives.
Auditing your sub-cultures before you write a word
Large multinational companies do not maintain a standardized corporate culture. They adhere to a core culture with several local adaptations. Before creating your story, it’s crucial to understand what these local adaptations are.
This cannot be based on just sending out questionnaires and analyzing the results. You must pay attention to the stories that are already being told. What do employees from different locations respond when asked about their reasons for working there? What kind of local events are organized? And what goes unnoticed in the background? Pay attention to these clues and you will immediately notice the gaps that exist between the story company leadership assumes is shared and the one that employees are actually familiar with.
Any other way of creating a story will result in different interpretations in each office, not because the story is wrong, but because you have failed to fill in the gaps.
Decentralizing without diluting
The main story is told from the top. However, it should not be restricted to the top.
Companies that excel in this create culture champions at the regional and team level – people who may not be in leadership roles but who are respected by their peers, are engaged in the story, and are hungry to spread it. Their role is not to parrot the corporate script. Instead, they are translators. They search for local stories that illustrate how the bigger story holds true in the microcosm of where they work.
This is why the mission-statement approach falls flat. A slogan cannot be adapted locally; it splits apart. However, a story can absorb anything. A narrative can gladly include the experience of the Mumbai office and the challenges of the São Paulo team and the perspective of the Berlin engineer, all of which still fit together because every element adds to the same story.
Think about how much more force the employee value proposition acquires when employees see themselves in the story rather than outside of it. And once they are committed, retention and discretionary effort become natural by-products.
The ongoing work
A strategic narrative is not something that you publish once and forget about. It is something that you need to actively maintain over time. Those companies that do manage to stay on track with their narrative function in a similar way to how they manage their products: they update and refine it, test for resonance, and deliver it in ways that engender maximum engagement.
The other option is to stand by helplessly, watching all your good work collapse into the kind of background static most organizational narratives become. The real job is not to “create” the narrative. It is to sustain it.
