# Authentic Storytelling Drives Organizational Culture Change

**Podcast:** HBR On Leadership
**Published:** 2026-03-04

## Transcript

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Welcome to HBR on Leadership.
These episodes include case studies and conversations with the world's top business and management experts, hand selected to help you unlock the best in those around you.
I'm HBR Executive Editor Allison Beard.
Stories and storytelling are at the core of many aspects of the corporate world.
Consider a great brand campaign or the ability to sell yourself in a job interview.
It's also an extremely important skill for managers who want to win support for new strategies and initiatives.
He also outlines the tactics that work best for developing and circulating a narrative that prompts true cultural shifts.
But many times those well thought out efforts end up falling flat.
Why?
The company culture.
If it doesn't fit the new strategy, you're toast.
So the obvious thing to do is to change the culture, right?
Well, we know that's really hard.
It's bigger than a CEO.
It's not about what is written down on paper in HR documents.
It's not easy to define, much less change.
But today's guest has studied leaders who were able to change their culture to fit a new strategy.
The takeaway is how they told stories to reinforce that shift.
Stories that circulated around their workplaces, because a lot of what creates a culture is the way that employees and managers talk to each other about each other and about the company and what it does.
The stories they tell.
Yeah, I wouldn't discount that.
There is a little bit of luck and timing in these things.
There's always some that goes on.
But we found there are many of the business leaders we talked to.
Many of them were CEOs, some were like plant managers or division general managers or office managers of large offices.
Some of them have a pattern of being able to change organ their organization's cultures that they repeat over time, which suggests that it's not just luck, that there's actually a a skill involved.
And our task was to try to understand what those set of skills were that enabled them to uh make culture change happen.
Well, it's really interesting because you have this very hard problem, and then you have a very simple solution.
Yes.
You want to change the culture, and you say create stories, which seems easy.
Well, let me let me start with an example.
And uh my co-authors ex ex experience at Tel SP, which was a Brazilian telecom that was operating in a highly regulated environment, was about to move into a deregulated environment, facing whole new competitors and whole new technologies at the same time.
Also, all that was going to happen at once.
They had developed a very, very top-down culture, uh aggressively top-down culture.
So much so, for example, that one of the cultural values was that no one in the organization could ride with the CEO in the same um elevator car, which is like sort of bizarre, I admit, but nevertheless, it was sort of the symbol of of just how top-down that organization had become.
But successful.
So yeah, you're going from a top-down culture, which makes sense in a world where you know you're you kind of have a regulated monopoly, essentially.
Sure.
Um that's basically what it was.
And you're going to a much more still regulated but competitive market where you know faster, more innovative companies could eat your lunch, right?
Absolutely.
Not a slam dunk at all.
That you would be the monopolist would be the survivor in a much more competitive market.
Yeah.
So what did Manuel do?
Well, the first thing is just you have to change your strategy.
You can't be just working about addressing government-defined goals.
You basically have to go to a culture that values customer service and that values satisfying delighting customers on their telecommunications needs.
So the specific thing that he did, he bought a new technology, new product that the company was coming out with.
And it and it was a new technology.
It didn't work very well.
And so uh he called the uh helpline, uh, where so we got on the line with a uh, you know, part-time uh worker at the helpline.
Now, previously, by the way, uh consistent with the old culture, there had been two helplines, one for senior managers in the firm and one for everyone else, and all well, consumers.
And so the first thing he did is he eliminated the one for senior managers and said, Hey, we got problems with technology, we have to go to the helpline that everyone else has to go to.
So then he g is in this two-hour conversation with this young man, and they're still not not having success.
And so finally, after two hours, he says, I want to let you know, I'm the CEO of the company.
And of course, the the guy doesn't believe him, so it takes a few minutes to convince him.
And then what happens is uh he asks uh Manuel asks, so what would you needed to know in order for you to be able to solve my technical problem with this product?
And this this young man generates a list of 14 things.
This, this, this.
We need these this information.
And how much information how much of this information do you have access to at this point?
And the answer was two or three things.
And then it gets interesting.
And then Manuel says, Would you be willing with a couple of your colleagues to come to our next executive committee meeting?
This is a senior group in the organization, and explain what those 14 things are and what needs to be done in order for us to support this new product technology.
Remember, this is deeply hierarchical organization.
Right, right, right.
Yeah, this is skipping a few levels.
Yeah.
Yes.
Oh, just a few.
This is this guy is not even an employee of Tel Spee.
It's an outsourced employee.
He's a part-time, he's a turns out he's a college student.
Anyway, uh, he and his colleagues come to this meeting, sort of here's what we need to do.
Here's here's the problems, here are the 14 things.
Manuel thanks him.
They leave the room, he turns to the people who says, Okay, um, so here's the deal.
In two weeks, we're gonna have a plan.
We're gonna have a plan ready to execute that will help us collect all 14 bits of information we need to support this product.
Till we have that plan, we're gonna suspend sales of this product because that's a customer-oriented company doesn't sell a product they can't support.
And and then you're gonna present a plan for us about how we're gonna uh get this this information that we need.
And you're not gonna just present it to us, you're gonna present it to these these people from the call center we just talked to.
So you're gonna be reporting to the call center employees, and uh two weeks later, sure enough, it happens to get the information right, and the product turns out to be very, very successful.
So it's all good news, yeah.
But from a cultural point of view, it just literally is a uh revolution in the way of thinking about organizational culture, uh, about who's in charge, about what we value in this company.
It's about valuing customers and customer relationships, it's not about hierarchy and bowing to the boss and and doing whatever the boss has to say.
So gotcha.
Now you have just told this story to me and to our audience, but in that story, there was no storytelling happening, right?
Like that was just that's correct.
There was action, there was something that was done.
Yeah, maybe differently, it was effective because it was strategic.
But where does the storytelling part of it come in?
Where does that so what you do is you engage in actions, and the actions create stories that other employees share.
Uh-huh.
Over time, you may come back and actually tell the story again and again.
So that may happen later on, but when you're in the process of creating the story in the first place, you act, you do things that are inconsistent with the old culture, but are consistent with some new culture.
Um, that's one of our criteria for being a successful story.
It's got to break with the past with a path to the future.
And this example is just a classic of this of a clear break with the past.
We saw no examples.
We interviewed 60 or so business leaders across multiple industries, multiple firms, etc.
We saw no examples, zero, where culture successful culture change started with the announcement that we were going to change our culture.
It just cheap talk.
It's just like just another thing.
Here it comes.
CEO wants to change the culture.
Okay.
And everyone says, sure, we'll we'll change the culture, sir.
But no one believes that it's really a commitment.
No one because it's cheap talk.
It's easy to back off of it.
But action is much harder to back down, back off of, walk back than words.
Yeah.
So yeah, you act first.
The stories then follow.
But these business leaders don't write down the stories, they don't plan them out in detail or anything like that.
They they they emerge in an authentic way because it reflect their deeply held beliefs about what the organization needs to do.
And then those stories start getting shared.
And what happens is those new stories that support a new culture replace the old stories that supported the old culture.
And then as that diffuse through the organization, that's how we see culture change.
Yeah, I mean, if you want to change the story of that's not how we do things around here, you do it differently.
And then people say this is how you do things around here.
That's that's exactly right.
So it seems that very important not to make up the story, but to make the story.
Yeah.
It's gotta be uh one of the our first criteria.
We we well did we studied enough of these so we could actually describe stories that seem to to actually facilitate cultural change and those that don't.
And the first criteria is the the story uh has to be authentic to the person who's building the story.
So, for example, if your values as a as a business leader are not custom oriented, and you say we're gonna build a customer-oriented culture, no one's gonna believe you.
Employees can smell hypocrisy from miles away.
The first criteria for this is that these stories have to be really authentic, both to your personal values and also to your understanding of the strategic challenges facing the organization.
Now, you mentioned personal values there, like how important is it to bring like the first person into it for organizational leaders?
Oh, yeah.
So our second criteria is they have to the business leader has to star in the story.
I know there's a lot of discussion in the management uh organizational change literature about top-down versus bottom-up.
And I I just want to say again, we saw no examples, zero examples of successful culture change that did not start at the top.
That doesn't mean it doesn't that these leaders don't engage the rest of the organization.
They clearly do, but it starts at the top, and it starts when that's authentic, when a business leader behaves in in ways that break with the past and give guidance to a new culture, and that individual stars in their story.
Now, other people will be there.
So Manuel started in the story at uh Tel SP, but the whole executive team was there.
Those are the people who create the stories.
Now, if you are supposed to feature yourself in your stories, you know, if you like like it or not, you know, as an organizational leader, you are a character in the story.
Absolutely.
Can that come off like bragging?
Sure.
That is going to hurt your efforts.
No, that's a great question.
And so there's a there's a question of, you know, how can I start in my story and still be humble and open?
Well, there's there's a couple things to recalize this.
The first is you're a business leader, people are watching what you do in depth, and they do that whether you want them to or not.
So you are already starting in the story.
It's the question is what story you're gonna build, right?
The second thing is you have to also understand while the culture change process starts at the top, it's important that they diffuse throughout the organization.
And the way that happens is a business leader builds a couple more stories, because one story, you know, people are still cautious, is this real or not?
But you do two or three of these kinds of really radical things, then people start getting the idea.
And then other people in the organization start feeling empowered by uh the possibility uh that they could build their own stories.
Uh, sometimes that happens with other senior managers, uh business leaders in the organization.
And you can, by the way, as a business leader, you can see that.
You can go to uh another business leader and say, Listen, I'd like you to do something that builds a story that is consistent with the news culture.
Now, I can't tell you what that story is because it has to be authentic to you, but I can I can sort of see that happen.
Uh, let me give you another really uh great example of this.
There's a company actually here in Utah called Traeger.
You know Traeger Grills?
I'm sure you do.
The person who was running Traeger, um, Jeremy Andrus uh was an investor in Traeger for a while, became convinced that Traeger had the potential for disrupting what was an actually a very mature market, which is the outdoor cooking market, you know, barbecues and smokers and things.
But the organization that he sort of inherited had a really toxic culture.
He basically closed up what the organization where it was and uh moved it here to Utah.
Basically built a new culture from scratch.
And one of the critical values of this new culture that he talked about, he tried to show in his own behavior, built stories around, had to do with customer service.
Sort of uh there was no limit on customer service.
He comes in to work on a Monday, and his uh sales VP comes in and says, Did you hear what Rob did over the weekend?
Who's Rob?
Well, Rob's this uh first-line employee, he has some responsibilities, but he's not a senior manager.
He's just a he's just a guy in the office working hard, doing his thing.
And apparently, uh Rob somehow got a phone call from uh a customer, a Traeger customer in Seattle.
His Traeger grill is not working.
Now, this customer was uh a manager, a sales manager at one of uh a Costco up in in the Seattle area, and Costco is of course is an important customer for Traeger.
Uh so this Rob listens to the phone call, diagnoses the problem, goes to the office, picks up the part that's needed, gets on an airplane, flies to Seattle, fixes the part, fixes the machine with the part, helps the guy uh uh season his brisket, okay, gets back on the airplane, flies home, and then he comes in work on Monday morning, and it's no big deal.
It's like he's just sitting at his computer doing his work.
Well, of course, the the sales manager at that Costco tells his boss, who is the the the uh Costco the store manager what Traeger did, what Rob did, and that guy then calls uh mer head merchant at Costco Corporate, who then calls the VP of sales at Traeger, who then tells the CEO of Traeger, Did you know what your guy did?
This is awesome.
This is under unbelievable level of quality of service.
And Jeremy Anders' response was yes, the culture is happening.
This is a guy who is building his own stories on his own.
For many companies, culture is you know where they are, how people work together.
And if you're talking about stories circulating at the at the water cooler and people passing these stories on, I wonder in a post-COVID world and where there's much more working remotely, working from home, yeah, much more virtual work, how that affects the efficacy of these stories and just the distribution of these stories.
So I I recently came from a meeting with uh with a group of managers at a well-known consulting firm, and I was just listening, and I was listening to the CEOs and other senior managers talk about the challenges they're facing.
And I came away saying what these people were saying was was our organizational cultures are in tatters.
They are in tatters, they're falling apart.
We have for good reasons.
I'm not saying I'm not uh arguing against going home during COVID, obviously that was a requirement.
But it's very difficult.
Two things are very difficult where everyone's working from home.
The first thing is it's very hard to build new stories because new stories are created when groups of individuals confront situations that actually test their old values.
And so it's very hard to build new stories, and it's very hard to communicate those stories.
Um and Zoom and related technologies is still a cool medium.
We we think we can't read the body language.
We the picture we see is two inches square in all in a in a large meeting.
We don't know the context, people are interrupting each other because they can't read the body the the body language, and then and then they're dropping off and coming on, and and then dogs running through.
I mean, all these things make it difficult, so it makes it a cool medium, makes it difficult to to get the really emotion and affect that has to be associated with um with telling these stories that are really profound in many ways.
Yeah, and so between those two things, I think a lot of firms now are calling people back in, saying it's time to get back together, and there's a resistance to do that.
But one of one of the reasons is to think about how to bring them in is to recreate these culture, the cultures that are in tatters.
Now you talked about the affect, right?
Not coming across in video conference calls, for instance.
Um, one of the recommendations that came from your research is that organizational leaders need to be theatrical.
What do you mean by that?
Yeah, it's amazing, isn't it?
I I think you've said it a little too little stronger than I would say it.
Um it turns out that many of the culture change stories that were created had a very theatrical element to them.
That's how I would say it.
Not all of them.
Uh, and what is theater varies a lot, but um let me give you a really short example of one.
Uh this is one of my very favorite stories in the book.
This is uh by uh a friend of mine named Jeff Rodek, who was the uh CEO of Hyperion uh a few years ago.
This is during a time when the company had been doing fairly well and there was a big downturn in the market, and uh he develops the new strategy in uh in consult with a consulting firm.
They put together a new strategy, and then they're gonna have a big meeting with among the top management team to sort of talk about the strategy and its implications, one of which is uh going to be a pretty significant layoff.
So they're getting ready to do that meeting, and it turns out that they had already uh their planning people had already booked a meeting room at a very, very fancy hotel in San Francisco.
And Jeff says, we cannot have a meeting to decide to lay off a very large percentage of our employees at that hotel.
Yeah, it's just it's just not right.
And his assistant says, Yeah, we we've already paid for the hotel.
So he says, We're gonna change the meeting.
So everyone shows up at the meeting and they and they can come into the dining room, and it's exactly what you'd expect.
It's all fancy china and stemware, and and and then they sit down for dinner, and the first uh the first course is uh rolls and water, bread and water, and then the the second course comes out, and it's also just bread and water, and then the third course, it's just bread and water, and then he stands up and says, Listen, we don't deserve to celebrate with a fancy dinner here.
We only deserve bread and water.
That is so theatrical, it's amazing, right?
And and talks about the strategy then and the cost, and it says ends the meeting by saying, I'm gonna schedule this room this meeting room for one year from now, and we're gonna have a real celebrator for dinner.
We're gonna deserve it because tonight all we deserve is bread and water.
I guarantee there's not a person in that room who forgets that experience because of the theatricality.
We know the old saying, hearts and minds.
Right.
How do you create stories that that appeal to both?
Because the stories, you know, will go on being told.
Absolutely, and they evolve too.
But we'll start with the head.
We had heads and hearts, is how we use it in the language.
But you're about hearts and minds thing.
That harkens back to Vietnam, so I'm a little worried about that.
So show my age is a good idea.
Yeah, right, right, right.
No, it does have that military connotation.
It does get the hearts and minds of the people.
So we use heads and hearts.
Heads and hearts.
Okay.
And we start with heads.
And the reason we say that is that if there's not a business case for culture change, then you should not engage in culture change.
If a business leader engages in culture change because without a strong business case, without the notion that you need to change the culture to implement your strategy, then it's an ego trip.
Then you know, think what you're saying.
Seriously, that's the most egotistical thing imaginable.
That's not gonna work.
So you have to start with a business case, and and it has to be very tight.
And it has to be our old strategy was X, our new strategy is Y, and our culture needs to change to Y, or we're not going to be successful.
And the economics need to be compelling.
However, culture change is about changing people's sense of purpose at work, their direction, their sense of identity, how they interact with each other.
Very, very personal stuff.
One reason culture change is so hard is because it requires us to change some basic assumptions about who we are at work and how we work with each other.
It's like change resistance on steroids.
And so we've also seen that a lot of these stories that that were built also appeal to uh what Nick can call the better angels of our nature.
They would they they went beyond just, yeah, we're here to make more money and drive these other people away.
Uh although that's part of it is to beat the competition.
I got it.
But it's also and and in doing so, we're going to satisfy our customers.
We're going to delight our customers more than they they have been delighted in the past.
We're going to give our employees an experience that they've never had before of being involved in creating this new business and on and on.
So those kinds of things appeal to the heart.
If it's just heart, we didn't see any examples of successful culture change that was just about let's just be better towards each other, sort of Bill and Ted.
Let's just be excellent towards each other.
Yeah, it turns out not to be a compelling organizational change story.
But if you have head and heart, then there's a there's a good chance you'll be successful.
Is there anything you need to do to spread the stories?
It makes me think of uh USAA, the the insurance company.
Sure.
They have something that they do called mission moments, where at the beginning of meetings, they will stop and talk about a customer.
Absolutely.
Their history with the company, this serves uh military family members, so they'll talk about uh that person's service and then sometimes tell stories of of uh solving that customer's needs.
Yeah, you know, talk about a great way to keep telling stories and then stay grounded in in what you do as a company.
That's right.
Um, but what do you recommend for telling the stories in informal ways, or do you just let stories take on the life of their own?
No, we we're gonna do both.
And they in the beginning, when a story is told, they spread like wildfire through an organization.
I mean, yeah, yeah.
Within a day, everyone in the company knows this is going on.
Interestingly enough, for those who understand why we need to change the culture to align with the strategy, these employees take pride in this, these stories.
They said, look what our CEO is doing.
This is so cool.
He is actually taking our organization and moving it in a way that used to happen.
So in the beginning, our findings suggest that interesting enough, don't be too aggressive in the beginning about taking uh having a more explicit communication policy, because that can be look a little self-serving, a little marketing going on, you know.
That said, at some point uh you have to start saying, okay, uh, usually it's when some other stories are also being built in the organization that are also culture changing in nature.
You start looking for ways to communicate those two formal channels, and that's you know, you have um online magazines and and uh chat rooms and those kinds of things.
Uh it's great if you can get the uh the press involved.
Again, that's not to talk about you as the business leader, but to talk about the culture change.
So let it sort of diffuse on its own, and then by the way, shortly thereafter, build another story so that so you get that one backed up, and after two or three of those stories that you've built, you continue to build them as well over time.
Then others will start building, and then you can go to more formal communication model.
Yeah.
Well, the previous culture was made up of lots of stories too.
So you have to.
That's correct.
So you're gonna have to you're gonna have to deconstruct the old one.
It's not actually that's the wrong language.
It's kind of subtle because one question we're asked, and it's a totally legitimate question, is a lot of people join a company because they like the old culture.
They they selected into it and they're actually really good at it.
And now you're you're putting a new strategy in place that requires a new culture.
Isn't that bait and switch?
Isn't that unfair?
And the answer is yeah, it is.
And some people who who have been deeply loyal and deeply committed to the organization's old culture can feel very much disenfranchised.
And you know why?
Because they are being disenfranchised.
That's just it.
And some of those can be a business leader's good friends, they can be uh functionally very competent.
But you know, if the strategic analysis is correct that we have to change the strategy, then it follows that we have to change the culture.
And a failure to do that is uh can be uh deeply problematic.
So as a business leader, I don't want to lose that functional expertise.
I don't want to lose that loyalty.
I'm gonna go to those people and try to bring them into the fold.
But if they if they cannot or will not make the transition to the new culture, uh they may have to be let go.
And if they do, you tell those stories and celebrate them.
Exactly.
Total win.
Yeah.
Can leaders at any level do this?
So uh, you know, the answer is probably yes, but our experience uh I won't I'm not gonna go I don't want to go too far beyond the data.
Our estimate is that if you have 50 or so people who are working for you that you have an organizational culture whether you know it or not and so you can take responsibility for changing that culture.
We 50 or so because at that point people may be dispersed, they may not see each other all the time and what happens is culture is is the control mechanism that fills in the blanks when policies and procedures don't talk about what needs to be done.
And as an organization gets larger and larger then you start seeing uh culture become becoming more important.
You mentioned over time the new stories sort of replace the old stories.
How do you know when you're done?
How do you know when the culture has been shifted so in an important sense you're not ever done because uh cultures uh you either invest in a culture or it drifts and dissipates.
Uh people think well maybe this culture is not that important.
Uh so there is a sense in which you have to continually invest in uh stories that build your culture that continue to reinforce the the the strategy.
Besides that, strategies also change over time.
Context that shifts, so you may have to change your culture, fine-tune it a little bit.
If you begin a culture chain process, and I've seen this, uh I won't name name companies, but many years ago I was contacted by a firm that was competing against a very innovative competitor.
And this particular firm was known, this is the Silicon Valley, it was known throughout the valley as being risk-averse.
Its competitor, uh, when they when they came up with a new technology that didn't work, they saw that as an opportunity to learn.
And this company, uh, when the product didn't work, they treated it as an opportunity to find out who was responsible so they could fire them.
Well, guess what?
They weren't innovative at all.
And so they they came to me and said, We'd like you to help us change our organizational culture from being so it starts with we did a six-month study and and we found out we have a risk-verse culture.
Six months.
This is like a three-minute conversation with any employee, okay?
It's not a very complicated problem.
Another side note, we saw no zero successful culture change efforts that began with a study of the current culture.
None.
That's that's a way of usually avoiding culture change.
But so uh they did they did the study for six months.
They decided they were risk-averse, and they said, what we'd like to do is you'd like you to come in here and we'd like you to help us get rid of our old culture and build this new culture, and we'd like this done in six weeks.
I uh distanced myself from that opportunity.
The whole concept was was flawed because uh culture change is an ongoing uh process that you you continually build new stories, and and it's not just you that builds the new stories, employees throughout the organization build their own stories and they continue to uh strengthen and rejuvenate the the culture of the organization.
That was Jay Barney, professor at the Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah, speaking with HBR Ideacast host Kurt Nickish.
Barney wrote the book, The Secret of Culture Change How to Build Authentic Stories That Transform Your Organization, as well as the HBR article, Create Stories That Change Your Company Culture.
HBR on Leadership will be back next Wednesday with another hand-picked conversation from Harvard Business Review.
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