Marcus has been with his organization for eleven years. He has watched three CEOs come and go, survived two restructurings, and navigated a pandemic that reshaped everything about how the organization functioned. He is not naive, not cynical — he is experienced. And experience, in an organization, accumulates into something very specific: a story.
The story Marcus carries about his current CEO is detailed. It includes the moment three years ago when the CEO walked past him in the lobby during a difficult week for the team and did not make eye contact. It includes the board presentation where the CEO took full credit for a strategy that had originated in Marcus’s department. It includes the time she came down from the executive floor during the week of layoffs — not the day of, not the week before, but three days after — and spoke to the team with a poise that registered, to everyone who had been there through the worst of it, as scripted.
Marcus does not dislike his CEO. He respects her competence. He executes her direction faithfully.
He would not, however, take a risk for her.
The Story You Did Not Know You Were Writing
Here is what I want every leader reading this to hold for a moment: your team does not experience your leadership through your intentions. They experience it through your story.
And they have been writing that story since the day you arrived.
This is not metaphor. It is how human cognition works. We are, as the narrative psychologist Dan McAdams has spent decades demonstrating, storytelling creatures. We organize the raw data of our experience into narrative arcs — with characters, patterns, causality, and meaning. We do not simply remember isolated events; we construct stories from them. And those stories become the framework through which we interpret everything that follows.
What this means for leadership is both humbling and clarifying: by the time you are thinking about your leadership presence, your team has already written thousands of words about who you are.
Those words are not stored in a document anywhere. But they are stored — in memory, in culture, in the conversations people have about you when you are not in the room. They shape how your team interprets your emails. They determine whether your feedback lands as developmental or threatening. They govern whether someone raises a concern or stays quiet. They decide, ultimately, whether your people will take real risks on your behalf.
What the Research Says About Narrative and Trust
The organizational psychologist Brené Brown has written extensively about how trust is built in small, cumulative moments rather than grand gestures. Her BRAVING framework identifies elements like boundaries, reliability, and vault — the confidence that a leader holds confidences carefully. But what strikes me most in the trust literature is not any single element. It is the cumulative logic.
Trust is not a conclusion reached in a single moment. It is a story assembled over time, from evidence.
What this means is that the leader who asks “why doesn’t my team trust me?” is asking the wrong question. The right question is: what story has my team assembled from the evidence available to them? And does that story support trust?
That second question requires something most leadership development frameworks are not designed to facilitate: honest narrative auditing. Not a 360 survey. Not a leadership assessment. Something closer to what I call a narrative reckoning — the practice of systematically examining what evidence your behavior has provided for the stories your team is constructing about you.
In my work with organizational leaders through Narrative Business Practice™, I use a framework called the Narrative Leadership Assessment to do exactly this. The assessment does not measure skills. It surfaces stories — the stories leaders carry about themselves, and the stories their teams are likely building from available evidence. The gap between the two is almost always where the real work lives.
Three Patterns I See Most Often
Across the leaders I have worked with, three narrative gaps appear with particular frequency.
The first is the gap between intention and impact in moments of stress. Leaders generally know who they are on good days — thoughtful, engaged, clear. What they often do not know is who they become under pressure, and what story that version of them is writing. A leader who becomes short-tempered during budget season is not simply having a bad month. She is providing her team with evidence for a story: that my safety in this organization depends on how the numbers look. A leader who goes quiet during organizational uncertainty is not simply managing complexity. He is confirming a story: that what I don’t know is too dangerous to ask about.
The second is what I call the credibility narrative gap. Every leader has a version of their own professional story — the one they believe justifies their authority and earns their team’s respect. But teams do not always construct the same story from the same evidence. I have worked with leaders who believe their credibility rests on their expertise, while their teams’ experience of that expertise is that it crowds out other perspectives. I have worked with leaders who believe their warmth is their greatest relational asset, while their teams experience that warmth as conditional — present during positive moments, absent during friction.
The third is the values-under-pressure narrative. Teams watch most carefully not for what leaders say they value, but for what leaders do when values come into conflict with pressure. When speed and quality are in tension. When a short-term result could be achieved at the cost of a long-term principle. When a difficult truth could be suppressed without immediate consequence. What happens in those moments becomes, for the team, the definitive text about what the organization actually values — and about whether leadership can be trusted to hold what it says it holds.
The Narrative Audit: A Practice for Leaders
None of this means that you are stuck with the story your team has assembled. Stories are not fixed. They are, as Narrative Business Practice™ recognizes, always in process — subject to revision when new evidence arrives, capable of transformation when leaders are willing to do the work of honest reckoning.
But the revision has to start from an honest reading of the current text.
Here are four questions I offer to leaders who are ready to begin that reading.
What would my team say I do when things go wrong? Not what you hope they would say, and not what the best version of you does. What would the median member of your team, thinking honestly, describe as your pattern when a project fails, a decision backfires, or a target is missed?
What story does my team currently have about whose voices matter here? Think about whose perspectives regularly shape decisions. Think about who gets interrupted in meetings, whose ideas get reattributed, whose concerns get tabled. The answers compose a story about power and belonging that every member of your team is reading continuously.
When was the last time I publicly changed my mind? Changing one’s mind is a sign of intellectual honesty, and intellectual honesty is one of the most powerful trust-builders available. But many leaders have been so shaped by the cultural expectation that leaders have answers that they cannot remember the last time they modeled honest uncertainty or genuine revision.
What story am I writing right now? Not last year’s story, not the story you intend to write, but the one you are actively authoring today, through your choices, your presence, and your silence. That story is in active production. The question is whether you are writing it consciously.
The Most Powerful Leadership Act Available to You
Marcus, eleven years in, is carrying a story about his CEO that she does not know he has. It was assembled from dozens of small moments she probably does not remember, each of which provided a data point for a narrative she was not aware she was authoring.
She cannot go back and rewrite those pages.
But she can write new ones.
The most powerful leadership act available to any leader is not a strategic decision or a vision statement or a town hall. It is the daily, deliberate practice of asking: what story is my behavior providing for my team? And is that the story I actually want to tell?
That practice is not a communication technique. It is a form of leadership integrity — the commitment to making sure that who you are aligns, as closely as possible, with who your team needs you to be.
The gap, when it exists, is never just a communication problem.
It is always a story problem.
And story problems, in my experience, have story solutions.
