There is a story being told before any words are spoken.`
The first time a new leader walks into a room — into the first all-staff meeting, the first one-on-one with a direct report, the first operational review — there is a room full of people doing something sophisticated and mostly unconscious. They are reading.
Not the presentation deck. Not the strategic priorities document distributed in advance. They are reading the leader.
They are reading what the leader pays attention to. Where their eyes go first. Who they acknowledge and who they seem not to notice. Whether they ask questions or deliver positions. Whether the questions they ask are performative or genuinely curious. How they respond when the information in the room doesn’t match the information they arrived with.
All of this, before the first agenda item, is story. And it is story that will outlast anything in the onboarding plan.
The Narrative That Precedes the Plan
In the early stages of building Narrative Business Practice™, I spent considerable time thinking about why leadership transitions so often go wrong despite comprehensive onboarding processes, well-defined 30-60-90-day plans, and the genuine good intentions of everyone involved.
What I kept finding — in the patterns of organizations where transitions stumbled, and in the contrast with ones that didn’t — was not a failure of strategy. It was a failure of narrative alignment. The formal story the incoming leader was telling about their intentions and the informal story the organization was constructing from their behavior were not the same story.
The formal story said: I am here to listen. I will take time to understand before I act. I value what has been built here.
The informal story — the one assembled from the actual evidence — said something different. It said: the questions they ask are already organized toward conclusions they’ve brought with them. When they say “I value what’s been built,” what they mean is, “I’m looking for what I can keep.” The listening is real, but provisional.
Teams read this faster than any leader realizes. And once they have written the informal narrative, it is extraordinarily difficult to revise.
The Narrative Choices Hidden in the First Ninety Days
What makes leadership transitions narratively complex is that every action in the early period carries amplified interpretive weight. This is not an organizational dysfunction — it is a rational response to uncertainty. When people don’t yet have a reliable map of what the new leader values, they read every observable data point carefully and store it.
The first meeting the leader chooses to run versus observe. The first question they ask versus the first statement they make. The first person they go back to for a follow-up conversation — and, just as crucially, who they don’t go back to. The first moment something goes wrong and how they respond. The first time someone challenges them in front of the group.
Every one of these is a narrative signal. Every one of them, individually, is interpretable in multiple ways. But as they accumulate, they begin to coalesce into a story that the organization will carry — often for years — about who this leader actually is.
I have worked with senior leaders who did everything right on paper in their first ninety days and spent the following two years fighting an informal narrative that was set in the first two weeks. Not because they made catastrophic errors. Because they made unexamined ones — small narrative signals they didn’t know they were sending, that landed in fertile organizational soil and grew into something they didn’t intend.
Three Informal Stories New Leaders Tell Without Realizing It
The story of scarcity. This story is most often told by leaders who arrive with a genuine mandate for change — and communicate that mandate, implicitly, as a verdict on what came before. The story the team hears is not “we are building toward something new.” It is “what we have done here has not been enough.” The signal is rarely explicit. It lives in the what-we-need-to-do-differently framing that appears before any meaningful understanding of what was done and why. The organizational response to this story is not transformation. It is self-protection.
The story of the already-formed opinion. This is the story told by the leader who asks questions but listens primarily to confirm rather than to learn. Teams identify this pattern quickly and accurately. When the questions being asked feel like a trial — when the purpose of the inquiry is not genuinely open — the people with the most important things to say go quiet first. They have learned what happens when real information is offered to a listener who has already decided. The result is that the leader gets the organization’s performance rather than its knowledge. And performance, by definition, is not the truth.
The story of selective presence. Where a leader shows up consistently matters as much as what they say when they arrive. A leader who is reliably present in senior leadership conversations and reliably absent from the spaces where frontline work is done tells a story about what they value — even if that story was never the intention. The team closest to the actual work of the organization reads this absence not as a scheduling reality, but as a signal about whose experience counts. That reading shapes how information flows — and doesn’t flow — upward for as long as the leader holds the role.
What Narrative-Informed Leadership Transitions Look Like
The leaders who navigate transitions with the most integrity and effectiveness tend to share a quality that is easy to name and genuinely difficult to sustain: they remain genuinely uncertain long enough to actually learn something.
Not performed uncertainty. Not the kind of listening that is recognizable as a transition strategy. But the kind of deliberate suspension of conclusion — the same discipline that Narrative Medicine calls for in the clinical encounter — that makes it possible to hear what is actually there rather than what was expected.
This requires something that many accomplished leaders find surprisingly hard: the willingness to be in a new place without demonstrating mastery. To ask questions that reveal not knowing. To stay with a partial picture long enough for the fuller picture to come into focus.
In clinical training, we called this sitting with the uncertainty. It is not passive. It is an active discipline — a choice, made repeatedly, to resist the pressure toward premature narrative resolution.
In organizational leadership, it produces the rarest of outcomes: a transition where the organization’s existing wisdom is genuinely heard, where what was built before is understood before it is changed, and where the informal story the team tells about the new leader matches the formal story being told.
The first story a new leader tells — the one told through attention, through questions, through presence — becomes the foundation on which everything else is built.
It is worth being deliberate about what that foundation says.
