The Organizational Story Nobody Is Telling

Every organization has an official story.

It lives in the annual report. In the website copy. In the remarks the executive director gives at the gala. It is the story of where the organization came from, what it stands for, and where it is going. It is a good story. Often it is a true story.

It is also almost never the story the staff tells.

David Boje, whose research on organizational storytelling shapes a significant part of how I think about climate work, described organizations as storytelling systems. Meaning is not stored in policy manuals or mission statements. It is stored in the narratives that circulate informally through an organization: the stories about who gets rewarded and who gets blamed, about what happened to the last person who raised a hard question, about why that longtime program director left and what was really going on.

Those stories are not distractions from organizational life. They are organizational life.

They are how employees understand the organization they work in.

The official story and the informal story exist simultaneously in every organization. The gap between them is a climate variable. And when that gap is large, it produces a particular kind of organizational symptom: disengagement dressed as compliance. People who show up and do the job, but have long since stopped investing in the mission. People who have privately decided that the story the organization tells about itself is not the story they are living.

What I watch for when I enter an organization is the story that is not being told in formal settings. What do people say when they are not performing for leadership? What stories circulate about decisions that were never explained? What happened that the organization never named, processed, or acknowledged?

Every unacknowledged story becomes a climate liability. Because stories that cannot be told in the open do not disappear. They go underground, and they shape how new employees understand the organization they have just joined.

The most important thing a nonprofit CEO can do for organizational climate is not to eliminate the informal story. That is not possible. It is to reduce the gap between the official one and the real one until they are, as much as possible, the same.

That requires honesty about what the organization has gotten wrong. It requires a tolerance for complexity in how you tell the story of who you are. And it requires the organizational maturity to understand that employees can handle hard truths far better than they can handle a story that does not match their daily experience.

Start telling the story that is actually happening. And watch what becomes possible when the informal one no longer has to compensate.