Three storytelling principles that enhance communication

1. Introduction

For years, leadership communication followed a simple formula: tell people you're the biggest, the best, or the newest, and hope it sticks. That formula has stopped working. Employees today are quick to spot a polished message that says little, and they switch off the moment they sense it.

Storytelling offers a different way in. Not storytelling as performance or spin, but the basic things that make any story worth listening to: something at stake, an honest account of what happened, and a result that means something.

This article draws on two ideas: the story structure used by screenwriting teacher Robert McKee, and the plain honesty championed by writer David Shields. Together, they explain what makes a story work, and how a leader can use the same principles in a team meeting, a project update, or a year-ahead announcement.

2. What Makes a Story Work

Three things, really.

A gap between expectation and reality

McKee argues that a story without conflict isn't really a story, it's just a list of good things that happened. When a leader presents a plan as one smooth success after another, the team switches off. There's no reason to care how it ends if nothing was ever at risk.

What holds attention is the gap: the space between what you expected to happen and what actually happened. Plans rarely survive contact with reality unchanged, and that gap, however small, is where the interesting part of any story lives.

Honesty about the mess

Shields' work argues for writing that reflects how people actually experience things, rather than a tidied-up version of events. Most internal company communication tries to remove friction by over-explaining everything, smoothing over the parts where things didn't go to plan or people misread each other.

People connect with the opposite. A leader who can say "I got that call wrong; here's what I missed" earns more trust than one who never admits fault. One of the clearest examples of this is Satya Nadella's early days as CEO of Microsoft. He inherited a company known for an aggressive internal culture, and rather than opening with a confident vision statement, he spoke about his son, who has severe disabilities, and the helplessness he'd felt as a parent. He used that experience to introduce empathy as a value the whole company would work towards.

That's a large-scale example, but the same principle holds at the level of a single team. A team leader who says "I pushed this deadline through without checking with you first, and that wasn't fair" is doing the same thing Nadella did, on a much smaller stage.

A person, not a policy

A story needs someone at the centre of it, a staff member, a customer, a team, whose experience shows why something matters. Policies and processes don't hold attention on their own. What happened to a specific person, and what they did about it, does.

Take something as routine as an expense claims process. Described as a policy, it's a list of rules: submit within 30 days, attach receipts, get manager sign-off. Nobody remembers a list of rules.

Described as a story, it's about someone who paid for a client dinner out of their own pocket, then waited six weeks for reimbursement because the form went to the wrong inbox twice. By the time the team hears about the new, simpler process, they already understand exactly why it matters, because they've felt some version of that wait themselves.

Just reporting	Telling a story
Lists what was done	Shows what was at stake
Skips over what went wrong	Shows the gap between plan and reality
Talks about the team in general	Centres on someone specific
Sounds like spin	Sounds true

 

3. Telling Better Stories in Your Next Meeting

Here's how to put this into practice. Six steps, and all things you can do to turn a routine update into something people will actually follow.

1. Decide what you want the team to take away or do differently

2. Pick a real, recent example that makes that point, a project, a customer, a decision

3. Open with what went wrong or what was at stake

4. Be honest about the gap, what you expected versus what actually happened

5. Show how the team worked through it

6. End with what changed, and why it matters

   
   

Worked example: rolling out new project management software

1.     Take-away: You want the team to actually use the new project management system, not just when it suits them.

2.     Real example: A client deadline was missed last month because two people each thought the other was handling a task.

3.     What was at stake: Work was falling through the cracks, and it was starting to cost you client trust.

4.     The gap: You rolled out the new system expecting it to fix the visibility problem. It did, but it also showed something nobody expected, one person was carrying far more work than everyone realised. That wasn't the plan, and at first it didn't feel like progress.

5.     Working through it: Rather than dropping the new system, the team used what it revealed to redistribute the workload more fairly. That took an uncomfortable conversation and a few weeks of adjustment.

6.     What changed: Deadlines started being met again, not because people worked harder, but because the work was now visible and shared properly.

Notice the story isn't really about the software. It's about a team working out how to trust each other again. That ties back to the three things from the section above: there's a gap, there's honesty about what didn't go to plan, and there's a person, or a few people, at the centre of it.

A second example: deciding on hybrid work

Not every story ends in a clean win, and that's worth showing too.

1.     Take-away: You want the team to understand why the hybrid work pattern is changing, not just be told the new days.

2.     Real example: After a year of fully remote work, two client projects stalled because decisions that needed quick input from several people kept getting delayed in chat threads.

3.     What was at stake: Deadlines were slipping, and newer staff said they felt isolated and were learning less without more experienced colleagues nearby.

4.     The gap: The expectation was that remote work would be just as productive, if not more so. In practice, the kind of work that depends on quick back-and-forth, and on newer staff picking things up by being around others, suffered without in-person contact.

5.     Working through it: Rather than mandating a full return, the team agreed on two fixed days together each week, chosen around the work that actually benefits from people being in the same room.

6.     What changed: Project turnaround improved and newer staff felt more supported, without losing the flexibility that remote work had given everyone.

This one doesn't end with a problem fully solved; it ends with a workable compromise. That's still a story worth telling, because it's honest about the trade-off, which is exactly the kind of gap people recognise from their own experience.

4. Why This Matters

In a workplace where people are quick to switch off anything that sounds like spin, this is one of the few ways left to actually get through to a team. You don't need to be a natural storyteller. You need to notice when an update you're about to give is just a list, and ask whether there's a gap, an honest complication, or a specific person's experience you could use instead.

Leaders who keep relying on the old approach, polished updates with no rough edges, will keep losing people's attention. Leaders who are willing to show the obstacles, the gaps, and their own part in getting things wrong will find their teams paying attention for the right reasons.

---