Chad Silverstein argues leaders should use storytelling to connect employees to company history and culture. Share origin stories, celebrate veterans, surface early struggles, and frame staff as part of an ongoing journey so they'll fight to protect the culture.
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One of the things that I was coached to do heavily during my time operating my company was to not only celebrate wins, but it was to honor tradition, and it was to help connect people to how we got to where we were. Because people came into our system and they just assumed that we were here, and they knew nothing about what it took and how we had to go through everything that we went through to get to where we were in that moment. And. And this day is about studying history, so you can see things in history. And I believe that if you've been in your company for a long time, you can study the history in your company to learn a lot. But the key is, again, leaders are connectors, and they can connect their team to all these cool traditions and all the cool things that were required early on to get you to this place. And hopefully you have some people around you that can confirm they were there. We had people on our team that were with us 15, 20 years. So every system's kind of got some veterans that they can do this with and to tell these stories over. And it's important to challenge the team and to set that bar high, that there's an expectation that you fight, you fight to keep growing, you fight, you know, to keep that momentum going. All the fighting that it took as a startup and a small company to get to where you are today, you know, now there's more of a responsibility to get the team to not only jump on board and then lift the team to the next level. And. And it's hard to do that when a lot of people on your team were not there early on. So that's why the power of storytelling, the power of that constant reminder of what it was like back in the day and to make it fun and to bring them into that and make them feel like they're part of the tradition. Leaders just. They fail to do this. And I think, you know, you don't have to be such a great storyteller to be able to connect people to how you got here today. So you don't even have to be the owner of the system to be able to do that. If you've been with your team for a long time, you can certainly look back and remember the way things used to be, how we used to do things. And you want to obviously keep it positive, and you want to be able to connect people to the whys behind the decisions that are being made, the changes being made. As you grow your company, as you grow your team, and you want to make sure you connect people to it. And you want to make people fight for it. And the only way they're going to fight for it is if they feel like they're part of it. And so your job as a leader is to make people feel united. It's to make people feel that they are part of this journey, no matter when they came into it. And if you do a good job of this and you can get people on board buying in on day one without coercing them to drink the Kool Aid, and you influence them through this authenticity and being transparent and not having to sound like everything was always so perfect because it wasn't, then you can get by in pretty easily. People want to be part of something like that, and then it's not so hard to challenge them, to fight to make it better and to make them feel like one day we're going to be telling a story about you. And so one of the most powerful things you can do to keep that momentum going is that when you tell stories over, make sure you're talking about the people who are in the room. Make sure you talk about the successes and the challenges that they had to overcome in order to get to the position that they're in. Many people have organically grown through their company up the ladder, and they all have a story, and they all have a story that's has the ability to move people and inspire. And your job as a leader is to connect people to that. So have fun doing that. It's something that doesn't cost you any money. It doesn't cost that much time. And it's something that you can always do and always be thinking about and finding creative ways to make it fun for the people that are working for you. Whether they're in the office remote, however it is, there's lots of ways you can kind of spread the word. And I think it's important that you cherish the traditions that got you to where you are.
