We all live by stories. I learned this from more than 30 years of coaching the performance of world-class athletes and top leaders from military special-forces, medicine, law enforcement, and commerce. I’ve seen many individuals’ stories make the difference between top tier and second tier, winning and losing, life and death.

When we become leaders, our public stories become more public. Are you promoting dramatics instead of getting down to basics? In a leadership context, a story is words that describe the shared mission, shared reality, and shared promise. When stories are well made, they have solid assumptions, propose a standard of behavior that is goal-driven and ethical, and state a vision of achievements and rewards. The best of these tales are delivered as works in progress, subject to editing based on changing conditions.

I often see leaders foster three types of troublesome stories: Official Stories, Big Stories, and Business Dramas.

1. Official stories are often made public through vision, mission and value statements. Common official stories include items such as these: “We reward individuals based on their performance” or “Our performance standards are clearly connected with work.” The underlying intention of statements like these is fairness in rewards, a positive goal.


Two problems often thwart such stories.

First, they must be heard at all levels in the organization—no small challenge. A colleague of mine, industrial psychologist Dr. Paul Connolly of Performance Programs, Inc., has researched employee attitudes in organizations for decades. “With each level removed from top management,” he says, “understanding deteriorates. By the time you get three levels down, there’s perhaps half the comprehension of the official story compared to what’s reported by people at higher levels.”

Second, official stories are very difficult to make believable. All it takes is one or two cases of apparent favoritism or leniency for that official story to look like fantasy. In fact, leaders are often confronted with real world conditions that challenge the sincerity of their official stories. All too often, we are tempted to respond with something I call the Big Story.

2. Big Stories form the backdrop of many cultures. For instance, a common Big Story is that—fast-paced business world being what it is, with globalization, and outsourcing, and downsizing, and automation, and maybe Wall Street pressure—we must make increasing demands on employees’ lives. Keep swimming or die. It means longer hours and less time for family and oneself. It means holding meetings during lunch or before or after the workday proper, which essentially kills anyone’s chance to exercise and stay in shape (let’s just order in fast food). And the organization—stressing its imperative to move forward to survive—also demands that people frequently change directions, learn new technologies every few months, and completely alter how they conduct business.

Big Stories are often the theme of learning initiatives: leadership training, company meetings, and pronouncements in employee newsletters. Big Stories infiltrate the rules of advancement, team evaluations, and performance appraisal. They become part of the unspoken rules through peer pressure, internal competition, and ways of currying favor.


The Big Story is often the precursor to a third type of story.

3. Business Dramas pose multiple problems. They introduce a fear factor—there’s something big and unmanageable coming to get us. They encourage a constant state of energy-sapping stress from which there can be little replenishment. And they encourage wasteful playacting—after all, if you’re not hyped up and ready to do battle, you’re not on board with the drama. If you’re leaving before the boss, you’re not as engaged as those who leave after the boss.

Here’s an example: “Hey, people, we’re at the mercy of something bigger than all of us. These are global forces we’re talking about here, nothing your friendly management team can do anything about. We’ve gotta’ run just to stay even! And we’ve all gotta’ do our parts, which includes 24/7 alertness.”

Who will garner more rewards in the scenario above? I’d place my bets on the galloping cowboys and cowgirls of the No Sweat Gang, people who are willing to go flat out, who will drive their ponies over the deserts, hanging half-dead from their saddles. Think about people who don’t challenge this soap opera for fear of offending—yes—the leader in charge of storytelling.

Revisit the official story we started with: “We reward individuals based on their performance” or “Our performance standards are clearly connected with work.” These statements pale in the context of a Business Drama that equates performance with heroics.

How productive are exhausted employees, people whose mental, spiritual, physical, and emotional energies are weakened by hypervigilance? As leaders, we’d better understand the habits of highly engaged, genuinely productive employees.


From our research on employee satisfaction and engagement in their work, we’ve learned the following:
• People who score in the top 10 percent of job satisfaction take care of themselves in the physical realm at much higher levels than others. Their average exercise and fitness scores are 170 percent of those in the bottom 10 percent of job satisfaction. Their nighttime sleep is 154 percent of those in the bottom 10 percent. Their overall rest and recovery, which includes daytime rest breaks and constructive diversions from work, is 149 percent of those with the lowest job satisfaction. Their nutrition is 126 percent of those in the lowest group.

• People in the top 10 percent of job satisfaction are also taking better care of themselves in the mental, emotional, spiritual realms. They score about 250 percent higher on commitment, passion, self-confidence, vision, and purpose than those in the lowest 10 percent of job satisfaction.

• People who report the highest job satisfaction are also highly self-confident individuals. There is an 85 percent correlation between high job satisfaction and self-confidence.

Now contrast these highly satisfied and engaged workers with a recent USA Today survey, in which one in six U.S. employees is so overworked that he or she is unable to use up his or her annual vacation time. Thirty-four percent of workers reported that their jobs were so pressing they had no downtime at work; 32% ate lunch while they worked; 32% never left the building once they arrived; 14% felt company management only promoted people who habitually worked late; 19% felt pressure to work when sick or injured; 17% said it was difficult to take time off or leave work in an emergency; 8% believed that if they were to become seriously ill they would be fired or demoted.

Many people who show up for work are present rather than absent—but are present in a fog. In fact, “presenteeism” —putting in an appearance no matter how counterproductive—may be a much costlier problem than its productivity-reducing counterpart, absenteeism, and potentially more lethal to the organization because it’s not as obvious.

Through repetition, some leaders believe their own faulty stories—at great peril. Mutiny is not just what happens when ship captains indefensibly change (or robotically stick to) their stories but also when kings, CEOs, and schoolteachers do it. Athletes routinely give up on playing hard for coaches they deem excessively punitive or inconsistent; the bond of their mutually aligned stories—to win a championship—is undermined because the coach’s story does not seem to allow for the inevitable particularities of any individual athlete’s story.

Alignment of stories, yours and your employees’, is ideally generated from a level of realism about the energy needs of human beings as well as the needs of organizations and the realities of the business environment.

Are you unconsciously promoting dramatics instead of getting down to basics? To do a check-up on your own storytelling, evaluate yourself with these seven questions:
1. Do I make a practice of periodically reappraising the stories I communicate as a leader?

2. Do I routinely take time to examine my own storytelling premises and assumptions in light of fact-finding?

3. Do I adjust my stories to reflect shared realities as well as visions?

4. Do I ask questions of others to familiarize myself with the premises and assumptions underlying their stories?

5. If I ask a question, I reflect on the response in light of the current “story”?

6. Do I know how to get inside the real practices and working values “in force” at every level in my organization?

7. Do I avoid oversimplifying or over-dramatizing the stories surrounding the challenges we face?


Reprinted with permission of Leadership Excellence (http://www.leaderexcel.com/)

Jim Loehr, Ed.D. is CEO and cofounder of the Human Performance Institute in Orlando, FL. He is author of The Power of Story (2007) and coauthor of The Power of Full Engagement (2003).