The Culture Glue

The short 10-second takeaway:
You can have the best strategy in the world. But if your team doesn’t feel it, trust it, and pass it on - you’ll struggle to scale. Joint memories and stories around them turn cold slides into shared belief. And shared belief is what builds culture.

Just got off a call with a senior leader a few hours ago. He told me: “I don’t think my team gets it. We’ve explained the change 3 times. Still, they don’t move.” I asked how he’d communicated it. He said: “In a slide deck. Then again in a town hall. Then again via email.”

There it was.

Words were spoken. But no connection had been made.

Because culture doesn’t live in bullet points. It lives in the stories people share when you’re not in the room.

Why Culture Doesn’t Grow in Slides and .xls.

Let’s be honest. We’ve all sat through elegant presentations on transformation. Clear pillars. Bold goals. Logical timelines. And yet, teams walk out… unmoved.

Here’s why:

Culture is built by humans. And humans don’t align through facts alone. We align through emotion. Through meaning. Through shared identity. And the most effective way to create those? Storytelling.

When leaders tell stories - about how a frontline team solved a customer crisis, or how an early product flop shaped a core principle - those stories carry values deeper than any slide can.

Stories create emotional anchors. And emotion is what turns slides into behavior.

The Neuroscience Behind Cultural Stickiness

When a leader tells a story, the listener’s brain doesn’t just hear it. It feels it. Stories activate multiple areas in the brain - sensory, emotional, and memory regions - making the message more memorable and meaningful.

Remember these bedtime stories? I hope you do….because it wasn’t just the written pages but all the characters inside the stories, their excitement and their fears that you could feel right under your blanket….it was so much more than just the letters on paper!

Stories trigger oxytocin—the “trust chemical.” That’s why a good story doesn’t just explain the what. It builds belief in the why. And belief is what drives consistent behavior - the foundation of culture.

How to Build Culture Through Narrative (Not Noise)

Here’s how top-performing teams embed culture through shared storytelling:

Ritualized Story Sharing
Weekly meetings kick off with a short “moment that mattered” from the field. Wins, fails, comebacks. This keeps values alive, not abstract.

Distributed Storytelling Power
Don’t make storytelling a leadership monologue. Invite team members to share experiences that reflect your values in action. Stories told peer-to-peer build trust far faster than those delivered top-down.

Values Anchored in Real Moments
Instead of posters that say “Integrity” or “Courage,” tell a story where someone actually lived it under pressure. This is how values stop being vague and start being viral.

Real-World Result: The 3x Culture Transfer Multiplier

When we rolled this into a Fortune 100 innovation team last year, here’s what changed:

• Strategy adoption speed ↑
• Psychological safety scores ↑
• “Clarity of priorities” in pulse surveys ↑

Why? Because people started repeating what mattered. In their own words. In their own language. That’s culture: when they tell the story for you.

One final thought: Your story isn’t just how you lead. It’s how your culture breathes.
If it’s not being told, it’s not being lived.

What are you doing to turn your values into a living, breathing story culture?