By Ang Brennan
Most strategies fail not because they’re poorly designed, but because leaders haven’t yet developed the storytelling skills to make them live and breathe across their organisations.
Despite significant investment in strategy and planning, execution remains a persistent challenge for organisations. Storytelling is a critical and often underdeveloped leadership skill, and the gap between strategy and alignment has measurable consequences. Understanding what distinguishes leaders who can genuinely bring a narrative to life is key to engaging, motivating, and uniting teams around a shared purpose.
Most organisations invest heavily in strategy, build detailed plans, and present polished slide decks to their leadership teams. However, according to the Harvard Business Review, 67% of well-formulated strategies still fail at the point of execution. So why is this?
In this sense the plans are not the problem – the issue is what happens to them afterwards.
Think of strategy as a script or content for a story. The words on the page may be clear, but a script left on a desk or a story that is not shared widely cannot not move an audience. It needs someone to take it off the page and bring it to life.
Storytelling doesn’t just sit with communications teams, it’s actually a critical skill for leaders. The leader, in this sense, is not simply a messenger, instead they are responsible for sharing a chapter that outlasts them and can be understood and acted upon by everyone around them. It is the story that when told in the right way, is told again and again throughout the organisation and which drives, trust, psychological safety and confidence,
So how as a leader do you become an engaging storyteller? This is what we explored during our Global Leadership Meeting in Edinburgh, bringing together all of our leaders from teams across the world, to better hone our storytelling capabilities.
The goal was to understand the real, meaningful stories that keep our people and communities at the centre of every decision. These stories shape what people focus on, what they let go of, and how confidently they make decisions in the moments that matter most for our customers, partners and performance
Why storytelling is important for engagement
There is a significant distance between knowing what a strategy says and being able to bring it to life. A 2025 study found that 68% of leaders believe their teams are not fully aligned with the organisation’s strategic direction. Research from the Balanced Scorecard Institute has found that 71% of employees cannot recognise their own organisation’s strategy when presented with it in a multiple-choice question.
The consequences are measurable. Gallup’s most recent State of the Global Workplace report found that only 21% of employees globally are engaged at work, a decline matching the lowest levels recorded since the pandemic. Disengaged employees cost the global economy an estimated $438 billion in lost productivity in 2024 alone.
These are not communication issues in the narrow sense of too few emails or meetings. One of the issues is that the strategy might have been shared, distributed, but not brought to life in a way that everyone can connect to. While many factors contribute to disengagement, the thread that runs through almost all of them is a sense of disconnection from purpose: people who cannot see how what they do every day connects to why the organisation exists, or where it is going.
Three reasons leaders find storytelling hard
In my experience the storytelling gap is not usually a matter of intelligence or commitment. It comes from three sources, which tend to reinforce one another:
The first is a perceived lack of skills. Storytelling is something you genuinely need to practice, and most leadership development programmes don’t treat it as a capability to be built. There is a widespread belief that storytellers are born, not made, in the same way people often say they are not creative or not innovative. This is a myth. Given the right tools and frameworks, most people can learn to communicate compellingly. The capability is learnable. And in fact most of us have been telling or listening to stories all our lives.
The second is role perception. Some leaders carry an implicit assumption that storytelling is someone else’s job, that it belongs to marketers or the comms teams or the CEO, and that their role is simply to relay the message. The result is that strategy gets transmitted, but never truly translated and felt. It’s so important to connect both hearts and minds.
The third is an understanding issue. Some leaders might struggle to articulate how their own team’s work connects to the wider organisational purpose and goals. If you cannot draw that line for yourself, you cannot draw it for the people you lead.
There is a story I come back to often in this context. When President Kennedy visited NASA in the early 1960s, he stopped to speak to a janitor mopping the floor. When he asked the man what he did there, the janitor replied: I am helping to put a man on the moon. That is what genuine strategic alignment looks like. Every person in the building understood not just their task, but the story they were part of.
What does a leader who owns the narrative actually look like?
Through our GLM we heard that when a leader truly owns and lives the strategic narrative, the effect is simple to describe and genuinely rare to find. The strategy does not live on a page. It is lived and breathed. If you were to stop anyone in the organisation, at any level, in any function, and ask them what they were there to do and how it connected to the bigger picture, they would be able to answer. Every day, in small interactions and large ones, the story is being told and retold in a way that makes the direction feel real, urgent, and worth following.
And developing that capability in leaders takes practice and genuine commitment. For example, when someone says it is important for leaders to connect with customers, everyone nods. But then leaders rarely ask – how did those conversations go? What did you learn? If something is not genuinely built into the rhythm of work, and checked on, people will always find a reason not to do it.
The answer is agreed practices, regular connection points, and leadership communities that hold each other to account in the way that any professional community does when it takes its craft seriously.
The key to storytelling – know your audience
There is another dimension to this that leaders frequently overlook: the storyteller’s responsibility to know who they are speaking to.
Any organisation is a mixture of people with different communication styles, different preferences, and different ways of processing information. Some people need space to reflect. Some need to be active. Some want to talk things through out loud; others want to sit with an idea quietly before they respond.
Effective leaders design their communication with this in mind and are self-aware – these are the kinds of capabilities that can be developed deliberately through personality profiling tools. They do not simply tell the story they find most natural to tell, but consider who is in the room and what those people need in order for the story to land.
The leaders who communicate most effectively are not the loudest or the most polished. They are the ones with enough self-awareness to understand their own defaults and enough discipline to flex them when it matters. You need to go most of the way to meet people where they are, not expect them to come to you. And if you are self-aware but choose to carry on regardless, that self-awareness is not actually serving anyone.
The three things a good leader-storyteller does
Storytelling is not something a leader applies to everything they do. Knowing when to use it as a tool is itself part of the skill. But when it matters, there are three things that distinguish leaders who do it well.
- First, they understand the stories they are telling themselves, and how those colour the stories they tell their teams. If a leader is carrying a negative narrative about where things are and is not conscious of it, that narrative will leak. People are extraordinarily good at sensing what their leaders really believe, regardless of what they say. The internal story and the external story have to be consistent.
- Second, they listen to the stories their teams are telling. When they hear a glass-half-empty framing, they help reframe it. This does not require a lecture. It simply requires asking: have you ever thought about it from this angle? The most dangerous stories in any organisation are the ones told quietly, at the water cooler, that no one challenges. A leader who walks past those conversations and says nothing is tacitly endorsing them.
- Third, and most visibly, they invest in how they tell what matters. Rather than listing statistics or presenting slides, they think about how to turn important information into a story that feels compelling and genuine. This is not about performance for its own sake. It is about recognising that messages told as stories are far more likely to land, to be remembered, and to be passed on accurately.
That last point carries more weight than it might seem. Research in cognitive science has consistently shown that narrative is one of the primary ways human beings encode and retain information. We forget lists. We forget bullet points. We remember stories, and we repeat them.
When a leader communicates through story, they are not simply presenting information. They are creating the conditions for that information to travel accurately through the organisation.
The next frontier of leadership development
The next frontier is not another framework. It is not a new competency model or a revised leadership model. It is something more fundamental: helping leaders find their voice as genuine authors and creators of their organisation’s story.
Good leaders are those who can stand in front of their teams without a slide and make the direction feel real. People whose teams, when asked what they are there to do and why it matters, can answer clearly and with an equally compelling story.
Currently heading up Learning & Talent at 
