The Executive Voice

When Your ‘Vision’ Story Damages Morale

This is Part 2 of Why Storytelling is Sometimes A Very Bad Thing.

A CEO tells a story about reinvention. Perhaps it’s how the company survived its darkest hour. Or how another business achieved something extraordinary because its people dared to challenge convention.

The message: we can do this too.

It’s stirring stuff. Employees leave the Town Hall feeling part of something bigger. There’s adversity to overcome, a future worth building and a role for everyone in making it happen.

Then they return to work.

They’ve been encouraged to act like owners, but routine decisions still require six approvals. They’ve been urged to experiment, but their workloads leave no room, and their managers punish mistakes. They’ve been asked to put customers first, but their targets reward ending calls quickly.

The story invites them to change. The problem is that the organisation makes that hard.

This is where storytelling sours morale.

A vision statement might earn a sceptical shrug. But a compelling vision story asks for something more personal: belief, hope, professional pride.

Employees may work harder or speak up about something that needs to change because they believe their leaders will back them. And when they’re thwarted, they remember what they were invited to believe, and who invited them.

This is because (sometimes) the ‘inspiring’ story omits a crucial character: the leadership team. Employees are cast as courageous agents of change, while the people controlling budgets, incentives and decision rights have made few commitments of their own.

Worse, when progress stalls, the CEO may tell the story again. Another stirring example. Another call to arms.

But employees now view the ‘vision’ story through the experience of having tried. What’s intended as encouragement can sound like an accusation: you haven’t believed enough, cared enough or tried hard enough.

The very atmosphere becomes poisoned from here on.

Which is why in a vision story, your obligations should be part of the narrative. Explain what leadership will change, what resources employees will receive and what existing work will stop. It’s also important to acknowledge the distance between today’s organisation and the one you’re asking people to build. Sure, some leaders mention this, but often too lightly or vaguely.

If you’re asking employees to be courageous, tell them which difficult decisions you’re prepared to make yourself.

An inspiring story raises the stakes. Your actions need to rise with them.

Communication That Earns Influence

A Great Sales Story Can Turn Into A Costly Mistake

Your sales story opens with a familiar frustration and closes with a better business: lower costs, happier customers, employees freed from repetitive work.

It’s a compelling destination. But a promised outcome isn't evidence you can deliver it.

Between today’s frustration and tomorrow’s improvement sit integration, data quality, permissions, process changes, adoption, exceptions and ongoing costs. Sellers easily downplay, soften, or even edit some of these out because they interrupt the story. Yet they determine whether the ending is achievable, and what it will cost to get there.

Most customer success stories hide implementation challenges - the blood, sweat and long hours to ‘go-live’. The result may be real, but the story is sanitised. What extra investment did the customer make? How much work did its people contribute? What went wrong? Which conditions made success possible?

Without those details, your story can imply that investing in the tech solution is enough to reproduce the result.

Sales stories use different forms of proof to influence buyers, as below. But if you look closely, they’re often not as clear or concrete as we’d like the buyer to think.

The problem is that the storytelling techniques above use one kind of evidence to imply another. A demonstration becomes proof it will work in someone else’s business. One successful customer becomes proof it can be repeated in the next customer. A forecast becomes an expected saving. This ‘proof’ often ends up more fictional rather than true-to-life storytelling.

For example, your customer success story boasts a 30% reduction in operating costs. But how much came from the software, and how much from restructuring teams, redesigning processes or closing offices? If those details disappear from the story, you risk selling the savings from an entire business overhaul as something your software alone can deliver.

This matters beyond your presentation. Your buyer must repeat your story to a CFO, procurement team or investment committee, often without you in the room.

Which means you have to give them a story they can defend under questioning.

They need to explain what exists today, what’s committed for delivery and what’s forecast or aspirational. They also need relevant, specific, hard evidence, strong numbers, realistic assumptions and a clear account of what their own organisation needs to contribute.

Before presenting your next outcome story, ask: “Could our buyer explain the path, the dependencies and the likely costs as confidently as the destination?”

A story that wins enthusiasm but can’t survive scrutiny leaves your buyer exposed, and your business responsible for expectations it may never have intended to create.

We’ve read the headlines: a tech company’s sales story bore little resemblance to what it delivered, and the customer took it to court. A great story must stand up to reality.

When The Markets Reject Your Story

Last week, Firmus’s failed float showed what happens when investors question an ambitious story. This week, co-founder Oliver Curtis offered a lesson in how not to respond when they do.

Speaking to The Australian in Singapore, Curtis described the abandoned listing as “a missed opportunity for Australia” and defended Firmus as an “unbelievable business”. Asked whether he had misled investors, he called the suggestion “disgraceful”.

He may be right about the opportunity. But immediately after a failed float, telling the country what it missed makes it sound like Firmus leadership wasn’t the problem; everyone else was. He would rather say this than explain why Firmus failed to convince investors. As last week’s coverage showed, plenty of experts pointed to specific concerns about the proposed valuation and investor support.

For a leader seeking confidence, that reframe isn’t landing.

Confidence under scrutiny means acknowledging an unwelcome result without making the questioner, or the audience, the problem.

Curtis’s past criminal conviction makes that scrutiny more personally difficult. And while his achievements since then deserve praise, they don’t remove the need to answer hard questions without getting self-defensive and to take accountability for mistakes or missteps. Yet Curtis appeared unprepared when hijacked by the journalist. Smiling awkwardly (even weirdly) and showing flashes of anger.

Likely Curtis has had a lot of media training. But sometimes an individual’s hubris, inferiority complex or a combination of both can override the training.

Curtis’s better response to the journalist would have been to acknowledge that Firmus hadn’t secured the required confidence, explain what leadership would review, and then reaffirm the business’s ambition.

That would have earned him respect and made audiences like him more.

Instead, he set himself up for further mockery and media excoriation.

Phrase of the Week

Message Discipline: Staying focused on your key points under pressure without letting frustration or difficult questions derail your response.

Better Storytelling: Make Your Narrative As Credible As It Is Compelling

An inspiring story can win attention. Getting employees or buyers to think and act differently also takes credibility. If the evidence, commitments or everyday reality contradict your story, the story’s power will work against you.

Before telling your story, use the following prompt to test what supports it and what could leave you exposed.

THE PROMPT

Act as a sceptical but fair member of my intended audience. Examine the story below for credibility, substance and sincerity. Assess what the wording demonstrates; don’t assume you can know my intentions.

Identify:

Give me the three toughest questions my audience could ask, then recommend specific improvements that make the story more believable without losing its inspiration. Distinguish writing fixes from evidence or action I must provide. Don’t invent supporting facts.

Audience: [Who they are]
Desired response: [What I want them to think or do]
Story and supporting evidence: [Paste here]

If this helped you think differently about communication, forward this newsletter to someone who leads, sells or explains complex ideas in tech.