By Giles Smith
It’s not hard to see why people disengage during change.
Most feel disconnected from the purpose, unclear on the benefits, and uncertain about the personal impact. Too often, organisations focus on the mechanics of change and forget the people driving it, treating them as obstacles rather than recognising them as the engine of growth.
Engaging people takes more than a slide deck and a town hall.
We’re living through a paradox. Businesses have more channels, more content, and more pressure to communicate than ever before. Yet real connection between leaders and their people has never been harder to achieve. From experience, volume is not the answer, clarity is, and clarity comes from story.
Not content, not messaging but stories. The right story, defined before a single frame is filmed or a word is written.
Most communications programmes work backwards. Someone decides what needs to be produced. A brief goes to an agency. Content is created and pushed out across channels. Engagement underwhelms. The cycle the repeats because what gets skipped is the most important step: agreeing the story.
Not the approved language or key messages, but the real story is the human, honest account of what’s happening, why it matters, and what it means for the people who need to hear it.
This is where most businesses fall short.
Story is not a communications function. It’s a leadership capability. The narrative must be owned by the people asking others to follow them. Content teams can amplify a story, but they cannot create one that leaders themselves don’t believe in.
That’s why the organisations that communicate well invest in their leaders first. Not just in what to say, but in how to find the story worth telling, and how then to deliver it with clarity, confidence, and authenticity.
Another common mistake is assuming storytelling responsibility sits with one or two senior voices.
The most effective organisations build depth. They create multiple confident storytelling leaders at every level who can carry the same narrative in their own voice, to their own audiences. That’s what turns communication from a campaign into a culture.
Before any major communications programme, there’s a simple but often overlooked discipline:
· Who is this for?
· What do they need to understand?
· What do we want them to feel?
· What do we want them to do differently?
When those questions are answered first, everything that follows improves. The brief becomes sharper, the creative is stronger and the content connects. The businesses that earn the most trust are not the loudest, they are the clearest. Leaders in these businesses own the narrative and deliver it with conviction. Their stories survive the journey from boardroom to frontline without losing meaning because they treat communication as a capability, not a cost.
Remember messages can get lost, while stories don’t.