Why Your Strategic Narrative Won’t Stick (And What to Do About It)

If you don't get your team onboard with your new strategic narrative, then don't expect your strategy to last.

When you work with your team to adopt a new strategic narrative, what are you really asking them to do?

Yes, a strategic narrative crystallizes your thinking about the problem you solve, who you solve it for, and the future you want to create. It clarifies the territory you want to claim for your brand and even provides a powerful way to communicate with customers, investors, and partners.

But before your team can implement any of that, you must first ask them to think differently about the business.

That’s because a strategic narrative isn’t a messaging tool, a sales deck, or a product roadmap. It’s a strategy document. And strategy requires change. That’s easy to grasp in theory. But for employees who’ve been operating under a different mindset for years (or even decades), making that mental shift can be a huge undertaking.

Before your team can implement a new narrative, you must first ask them to think differently about the business.

I don’t share this with you to scare you away from developing your strategic narrative. Quite the opposite. When your team does make that mental shift, when they can see the strategy for themselves and feel excited about the future, it’s game-changing.

It’s a call to adventure that can give your team a worthy challenge and add to the excitement of coming to work each day.

The trick?

Avoid the pitfalls of internal adoption. In my experience, there are three ways an internal rollout of your strategic narrative can go awry:

1. The Curse of the Underdog

2. Strategic Whiplash

3. Strong Opinions, Stubbornly Held

The Curse of the Underdog

When companies invest in a strategic narrative, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re trying to be the next Apple or OpenAI. But it does mean they want to build a dominant, profitable, and defensible business.

However, when brands lose their mojo, it’s not uncommon for employees to shift from an offensive mentality to a defensive one. Instead of playing to win, they try to avoid losing. That perspective can prevent you from taking the risks you need to win.

But sometimes it’s not a fear of failure that keeps your team from adopting a new strategy, it’s a fear of success.

That might seem like a strange concept, but fear of success is a real thing. For people who experience this, the idea of winning makes them feel uncomfortable. Winning can mean higher expectations, more scrutiny, and larger stakes. Teams who don’t see themselves as future winners won’t get there by accident. If your team looks at larger, more successful competitors and can’t imagine themselves ever surpassing them, fear of success could be at play.

This self-defeating mentality can feed on itself and prevent the vision in your narrative from ever becoming reality.

How to get through this?

Origin stories are one of my favorite ways to counteract this bias.

It’s easy to look at billion-dollar brands and assume that success has always been in the cards. But if you study their history, you’ll find plenty of chapters defined by setbacks, failures, and self-doubt. Every legendary company went through periods where success felt reserved for someone else. Yours included.

Strategic Whiplash

As humans, we need time to process change. Whether it’s a new job, becoming a parent, or moving to a different city, every shift requires an adjustment period.

A new strategic narrative is no different.

But some executives, excited with their new narrative, rush the internal rollout. Worse, they expect their employees to start working towards this strategy immediately. But that will only create problems.

Best case?

Your team is excited but confused about what to do next. Worst case? If your team feels like a new strategy is being forced on them, they may drag their feet, second guess your thinking, or openly oppose it.

If you don’t support your team in understanding the new strategy, you can’t expect them to support you back.

Here’s how to get this right.

Before you work on an internal rollout of your new narrative, create an internal comms plan. Explain why the business is re-evaluating its strategy. Communicating past missteps can go even further to build trust.

Next, share that a change in strategy will be coming. Get feedback from your team on what they think is broken. Even if they don’t agree with the strategy itself, giving them a voice early on can go a long way to help them get on board.

Share the new category strategy and narrative once your team has had time to process it. But be careful, because the inverse of this trap is also true. Taking too long to roll out your narrative is a sign you aren’t sure what to do. If you send that signal, your team won’t believe in the strategy either.

Strong Opinions, Stubbornly Held

Every new narrative will be stress-tested. Partners, customers, investors, and competitors will relish the opportunity to poke holes in your thinking. One client of mine was repeatedly told that his choices were impossible, already tried, and dumb. (They were wrong, by the way). Thankfully he had the conviction to stick to his guns.

But there’s a difference between conviction and stubbornness. While conviction gives your team confidence, stubbornness erodes it.

There’s an old military saying: “The best-laid plans don’t survive first contact with reality.” That’s true for business strategy, too. Even the best strategy will need to be adapted as you learn more. But if your team feels like your leaders are tone-deaf to new information and unwilling to adapt, they may lose faith in the strategy altogether. No one wants to go all-in on a strategy that feels out of touch.

Here’s an easy example.

One event management software company built its entire strategy on the belief that COVID would permanently change in-person events. In 2020, that kind of thinking was predominant. But just a couple of years later, the world changed. What seemed like a strong foundation soon turned into shaky ground. The business didn’t recognize this early enough and had to sell off its assets.

The key is to operate with “strong opinions, loosely held.”

If you don’t have conviction, your team will doubt your plan and it will always be up for debate. But if you blindly follow a plan and are never open to new information, your team will question your ability to stay in tune with an ever-changing world.

The Most Important Audience for Your Narrative Is Your Team

If you do a good job developing your strategic narrative, your first instinct will be to shout it from the rooftops. After all, it’s fun to make competitors lose sleep.

But rushing that process and leaving your team on the sidelines can turn an exciting vision into a mere flash in the pan. Before you know it, you’ll be back to the old way of doing things.

In fact, you’ll be worse off than when you started.

A false start on a new strategy means you’ve lost trust and expended most if not all of your political capital. If that happens, it’s probably your replacement who will work on the next version of the strategy, not you.

I know that sounds dire, but I’ve seen it happen enough, and I don’t want it to happen to you. Approach your strategic narrative with an “internal adoption” mindset, and you’ll give yourself far better odds of pulling it off. 

Good luck!

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Thanks for reading. I own a consultancy called Flag & Frontier. I help clients define their category strategy, align their executive teams around their strategic narrative, and win their category.

Find out more about working with me by booking an intro call.

You can also say hello on LinkedIn 👋.

Cheers,

John