Adam Baratz

“My PM doesn’t understand why this project is so hard.”

“My team doesn’t get any of the good projects.”

“Our architecture will collapse within six months.”

“Carryover is a fact of life on this team.”

“We need to replatform to survive peak.”

“We’re making the right investments to survive peak.”

“My tech lead has me over-engineer everything.”

A team is a cacophony of stories. You’ll hear them at obvious times, like during a project kickoff. You’ll hear them as asides in one-on-ones, glossed over without explanation because they’re so “obvious” to the teller. You’ll hear them as jokes in sprint planning sessions, poking fun at tensions between team members. You’ll hear them as people get ready to start a meeting, in standup updates, in email, around the coffee machine. People share stories pretty much whenever they get together.

Stories don’t appear fully formed. They emerge as people draw connections between evidence. Imagine a stakeholder with limited visibility into the activities of a team. They might find the work that they request is frequently delayed and then abruptly deprioritized. They might not think much of it the first time. When it becomes a pattern, the stakeholder begins talking about how the team is unreliable and underperforming.

The team’s tech lead might tell an entirely different story. They eagerly jump on projects, but have trouble hitting estimates. Over multiple sprint retros, they identify a neglected system that is impeding a range of work streams. Rather than continue to struggle, they decide to pause feature work for a sprint so that they can shore up the neglected system. To the tech lead, this is another great example of how their team learns from problems and strengthens its ability to deliver.

Stories are typically incomplete, but rarely wrong. A story like that stakeholder’s can be frustrating to hear as a manager. You likely have a more balanced and nuanced view of your team. Yet others are now acquiring a negative perception of them and becoming less willing to trust them with important work.

Thankfully, as managers, we’re uniquely positioned to shape the stories that people tell. Our roles usually ensure that we get face time with a large cross-section of an organization. Use that time to share the evidence that speaks to the breadth of what your team is engaging with. Don’t stop there. Connect the dots and draw your audience to the stories that you want them to be telling.

Repetition is an important tool for spreading stories. Call out complementary groupings of evidence. Take every opportunity to retell a story. Maybe you’ve been impressing upon a team that it should get in control of the operational aspects of its system. Maybe an engineer says in a standup that they fixed a chronic issue after digging into some confusing log messages. Pull this piece of evidence into the broader story you’re trying to tell: “I’m glad we’re taking the time to get in control of the operational aspects of our system.”

It’s a good sign when people are nodding along and signaling familiarity with a story. It means the story is no longer background noise. They’re consciously using it to assess the world around them. It’s a better sign when you hear people repeating stories you tell. It means a story has resonated at a deeper level, that it has become a tool for achieving their goals. People are now tracking to your direction without you having to stand over their shoulders.

When negative stories spread, they give you an opportunity to connect with your audience. Oftentimes, all you need to do is ask. Someone who is telling others that they’re frustrated with your team would likely welcome the opportunity to tell you why they’re frustrated. Ask questions to understand their evidence. This will help you understand their values. A stakeholder who sees a team as unreliable is telling you what he thinks reliability looks like. He could be telling you how he values the different capabilities of your team, potentially that he doesn’t know how to place a value on some of them. He could be telling you where he gets his evidence and how information flows through an organization. These kinds of conversations are opportunities to win over detractors, but you should also be open to changing your mind about a situation. You could find that you’re misaligned with an organization’s objectives and that you need to retune.

You want to be telling the best stories. Make them stick. Own the narrative.