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Uncovering the Hidden Narrative Driving Your Team Culture

In every team, there's an invisible force at play, one that dictates how people interact,

Employment surveys are one of the most powerful tools you...

As a business leader, one of your jobs is to make big, difficult decisions. When

Overcoming Fear of Failure & Embracing New Challenges: What I...

How are you at dealing with challenges that take you outside your comfort zone and

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In every team, there’s an invisible force at play, one that dictates how people interact, what they value, and how they perform. This force is your team’s narrative, the collection of stories that shape and define the collective culture.

Culture isn’t accidental. The narratives we create and share, consciously or unconsciously, shape organisational culture. These stories form the lens through which your team perceives everything, from minor interactions to major business decisions.

But what does this mean for you as a leader? How can you better understand the narratives shaping your team’s culture, and how can you take control of them?

In this article, we’ll explore the underlying forces shaping team culture, why paying attention to these stories is essential, and the concrete steps you can take to actively shape your team’s culture for greater success.

The Narrative Lens: Why Your Team’s Stories Matter

The stories we tell ourselves and each other are more than just anecdotes; they are the foundation of your organisation’s culture. These narratives shape how your team behaves, makes decisions, and interacts with one another. Culture, in this sense, isn’t a static concept. It evolves based on the ongoing stories your team tells about itself.

For example, consider the difference between a team that talks about their achievements as a result of “hard work and collaboration” versus one that attributes success to “luck” or “external factors.” The former group is more likely to foster a culture of ownership, collaboration, and accountability. Conversely, the latter might develop a passive or complacent culture where efforts disconnect from outcomes.

At its core, I have witnessed many nuances that have supported and undone a team’s success because the narrative, as a lens determines how something is interpreted. Strong leaders that I have worked with understand how it influences how we interpret events and make decisions, affecting everything from assigning blame to celebrating success. They know that if they want to drive culture intentionally, they must understand the role narrative plays in how their team members receive messages. How they might think, react, and collaborate or not. But anticipation can form part of the problem when a leader over thinks reactions. The leaders I have witnessed at their most successful are the ones who can discuss their intentions, assess the validity of the responses and discuss these in a way that creates safety in the conversation without committing certainty where it doesn’t exist.

What You’re Not Hearing: The Hidden Subtext of Team Culture

As a leader, it’s easy to become distracted by surface-level conversations. But the real insights into your team’s culture lie beneath the surface, in the subtext. Subtle stories weave through language in every meeting, email, and casual conversation. These stories reveal far more about your culture than you might realise.

Think about decisions in your organisation. Are they based on the values you’ve publicly committed to, or do actions speak louder than words? How often do your people express frustrations, either directly or indirectly? The language used in these moments can reveal powerful insights about your team’s priorities.

Notice the discourse in meetings. Do employees speak about a commitment to teamwork but then disengage or withhold information when a project gets tough? This inconsistency between words and actions can be a telltale sign of an underlying narrative at odds with the team’s stated values. I remember working with a team who told me they were committed entirely to changing how they worked together. To become braver in challenge of each other. However, I found them returning repeatedly to an unhelpful dialogue when they couldn’t reach agreement. I found myself pointing out that they seemed to find safety in the futility of an idea and discussing that instead. I remember putting my involvement in the entire project at risk when I called this out – I hadn’t been working with them long – they learned to love the challenge! I have repeated this candour with other projects and clients because I know that authenticity and commitment to change are narratives that have to be present if I am to deliver on my results to those clients.

When observing your team’s behaviour, consider what happens after the meeting ends. What do people say in the hallway or over lunch? How do they reflect on the meeting, and what are they reinforcing or undermining?

Identifying Patterns: How to Uncover Dominant Narratives

Patterns shape culture, and these patterns lie in recurring themes or metaphors. In your team, are certain types of stories dominating the conversation? Are there metaphors that come up frequently in discussions about success or failure?

A powerful example of this is how organisations frame their successes and challenges. For instance, consider the language around challenges: Is it framed as an opportunity to innovate or a roadblock? Likewise, when talking about success, is it seen as a collective achievement, or is it attributed to the efforts of a single individual?

Observing these recurring themes over time allows you to identify the dominant narratives that drive behaviour. These aren’t always positive; they may even limit the team’s potential. For example, if failure has negative connotations, it may lead to a fear-based culture where people are afraid to take risks. On the other hand, a team that celebrates the lessons learned from failure fosters an environment of growth and innovation.

Heroes and Villains: Who Shapes Your Team’s Stories?

Every narrative has characters. In the stories you tell about your team, who are the heroes? The villains? The unsung heroes?

In every organisation, some individuals or groups are the exemplars of success, they are the “heroes” of your story. But just as important are the “villains” in your team’s narrative.

These characters reveal the qualities that are celebrated or condemned in your organisation. Are the heroes consistently delivering results, or are they individuals who demonstrate loyalty or perseverance? What behaviours are heroic? What actions are considered failures? How you depict these characters influences how your team approaches challenges and solutions.

Empowering vs. Limiting Narratives: Shaping the Future of Your Team Culture

As you analyse your team’s culture through its stories, you’ll notice a crucial distinction between empowering and limiting narratives. Empowering narratives inspire your team to aim higher, take risks, and embrace collaboration. Limiting narratives, however, create fear, anxiety, or complacency.

The power of a narrative lies in its ability to either empower or limit the team’s actions and mindset. As a leader, you must decide which narratives you want to cultivate and in doing so, determine if your own narrative is helpful or unhelpful to your team’s execution.

Shaping Your Team’s Narrative: What You Can Do Today

So, what can you do to shape your team’s narrative in a positive direction?

1. Use a data driven approach to provide insights into the team behaviour such as the Meta Team approach – their Team Performance Profiler

2. Observe without judgment: Pay close attention to your team’s conversations’ language, metaphors, and recurring themes. Don’t rush to fix things immediately; let the patterns emerge organically.

3. Focus on the values: Identify the core values necessary to your organisation. What is showing up as well as what is evident based on the values you have. Do these values come through in the stories your team shares? If not, is it time to introduce new stories reinforcing these values or choose values that better represent your organisation.

4. Challenge limiting narratives: If you notice limiting stories, don’t shy away from confronting them. Acknowledge their existence, understand their origins, and discuss ways to rewrite them. This is data that tells you what’s happening and can inform how you re-write it authentically rather than re-badging it.

5. Tell stories that matter: Share stories that reflect the outcomes you want to encourage in your team. Don’t manipulate the narrative; instead, focus on real examples of success and articulate the behaviours that contributed

6. Engage everyone: Culture is a collective creation. Involve your team in shaping the narrative through open discussions, feedback sessions, or storytelling exercises. Cultivate ownership and help embed the culture across all levels of the organisation

Meta Team partners with businesses and leaders to uncover and shape the stories that drive their team culture. If you’re ready to elevate your team culture, let’s explore how we can help you achieve your goals.

As an accredited Meta Team Strategic Partner, Tash specialises in facilitating impactful conversations for leaders and teams across organisations of all sizes. Through a blend of experiential and facilitative techniques, she helps teams uncover the right questions to ask as they define their next phase and mission. Get in touch for an initial conversation or learn more about our team coaching courses, which offer data-driven insights into the behaviours that accelerate team performance.

As a business leader, one of your jobs is to make big, difficult decisions.

When making a decision, you take care to look at all of the information available to you so that you can make the best, most informed decisions.

And when it comes to making decisions about your people, you know it’s important to use the same care and due diligence because they are the people that deliver for your customers.

Employee surveys are a really useful solution to finding out answers to how your employees view your business. They can provide valuable insights that can inform decisions for your team.

I would go so far as to say they’re one of the most powerful tools you can use as a business leader because they help you to bridge the gap between what you think is going on and how people are really experiencing working in your business.

Here’s how to conduct a great survey:

Step 1: Create a specific focus for your survey informed by business outcomes.

Step 2: Decide how you will conduct the survey, for example, online forms, in-person interviews or group sessions.

Step 3: Create questions that will prompt the insights you need in a way that you can use to measure, benchmark and compare data in the future.

Step 4: Frame the survey to your employees and encourage them to take part.

Step 5: Decide how you want your employees to complete the survey.

Step 6: Review results and create findings.

Step 7: Create your action plan.

Step 8: Communicate findings and actions to your team.

Step 9: Act on the results.

Step 10: Check in 6 months later to see if you’ve changed the right things..

We’re here to help

To help you gain the best insights from your survey and to convert your findings into a great action plan, we’re here to help.

Get in touch for a confidential chat today.

How are you at dealing with challenges that take you outside your comfort zone and require you to go beyond your usual points of reference?

When you have to do something new, something you’re not familiar with or don’t understand, it’s natural your ‘fight or flight response will kick in, causing you to feel nervous, anxious – perhaps even frightened.

In the workplace, where organisations must continually respond to threats and opportunities, and the people working in them have to adapt and evolve, change is a constant. Constant change creates uncertainty, and that creates stress.

Understanding how you behave in stressful situations, the reactions that are triggered and how you can manage them is crucial. It’s why each year, our client Berkeley Construction takes their new apprentices out of the workplace and into the great outdoors for a week of team-building and personal development exercises. Working with our client, we use behavioural observations made during these activities to inform the learning and development programmes we deliver to their apprentices.

In February, I joined a group of first-year apprentices in the Lake District, undertaking a wide range of adventure experiences, including mountain climbing, abseiling and kayaking. I was there primarily to observe, but as an active participant as well, the five days I spent in Eskdale provided me with insights into how I personally respond when mentally and physically tested. By coincidence, this was something I had a further opportunity to reflect on just a few weeks ago, when I went on a ski holiday with friends from my BNI networking group.

The first time I went skiing, it reminded me how we all learn in different ways and inspired me to draft my blog, 4 Insights That Will Boost Your Learning Power. This time – only the second time I’ve skied – my experiences gave me an opportunity to reflect on how I deal with stressful situations.

My mountain adventures in the Lake District and the Alps both helped to reinforce some important lessons about the process of learning to overcome fear of failure and embrace new challenges:

Stress testing is best done in a safe space

We all respond differently to stress. Understanding where you go mentally and physically when dealing with a stressful situation will help you recognise warning signs and put coping mechanisms in place, ensuring you stay in full control.

Learning these things about yourself is best done in a safe, non-work environment. Finding settings outside of work where you can safely activate stress triggers, see how you respond, and practice managing responses will help you develop skills you can transfer to work situations.

Scrambling up cliffs and throwing oneself down icy mountains might be extreme examples, but under skilled supervision, they certainly helped teach me a lot about my own instinctive responses.

My ski experience also gave me a real insight into why, in new environments, we might not always comply with logical instructions. Many of the critical actions that keep you upright while skiing – like leaning forward when going downhill and out when making a turn, are counter-intuitive. I knew these things because I had a great instructor, but despite knowing what I had to do, there were times early on when fear took over and made me doubt what I’d learnt – with inevitable results!

Developing muscle memory takes time

It was interesting to see the different approaches to skiing in our mixed ability group. While I worried I hadn’t put enough time and effort into preparing myself properly, the more advanced skiers never questioned their fitness levels or capabilities. It took me a while to overcome this feeling and to recognise I wasn’t asking anything of my body that it wasn’t’ already capable of doing.

I noticed too that while I was comfortable putting lessons learnt into practice on wide, gentle slopes, as soon as the environment changed to narrower, steeper gradients with more significant drops to the side, all my training was – initially at least, forgotten. In my head, the consequences of crashing overrode all I’d been taught. Instead, I automatically reverted to the brace position, incapable of implementing the techniques I knew would get me down the mountain safely.

What became clear was that learning was a process. I needed to constantly remind myself that I did know how to deal with the new environment I was in, that I did have the skills but not, as yet, the experience that only comes with practice.

After my lessons were over for the day, I’d practice the techniques I’d learnt on safer, less steep slopes. They quickly became second nature as learning transitioned into embedded muscle memory – in my head as much as my legs – and I felt able to trust my instincts in more testing environments.

Trusting those with experience & knowledge is vital

Both experiences reinforced the importance of trusting those who are teaching a skill we want to learn. Of course, this is especially true when there is a physical risk to our person, but it applies equally in a business environment.

On one of my ski lessons, the weather suddenly closed in around us at the top of a run, and visibility became very poor. Normally, I’m pretty unflappable but without visual cues. I found myself starting to panic.

What got me to the bottom of the slope in one piece was the level of trust I’d developed with my instructor. I knew she was an expert in the skill I still had to master and that having taught me for several days, she had the measure of my capabilities, limits, character and personality and wouldn’t ask me to undertake something I wasn’t capable of doing.

By being consistent, supportive, and direct during the week about what I needed to do to improve my skiing, she’d earned my trust. As a result, I was completely comfortable following the instructions she gave me as she helped me negotiate my way to the bottom of the slope – which it transpired as the weather cleared, was significantly less steep than I’d imagined!

If she hadn’t managed my crisis of confidence sensitively and had instead simply barked instructions at me, my belief in my ability would almost certainly have been seriously damaged.

My mountain top wobble also demonstrated how nervousness and uncertainty can transfer to those going through a learning process together: how a person leading a team through a new challenge may need to manage fall-out in those around someone struggling with a task – as well as managing the individual themselves.

One of our group, who up to that point had been making good progress and was very confident, lost their nerve when they saw me panic, with the result that the instructor had to talk us both down.

The activity leaders on our Outward Bound adventure were similarly perceptive and professional in their approach, ensuring that if someone was nervous about participating in an activity, the feelings of the whole group were considered.

How often, in a work situation, do we miss subtle signals in communication because we’re so focused on getting someone to complete a task?

A supportive, sharing environment aids learning

In the Lake District and in the mountains too, I found being part of a supportive team of people all striving to overcome the same challenges and achieve shared goals helped me with the learning process.

The Outward Bound programme allowed for regular periods of review and reflection, enabling us to consolidate learning points and helping to foster a cycle of continuous improvement. And on my ski trip, although our group consisted of a wide range of abilities and we went our own ways on the slopes, we came together in our chalet at the end of each day to exchange stories, discuss experiences, celebrate success, talk through fails, and provide moral and technical support.

For me, this part of the day was an especially important component of the learning process. In the workplace, the power of providing a space where colleagues going through a learning programme together can engage in useful dialogue, share and compare experiences and generally support one another can often be overlooked.

If you have to face a new challenge or go through a difficult transition at work, you might not be aware of feelings of fear or resistance. Because you’re not physically at risk, they may be relegated to your subconscious.

We need to remember that one person’s fear may be very different to someone else’s. Fear of failure or not being good enough can come from many places, and an employer or line manager can’t be expected to know or understand everything about the feelings of those people for whom they have responsibility.

Perhaps the most important thing we can do is to recognise that we’re all on our own journey. If you or a colleague are struggling with a challenge, could a different environment bring a better understanding of your automatic responses and help uncover solutions to help deal with them?

In the mountains, the guidance and support of experts gave us the confidence to put learning into practice in safety. It enabled us to test new skills, reflect on results and push boundaries without fear, and return to our workplaces with a much better understanding of ourselves.

Can Organic P&O Solutions Help You with Bespoke Learning & Development?

Dealing with demanding challenges in an ever-changing environment means your employees and line managers are under constant pressure to take decisive – often difficult actions. The success of your organisation depends on their ability to perform under pressure.

Organic P&O Solutions’ strategic and operational Learning and Development programmes are designed to equip you and your team with the skills needed to deal with all eventualities. We can create customised topical training programmes to address your requirements – and with the lifting of Covid regulations, we’re now able to deliver them face to face again.

Call us today to find out more about our Learning and Development programmes and how they can help you!

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