What Your Team Will Remember About You (And Whether You Are Being Intentional About It)
There is a thought experiment I use with leaders that tends to produce a particular kind of quiet. I ask them to think about the leaders who have most shaped them, not the best performers they reported to, but the ones who genuinely changed how they think and who they became. And then I ask: what do you remember about them? Not their strategy. Not their credentials. Not their stated philosophy. What specific moments do you carry?
Almost always, the answer is a story.
The time the leader stayed in a meeting when everyone else had written the person off. The time they told the team the truth about a difficult situation before the formal communication had been prepared. The time they gave the credit publicly in a way that changed the professional standing of someone who had been working in the margins. The time they sat with someone through a failure rather than moving away from it.
These are not strategic moments. They are human ones. And they are, in the deepest sense, the moments that carry culture forward.
Culture does not transmit primarily through documents. It transmits through story. Through the narratives that people tell about what happened here, who the people were, and what they did when it mattered. Those stories teach incoming team members what the organization actually values. They reinforce existing members in the behaviors that the culture rewards. And they carry meaning across time and across the people who were not present for the original event, in a way that no policy document can.
What this means for leaders is both simple and demanding. It means that your choices, particularly the ones made under pressure and in high-stakes moments, are being stored as narrative. They are becoming part of the story your organization tells about itself. Not the official story. The real one.
The leaders who build the cultures that outlast them are not primarily the ones who designed the best systems. They are the ones who, through repeated choices in real moments, gave the people around them experiences worth carrying and stories worth telling.
What moments are you creating right now that will become the stories your team tells long after this chapter is over?
This scenario is also shared on LinkedIn, with a companion podcast deep dive exploring the leadership dynamics behind the decision.
If this scenario resonates, share how you’d approach it or pass it to a leader who’s navigating something similar.
If you’re second-guessing how you’d handle this, you should be.
I break down what’s actually happening—and what to say instead—inside Leadership Uncensored.
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