Walk into almost any organization, and you’ll find the same things on the walls. A framed mission statement and a list of values, carefully chosen and professionally printed. Yet, ask people what the culture actually feels like to work in, and you’ll often get a very different answer than what you see on the wall.
That’s the problem. Leaders invest real effort in declaring culture, through statements, town halls, and communication plans, and still watch it fail to take hold. The message goes out, the posters go up, but the culture doesn’t shift.
Why This Happens
Culture isn’t something an organization declares. It’s something people experience in relationships: how a difficult conversation gets handled, what leaders do when no one is watching, and the small moments that never make it onto a slide deck. Communication informs people, behaviour is observed, but neither, on its own, creates the shared meaning that makes people believe a stated value is real.
Business relationship management (BRM) and organizational relationship management (ORM) exist to close this gap. BRM builds and sustains the relationships that let strategy land inside an organization. ORM applies that same discipline as a leadership capability at every level, not just as a defined role. Neither treats relationships as a soft add-on. Both treat relationships as the mechanism through which culture is built, tested, and either strengthened or quietly eroded.
That’s where most culture efforts break down. Leaders keep reaching for more communication when what’s missing is meaning, and meaning is a relationship outcome, not a broadcast one. Facts are stored. Stories are felt. Identity, a sense of “this is who we are and how we do things here,” is built from stories, not statements.
How It Feels
For leaders, this shows up as a quiet, persistent frustration. You’ve said the right things, and you believe them. And still, engagement scores don’t move, or worse, your own words come back to you as cynicism. For employees, it shows up as skepticism: the practiced ability to nod along in a town hall while privately discounting most of what’s said. Nobody trusts a value they’ve only ever heard declared. Trust has to be earned through evidence; declarations aren’t evidence.
Left unaddressed, this gap compounds. Every unaligned action becomes a counter-story, and counter-stories spread faster than the official ones.
What Actually Works
Storytelling, when done well, is not a communication technique. It’s a relationship act, and that makes it BRM and ORM work, not marketing work. A performance can be rehearsed to perfection, delivered to an audience, and still leave people cold. A relationship act, imperfect but authentic, changes the temperature of a room.
The leaders who close the credibility gap don’t speak more. They tell the right story for the right relationship moment: a personal story that makes them human before they’re a title, names the doubt already in the room, or shows values holding up under real pressure rather than just being claimed. These stories work because they satisfy the three conditions trust requires: authenticity, sound judgment, and genuine care for the people listening, the same conditions BRM and ORM practitioners build into every stakeholder relationship.
This is also why culture cannot be owned by one function. Every leader who holds a relationship—with a team, a peer, a customer, a partner—is carrying part of the culture in the stories they choose to tell. BRM and ORM give that work a discipline: a way to see which relationships matter most, and what each one needs right now.
Where to Go Deeper
This is exactly the territory we explore in our Leading with Relationships and Leading with Impact courses, where storytelling is covered in far more depth: the specific story types leaders need, how to build them from real relationship moments, and how to turn individual stories into a living culture library your organization can strategically use.
We’ve also written a full article on this topic, covering:
- the three forces that shape culture,
- the six story types every leader needs, and
- how to build your own organizational storybook.
Download the full article (working on the final version)
Lead and Succeed
Our coaches, Elka Schrijver and Peter Lijnse, have both won the prestigious Arnie Award from the Business Relationship Management (BRM) Institute for their work to embody, enhance, and promote business relationship management knowledge throughout the global BRM community. They have been actively involved in the BRM Institute since it was founded in 2013 and have been contributing authors for several components of the BRM Body of Knowledge and certification courses. They are currently writing a series of practical, user-friendly books about mastering business relationship management leadership skills.