Culture Carriers: Storytelling, Clarity, and Joy in Times of Change
When I think back to that winter morning in Metz, what stays with me is not only the smoke outside, but the silence inside. We were twelve middle managers, seated around a long table, carrying the weight of decisions we had not made and consequences we could not ignore. Outside, workers built a barricade of burning tires against what they saw as distant, indifferent power. Inside, we wrestled with a quieter fire, the tension of being both messenger and shield, faithful to the company’s direction and loyal to the people who trusted us. That first conversation cracked open something real. We stopped pretending that middle management was just a rung on a ladder and started naming it for what it is: the nervous system of the organization, invisible yet vital, sensing every tremor and transmitting every signal.
In that first gathering, we acknowledged the double bind that defines our work. We translate executive ambition into daily tasks, but we also absorb the emotional fallout when those ambitions collide with human limits. We discovered that leadership from the middle is not just operational; it is moral. We left that room with a quiet pact: each of us would come back with one piece of our craft, one lens on what “excellence in the middle” looks like when the slides are gone and only people remain. This sequel is the story of our second gathering, told through my eyes. I watched Noah, Liam, Omar, and Yusuf stand up one by one, and as they spoke in their own voices, I realized I was not just listening to colleagues. I was witnessing a living manual of middle management being written in real time.
Setting the Scene: The Second Gathering
The second time we met, the sky over Metz was clearer, but the uncertainty in the company was not. Restructuring plans were still circulating; rumors still traveled faster than official updates. Yet the atmosphere in the room was different. The first meeting had burned away some of the politeness. People arrived with notebooks, not just agendas. There was an unspoken agreement that this time we would talk about what actually works, not what looks good on slides.
I took a seat near the middle of the table so I could see everyone’s face. Around me sat the same twelve managers: Emmanuel from Marketing, Blessing from Operations, Marie from Finance, Olivia from Customer Service, Noah from Logistics, Liam from Procurement, Omar from HR, Yusuf from Compliance, and the others, each a different accent of the same shared struggle. We were not here to defend our departments. We were here to lay out the quiet tools we rely on to make sense, to include, to steady, and to sustain.
Our facilitator simply said, “Who wants to start?” Noah lifted his hand, almost casually, and walked to the front. I leaned back in my chair, pen ready. What followed over the next couple of hours was less a set of presentations and more a conversation carried through different voices, but I will tell it as I lived it, through my own eyes and ears.
Noah: Learning to Hear the Story People Repeat
Noah did not bother with slides. He stood, hands in his pockets for a moment, and then asked us a question that felt uncomfortably precise: “If I stopped someone on your team tomorrow and asked, ‘What are we really doing this year?,’ what story would I hear?” The room went quiet. I realized I was not sure I liked the answer for my own team.
He went on to explain that he does not trust jargon. When he walks around the site, from break rooms to loading bays, he listens less for facts and more for echoes. If people describe our work with acronyms and buzzwords, he takes it as a sign that the message has died somewhere between the executive floor and the shop floor. But when a junior employee casually repeats a metaphor first introduced months earlier, about rebuilding trust after a storm, or turning customers into fans rather than just buyers, then he knows the story has taken root. Strategy, he said, only survives when it becomes something people can retell without a script.
Noah described his “two-minute test.” He asks a project leader to tell the story of the initiative in simple language, no slides, no numbers, just why it matters and what journey the team is on. Then he asks three team members the same question. The degree to which their stories align becomes his informal culture score. I could almost see him, wandering the corridors, catching people by the coffee machine and gently pulling on the thread of their understanding.
He gave one example that stuck with me. In a major change initiative, instead of a traditional communication plan, he created a “journey map” narrative. The project became a crossing from one landscape to another: from a fragmented, fragile organization to a more open, resilient one. Each team could locate itself on that map and add its own local chapter. Over time, resistance dropped significantly, not because the targets were softer, but because people could see themselves in the story.
As I listened, I found myself scribbling questions in the margins of my notes, questions Noah had planted in the room even without writing them down:
- If someone joined my team today, what story would they hear after their first week?
- If I asked three people to describe our main project, would their stories rhyme or contradict each other?
- How would I know if our strategy had become part of our collective memory rather than just a set of instructions?
Around me, heads were nodding. I saw one colleague underline a sentence three times. Another leaned forward, elbow on the table, as if trying to catch every word. Noah ended simply, almost quietly: “Without a story, numbers don’t stick. With a story, numbers start to matter.” I believed him, and more importantly, I could see exactly where I had failed to do this in my own work.
Liam: Seeing the Quiet Genius in the Room
When Noah sat down, Liam rose with a different kind of energy, calm, deliberate. He began with a line that made several of us smile in recognition: “Most meetings are dominated by the same few voices, and we call that leadership.” Then he shook his head. “I call it lost potential.”
He told us that he tracks airtime, not obsessively, but intentionally. When two or three people occupy more than a third of the speaking time, he takes it as a risk signal. Not because those people are wrong, but because the room’s intelligence is being compressed into too few mouths. To counter that, he blends data with empathy. After important meetings, he sends a simple, almost disarming question: “What’s one thing you wish had been asked but never was?” The answers, he said, often reveal the questions that should have shaped the meeting in the first place.
Then he shared a story that made the whole room lean in. In one project, a coder rarely spoke in cross-functional sessions. She was competent, respected, but almost silent in group settings. Later, in a survey response, she wrote that decisions were being made too quickly, without time to think through downstream effects. Curious, Liam invited her to a focused session and gave her the floor. What would you change if you had ten uninterrupted minutes? Her suggestions, built from deep understanding but previously unvoiced, doubled the output of a key process and saved thousands in lost efficiency. All that value had been sitting silent in the room.
Liam explained one of his favorite practices: he asks the loudest voices to summarize what the quietest have just said, then flips the roles. At first, people find it awkward, even artificial. But over time, the dynamic changes. Listening becomes a visible skill, something people expect of each other, not just a courteous add-on. In one multicultural team, this shift allowed a junior analyst, previously invisible in discussions, to suggest a process tweak that cut cycle time by nearly a fifth.
He also described experiments like “silent brainstorms,” where the first round of ideas is submitted in writing, anonymously. Only after collecting and reading them out does the verbal discussion begin. In one case, three of the most impactful ideas came from people who barely spoke during normal meetings.
As Liam talked, the questions in my own head grew sharper:
- When was the last time a quiet person on my team changed the direction of our work, and how long did it take for their insight to surface?
- If I replayed our last big meeting on mute, whose faces would I see moving the most, and whose would hardly appear?
- What simple ritual could I introduce to make it safe, and expected, for quiet genius to shape our decisions?
I glanced around and saw others doing the same inner inventory. Some avoided eye contact, perhaps recognizing their own patterns of dominance. Others nodded, clearly thinking of someone in their team who needed an invitation, not a spotlight. Liam’s message landed with a kind of gentle force: leadership is not only about speaking well, but about making others audible.
Interlude: The Room Finds Its Voice
Between Liam and the next speaker, our facilitator paused. Instead of rushing on, he asked us to share what resonated. Hands went up immediately. One manager spoke about a junior planner whose half-sentence in a corridor had saved a major shipment. Another admitted that their project name was “so technical that even I can’t explain it to my kids.”
The room felt alive. People were not waiting for theoretical frameworks; they were connecting ideas to their own daily grind. I watched someone draw a line down the center of their notebook, scribbling “Story” on one side and “Voices” on the other, mapping where they were strong and where they were failing. The atmosphere was attentive but not tense, a good kind of pressure, the kind that suggests people are ready to act, not just to agree.
Then Omar stood up, and all of us instinctively straightened in our chairs. His world is crisis, and we all knew he had stories that could easily have become blame sessions. Instead, what he offered was something much more useful: a way to see chaos as data.
Omar: Watching Leaders Create Signal in the Storm
Omar began with a simple truth: “You don’t really know a team until you’ve watched them in a storm.” He told us that he reads incident logs like a historian, looking not only at what failed, but at how communication behaved when pressure spiked. Did messages narrow into clarity, or scatter into noise?
He compared two outages we had all heard about, but never framed side by side. In the first, a manager panicked and sent a dozen overlapping emails within two hours. Each update slightly contradicted the previous one. Different teams acted on different versions of reality. Confusion grew, and trust eroded faster than the technical problem itself. In the second outage, another manager paused, to some, it looked like delay, and used that time to gather facts and align with a small decision cell. Then a single, clear status update went out, followed by a short daily briefing at the same time each day. Both incidents were painful. Only one left people feeling better led.
Omar’s key practice is the “after-crisis replay.” Once adrenaline has faded, he sits down with people from different levels and asks them, separately, to recount what happened: who did what, when, and why. If their stories line up into a coherent narrative, he considers the crisis well led, regardless of the specific outcome. Clarity has been written into the memory of the event. If, instead, each person tells a fragmented story, “I don’t know who decided that,” “We were in the dark,” “We just waited for orders”, then even a technically successful resolution counts as a leadership failure.
He described a supply disruption that could have easily fractured us. Instead, they implemented a simple rule: one official update per shift, one central channel for questions, one named person responsible for maintaining the signal. People were free to talk informally, but there was no doubt about where “official truth” lived. The result was not perfection, but coherence. Downtime dropped significantly compared to similar crises in the past, and post-incident feedback showed surprisingly high confidence in leadership despite the stress.
As Omar spoke, I remembered my own clumsy attempts at managing crises, how often I had mistaken the volume of my communication for its quality. His questions stung, but in a productive way:
- In my last crisis, did the messages we sent create clarity or multiply confusion?
- Where does official truth live in my team when everything is on fire?
- If I asked people a month later to replay the event, would their stories match, or would they contradict one another?
I looked around and saw several colleagues staring at the table, lost in their own memories of failed or half-successful storms. Omar did not spare us, but he also did not condemn us. His message was simple: crisis will come; our job is to forge signal when it does.
Yusuf: Discovering Joy as a Leading Indicator
By the time Yusuf stood up, the mood in the room was serious, almost heavy. He opened with what sounded like a provocation: “Joy is a performance indicator.” A couple of us smiled, assuming he was joking. He was not.
He described how he walks the floor with the eyes of a coach, not just a supervisor. He listens for laughter and notices whether people stay a bit after meetings to keep talking or rush out as if escaping. He pairs these observations with pulse surveys that ask about energy, not just satisfaction. One of his favorite questions is, “Do you feel that your effort is seen?” The answers, he said, often predict turnover more accurately than any single metric.
In one unit notorious for burnout, he introduced a series of small rituals instead of a big program. There were short daily huddles where each person could share one micro-win from the previous day. There were Friday games that had nothing to do with performance reviews and everything to do with reconnecting as humans. At first, people rolled their eyes. Over time, they began arriving prepared, eager to highlight colleagues’ contributions. The atmosphere shifted. Over the next months, retention among top performers improved noticeably. The work had not become easier, but it had become more bearable, more shared.
Yusuf spoke about “micro-win recognition” as a core audit point. When leaders only celebrate large, perfect outcomes, people learn to hide partial progress and small improvements. Fear grows in the shadows. By contrast, when teams ritualize the noticing of tiny steps forward, they build a kind of collective resilience. One ritual he shared, “Monday Mugshots,” invited people to bring a photo or a short story from their weekend or recent success. It sounded trivial, but he described how engagement scores rose and how people began volunteering for stretch assignments because they trusted their efforts would be seen, even when results were not yet shiny.
His questions were softer, but no less demanding:
- What do my retention numbers say about the level of joy in my team, especially among the best people?
- How do we celebrate small wins, and what does our answer reveal about what we really value?
- When was the last time laughter in our workplace came from trust and connection rather than cynicism?
As he spoke, I realized that I often treated joy as a byproduct, something that might appear once performance was under control. Yusuf framed it differently: joy, in the sense of meaningful connection and visible progress, is a leading indicator. Neglect it, and you will see it later in turnover, mistakes, and passive resistance.
The Audience: A Mirror of the Middle
Throughout these conversations, I watched the audience, my peers, as closely as I watched the speakers. No one retreated behind their laptop. People leaned in, nodded, frowned, and occasionally laughed. They were not spectators; they were recognizing themselves in the stories. Well before the Q&A, pens were busy designing new rituals: story audits, airtime tracking, crisis scripts, micro-win practices.
When questions came, they were grounded and practical. Someone asked Noah, “How do you keep a story alive when sponsors rotate every year?” Another asked Liam, “What do you do when the loudest person in the room is your boss?” Omar was asked how to balance speed with the discipline of a single channel. Yusuf fielded a question about how to introduce joy rituals without seeming unserious in a technical environment.
The atmosphere was not one of complaint but of craft. We were not trying to change the world that afternoon. We were doing something more realistic and, in a way, more radical: adjusting the levers available to us in the middle, words, rituals, questions, check-ins, to shape how our teams experience strategy, pressure, and each other.
Key Learnings: What I Carried Away
As we closed the session, our facilitator asked me to share what I had heard, in my own words. I realized that while each colleague had presented a different angle, together they formed a coherent whole. From my seat in the middle of the table, this is what emerged:
- Story makes strategy livable. If people cannot retell our purpose in their own words, we are not leading; we are broadcasting.
- Inclusion requires design, not just good intentions. The quiet genius will not magically speak up; we must create structures that make their contribution expected and safe.
- Clarity is the true currency in a crisis. Volume without alignment is just noise. Our ability to create one shared story of what happened is as important as the technical fix.
- Joy is not decoration; it is infrastructure. Rituals of recognition and connection are early warnings and early remedies for deeper problems.
- Attention is earned every day. People lean in when they hear their reality reflected honestly and when examples are specific enough to translate into their own context.
Walking out of that room, I did not feel that everything had changed. The restructuring was still happening. The pressure on costs, timelines, and performance had not vanished. But I carried with me a different sense of what my role in the middle could be. I was not just there to pass down decisions and push up reports. I was part of a small, scattered community of practitioners quietly shaping the culture through stories, questions, and rituals.
As I stepped into the cold air outside and watched colleagues drift toward their cars, I found myself wondering: months from now, what echoes would remain from this conversation? Would I hear new metaphors in the corridor? Would I see quieter colleagues taking the floor? Would the next crisis replay sound more like one shared story than a handful of fragmented memories? Those questions have stayed with me, guiding small choices day after day.
This is how the middle changes, not through one grand speech, but through many managers, in many rooms, deciding to practice their craft with more intention, more courage, and more care. And on mornings when the pressure feels heavy again, I remember that table in Metz and the four voices that reminded me what is possible when we truly listen to each other.
MB
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