According to H/Advisors’ research, employees can handle change, but they can’t handle confusion. Leaders rank poor planning and unclear strategy as the single biggest obstacle to successful change. Inconsistent communication ranks third, while resistance from middle management comes sixth.
The takeaway: what looks like resistance can often be a lack of clarity.
For change to succeed, employees need to understand the why, what and how. Storytelling brings strategy to life by connecting it to employees’ day-to-day reality and helping them understand both why change is needed and the role they play in delivering it.
Lena Treuer, Global People Growth Senior Manager at Boehringer Ingelheim, explores the role of storytelling in helping employees understand and connect with corporate strategy.
01 How can organisations make a corporate strategy resonate with employees?
A strategy resonates when people can see themselves in it. Many organizations spend significant time defining what they want to achieve, but less time defining how employees can contribute. Storytelling can help bridge that gap. The most effective stories translate strategic priorities into real decisions, trade-offs and behaviors that employees encounter in everyday work. When leaders consistently connect strategy to practical examples of success, employees no longer see strategy as a presentation deck. They see it as a guide for how they prioritize, collaborate and execute every day.
02 How do you simplify a complex message without losing the substance behind it?
When faced with a complex message, I ask myself one question: What do I want people to do differently tomorrow? If I can’t answer that clearly, the message is probably still too complicated. I then look for a real example, decision or moment that people can relate to. Employees rarely struggle with understanding strategy. They struggle with understanding what it means for them. The goal is not to simplify the idea itself, but to make it actionable and relevant in everyday work.
03 How can organisations tell whether their strategy is actually landing with employees?
Awareness is only the starting point. What really matters is whether people move from knowing the strategy to using it in their everyday work. At Boehringer Ingelheim, our long-term strategy sets out what we want to achieve, while ‘Our Behaviors’ define how we work together to get there. Our Behaviors establish shared expectations across the organization and translate our ambitions into tangible actions in day-to-day work. To see whether this is happening, we need to look beyond communication metrics and focus on adoption: Are Our Behaviors shaping priorities, decisions and collaboration? Are leaders role-modelling them consistently? Employee listening can show whether people understand the message and where barriers remain. The strongest evidence comes from when people apply Our Behaviors naturally, especially in challenging moments.
Making corporate strategy relevant to your team
Senior leaders understand a strategy because they have spent months building it – debating the trade-offs, testing different options and seeing how it all fits together. Employees usually are presented with the outcome of this process and hear about a new strategy as the finished product, with none of that thinking behind it. That gap matters.
The 2026 IC Index found that only 52% of UK workers believe their employer has the right strategy for success, and that confidence deteriorates further down the organisation. Just 49% believe the reasons for change are clearly articulated. Gartner similarly warns that frequent shifts in organisational strategy are outpacing employee understanding.
These findings point to a growing challenge: as strategies and priorities evolve, employees struggle to understand the bigger picture and what it means for their own work. This is where storytelling plays an important role. Stories turn abstract priorities into something concrete – an employee demonstrating a new way of working, or a customer example that shows why a change matters.
For communicators, this starts with understanding audiences.
Audience mapping helps identify what matters to different employee groups: their priorities, needs and day-to-day challenges. Employee listening data, targeted focus groups and interviews provide valuable insights and help shape stories that will make the strategy tangible and relevant to each group.
Leaders are particularly important in making this connection. Rather than repeating centrally developed messages, they can explain what the strategy means for their team, use examples employees recognise and connect day-to-day decisions back to the wider ambition. Equipping leaders with key messages – while giving them guidance and flexibility to adapt these to their teams – keeps the strategy relevant without losing consistency with the organisational narrative.
Used in this way, storytelling isn’t simply about making strategy more engaging. It helps employees understand what the strategy means for them and what they need to do differently to deliver it.
How to get leaders’ buy-in for strategy
Leaders play a critical role in bringing strategy to life, but they need to understand and believe in it before they can communicate it to the wider organisation. H/Advisors’ research found that leaders rank a better understanding of the change strategy and rationale as the number one thing that would help them lead the change more, followed by greater alignment between leadership levels. Ready-made materials and toolkits ranked last. Yet toolkits are often where organisations start. The research suggests the order should be reversed: understanding and alignment first, materials last.
Our approach:
- Involve the right people early: Identify the leaders who will be responsible for communicating and delivering the strategy and bring them in while it is still being shaped. Giving them the chance to question the approach surfaces confusion before they are asked explain it to their teams.
- Build alignment through workshops: Bring leaders together to test their understanding of the strategy, work through points of tension and establish a shared view of what the organisation is trying to achieve and why.
- Co-create a consistent narrative: Once leaders are aligned, involve them in shaping the narrative. Agree the core story and the messages that need to stay consistent across the business.
- Then equip them with toolkits: Only at this point provide practical tools, such as talking points, Q&As and practical examples, that help leaders make strategy relevant to their teams.
- Keep the conversation going: Treat leader engagement as an ongoing process rather than a one-off briefing. Create regular opportunities to share employee feedback, address emerging questions and refresh examples of the strategy in action as priorities evolve.
Contact
Adaora Geiger, Head of Transformation & Change
London
[email protected]