Stories and Organizational Culture

In this week’s learning we understand the importance of The Story. The Story is an integral part of communication and it is a great way to impart meaning and relevance to any situation. It can be easier to relate to a concept when you are able to contextualize the material in story form. Stories give life to living. In my current role I work with disabled veterans or veterans that are facing barriers to employment. My task is to case manage these veterans to aid them in overcoming these barriers. This involves everything from creating resumes to working with veterans as they go through addiction recovery and PTSD treatment, and that is just my office. In my organization over a dozen (perhaps more) programs are administered dealing with employment and assistance issues. Some of these are simple grants for education or training but others, like my program and a few others, are intensive services designed to directly address the needs of clients. In this capacity many people develop a bit of a dark sense of humor or create other coping mechanisms. Story telling is one of those mechanisms.

To pinpoint one particular story would be very difficult. A great many conversations occur when someone plops down at your desk and says, “You have to hear this…” This isn’t to say that there aren’t some that don’t stand out more than others. One story involves a man that needed to wire money from his New York accounts because Obama was bombing Libya and his liquidity was an issue. This man suffered from an obvious mental illness but he is only one of the many heartbreaking stories that live in and breathe in our waiting rooms. There is the story of the battered wife trying to feed her children. There is the story of the man laid off from work for no reason other than the employer wanted to hire a family member. There is the story of the young veteran home from the front and finding out that a great deal of the time a “commitment to support our troops” really just means a bumper sticker and not a job. Yes, there are also stories of people attempting to scam the system though those stories are in far less supply than some in the media would have you believe. In all of this there are the stories of the men and women that work in our building. There is the story of the man whose wife left him. There is the story of the low wage earners here that struggle to make ends meet as wages fall far behind cost of living. There is the story of the guy that struggles with his own mental illness as he works to help others solve theirs. These stories merge into a greater story, a unified story, of the daily struggle to take care of one another. I believe that stories are just crystallized versions of life; much like poetry is the crystallized essence of a moment or feeling. To ask for a single story would be to do a disservice to how all these stories unify a culture. I have held and will always continue to hold to the concept that we too often focus on the tree while the forest goes unheeded.

These stories bring together the office as a whole and they do provide a bit of focus for what we do. We aren’t paid very well, civil servants rarely are. The newsmakers make news because they are rare. Many of us do what we do because we believe that we can make a difference in someone’s life. Others do this work as a means to garner experience in office settings. And still others do this because in our region of the country it is one of the better jobs you can have. This isn’t to say that these people are not professionals, they are, and through these shared stories we can reaffirm a bit of our commitment to what we do. This is how stories impact my organization’s culture. They provide shared laughter and success and sadness. In an organization designed to affect lives isn’t laughter, success, and sadness life itself?