In many young companies, leaders say they want more empathy and allyship, yet what usually appears are new handbooks, training sessions, and slide decks. These instruments are not useless, but they rarely change how people feel about one another at 11.30 pm during a crunch before launch, or in the awkward silence after a tense investor call. What tends to shift behaviour in those moments is not a policy, but a story. Storytelling is one of the simplest and most underrated tools founders have to build empathy and strengthen allyship, especially in the messy, early stages of a team.
Every person in a startup arrives with a history. There are childhood experiences, early jobs, formative bosses, cultural habits, personal responsibilities, and unspoken fears that shape how they read risk, conflict, and opportunity. Yet most of this never enters the room. Colleagues know each other’s roles and LinkedIn summaries, but not the smaller, crucial details that explain why someone reacts sharply to a missed deadline or goes quiet when a certain topic appears. In the absence of story, people still make sense of one another, but they do it with guesses. Those guesses harden into labels, and those labels begin to drive behaviour more than reality.
When founders share their own stories selectively, this pattern is reinforced. The team often gets a polished origin narrative, the version crafted for pitch decks and media interviews. It might explain why the company exists, but not why the founder flinches at certain kinds of feedback or instinctively defends a particular group of employees. Without those contextual stories, people experience strong reactions but cannot place them, and so they adjust around them. They avoid hard topics, manage perception more than truth, or quietly withdraw from decisions where they feel misunderstood. Empathy cannot grow in that environment because the raw material for empathy, which is context, has not been offered.
At a systems level, the problem is not a lack of kindness or good intentions. It is a lack of shared narrative. Product managers, engineers, sales leads, and operations teams make decisions based on very different mental scripts. One person grew up in a culture where hierarchy is absolute and speaking out is risky. Another comes from a background where debate is a sign of engagement and care. A third has always had a financial safety net and views aggressive expansion as an obvious move, while someone else has supported family members since their teens and sees the same move as reckless. When those scripts stay private, each person assumes their own is normal. Behavior that deviates from it feels wrong rather than simply different. That is where judgment replaces curiosity, and allyship turns into quiet, polarised side taking.
This drift does not happen overnight. In the earliest days, when everyone is squeezed into the same room, storytelling occurs naturally. People stay late, swap war stories from previous jobs, laugh about odd customer requests, and share fragments of their lives. It feels effortless, so leaders assume this sense of connection will scale itself. It does not. As the team grows, work becomes distributed across time zones, and meetings become more rigidly structured, the space for unplanned narrative shrinks. Standups turn into rapid fire status updates. One to ones become focused on tasks and performance issues. The only stories that get told are the dramatic ones about deals saved, outages survived, or investors impressed.
In that vacuum, narrow stories bloom. The designer becomes known as the person who is always “too sensitive.” The sales head is repeatedly described as “too pushy.” The engineer who raises uncomfortable questions is quietly seen as “negative.” These are also stories, but they are thin, one dimensional interpretations built without context. They strip people of their full selves and reduce them to a single trait. When real storytelling is absent, these shallow narratives dominate, and empathy contracts.
The consequences show up in the small, persistent tensions that never quite resolve. A new parent who logs off early to handle childcare is assumed to be less committed, even if their outputs are strong. A colleague who rarely speaks up in large meetings is tagged as disengaged, though they might be translating and processing in a second language or managing anxiety. An employee who hesitates to relocate may be protecting fragile family circumstances that no one knows about. People who already sit at the margins, such as those from underrepresented backgrounds or with less financial cushion, end up doing most of the explaining. They carry the burden of repeatedly justifying their perspectives, choices, and needs to be seen as legitimate. This dynamic erodes trust and makes allyship feel conditional.
Storytelling offers a way to redesign this pattern, not through theatrical displays of vulnerability, but through practical, focused sharing. The goal is not to turn every team meeting into a group therapy session. Instead, storytelling can be treated as a method for gathering the context needed to interpret one another more accurately. Short, specific stories about early work experiences, about what “support” looked like in past teams, about moments when allyship changed an outcome or when its absence stung, can all become inputs into how a team operates.
These stories do not require elaborate ceremonies. They can be woven into existing rhythms. A weekly meeting might open with a prompt: each person shares, in a few minutes, a time they felt genuinely supported at work and what made it meaningful. One person might recall a manager who quietly shifted a deadline when a family emergency struck. Another might remember a senior colleague who publicly credited them in front of a client. A third might talk about someone who gave brutally honest, but respectful feedback instead of sugar coating. These examples are not fluffy. They reveal what different people need to feel backed by their team. Over time, they become design cues for how managers recognise effort, how peers step in during crunches, and how the company defines real allyship beyond slogans.
Story entry points can also be linked directly to roles and transitions. When a new product manager joins, inviting them to describe their best and worst experience working with engineers can surface crucial preferences about communication, planning, and conflict. When an engineer becomes a team lead, asking for a story about a time they felt set up to fail can clarify the kind of guidance they wish they had received. When someone moves into a sales leadership role, hearing about the most dehumanising target pressure they have experienced can help prevent those conditions from repeating. These stories guide practical choices about handoffs, decision rights, and expectations.
For storytelling to really build allyship, it cannot be a one way education flow where marginalised team members share and everyone else consumes. That model quickly becomes extractive. A more robust pattern is reciprocal narrative. If an employee shares the strain of being the only woman in a room of older investors, leaders can respond with their own stories of moments when they realised they had been complicit in sidelining such voices, even unintentionally. If a teammate explains what it is like to juggle unpaid caregiving alongside a demanding role, those with more structural power can share times when they overlooked similar situations and what they have learned. This does not erase power imbalances, but it signals a willingness to be changed by what is heard, rather than simply informed by it.
Operationally, founders can look across their calendar and ask a simple question: where could story live that it currently does not? Onboarding is one obvious place. Beyond process walkthroughs, new hires could be given space to share one or two foundational experiences that shape how they work. Retrospectives can include narrative questions like, “Whose perspective did we miss early that could have changed this outcome?” Performance reviews can invite employees to name specific people who acted as allies and to describe what they did. Even customer debriefs can include the story of how decisions were made internally, not only what was delivered.
As these small narrative practices accumulate, they change the internal map the team holds of one another. People begin to notice when a colleague is approaching burnout because they recognise the earlier signs that person once described. They know which teammate consistently mentors others quietly and can name that contribution during promotion discussions. They understand that when a certain engineer pushes back strongly on scope, it often comes from a history of being blamed for quality issues in previous jobs, not from stubbornness. The shift is subtle but profound: empathy becomes less of a vague value and more of a natural response grounded in remembered stories.
Storytelling also exposes the gaps between stated values and lived reality. If an organisation claims to support flexible work, yet people share story after story of feeling pressured to hide family obligations, then the problem is not unclear branding, but misaligned structures. If junior employees recount times they raised concerns about bias and were ignored or punished, this signals a need to rework escalation paths and leadership accountability. Stories act as diagnostic tools. They point directly to patterns that surveys and dashboards may flatten or miss.
It can be useful to imagine the company as a mosaic of overlapping narratives. There is the official story the brand tells the world. There are the customer stories that drive product and marketing decisions. And there are the quiet internal stories employees tell themselves about whether they belong, whether they are respected, and whether anyone will stand by them when something goes wrong. Allyship sits at the heart of this last category. Leaders cannot script these stories directly. They can, however, create conditions that make positive stories about solidarity and support more likely to emerge.
A simple test for any founder or senior leader is to imagine stepping away for two weeks. During that time, would the team still act in ways that reflect the company’s values of empathy and allyship, or do people depend on the founder’s presence to moderate behaviour and show care? If everything collapses into competition and silence without that central figure, then the culture is still overly dependent on personality rather than shared narrative. Storytelling practices help distribute responsibility. When people have heard each other deeply over time, they are more willing and able to check in on a colleague, speak up in defence of someone, or challenge a biased remark without waiting for explicit permission.
Ultimately, every team is already shaped by stories. The question is not whether narratives exist, but which ones dominate. Are the prevailing stories about grudges, stereotypes, and quiet resignations, or about moments where someone made room for another to succeed? Leaders have real influence over this balance. By choosing to invite, honour, and act on fuller stories, they make it possible for empathy and allyship to move from abstract ideals into daily practice.
The work does not require dramatic gestures. It begins with one prompt added to a regular meeting, one onboarding conversation that goes a layer deeper, one retro where someone is encouraged to share what it actually felt like to be left out of a decision. If leaders listen carefully and make even small structural changes in response, people will notice. Over time, an environment emerges where colleagues remember what each person carries with them and adjust accordingly. In that kind of culture, empathy is not a special event, and allyship is not a campaign. They become the way people show up for each other when no one is watching, and that is where a team’s real strength is built.
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