The role of leadership in encouraging inclusive storytelling

There is a moment in every young company when the story on the website stops matching the stories inside the office. The deck says the team is one big family, global and diverse, united by purpose. Inside, a few people speak most of the time, the same backgrounds shape most decisions, and sensitive experiences get edited out to keep things comfortable. That gap does not close by itself. It closes when leaders make a deliberate choice to treat storytelling as a shared practice instead of a top down broadcast. That is what leadership in encouraging inclusive storytelling really is, not a marketing tactic, but a way of running the company that makes room for every founder, operator and teammate to bring more of their reality into the story.

For most early stage teams in Malaysia, Singapore or Saudi, the instinct is the opposite. Founders worry that if they invite too many voices into the narrative, they will lose control. They imagine messy conversations about identity, faith, gender, class, or privilege, and they are afraid of the conflict that might follow. So they centralize the story around the founder, around the pitch, around what investors want to hear. The problem is that when a company only tells one kind of story, it also only sees one kind of risk. The quietest stories in the room often hold the earliest signals that something in the culture, in the product, or in the customer base is starting to strain.

Inclusive storytelling starts with what leaders model in small rooms, not what they publish in big campaigns. When a founder shares not just the polished version of their journey but also the parts they are still working through, they send a message that imperfection is allowed. A Saudi founder admitting that she sometimes edits herself in investor meetings because of cultural expectations, or a Malaysian leader sharing what it felt like to be the first in the family to move into tech, opens a door. People start to realize that this company will not punish them for having a complicated story.

The next step is what happens when others start to talk. Leaders who truly care about inclusive storytelling do not just sit through sharing sessions and then move on to business as usual. They listen for patterns. They notice whose stories never get told unless someone explicitly asks. They pay attention to the engineer who always turns her camera off when the conversation touches on family expectations, or the intern in Riyadh who stays silent whenever the topic of social media harassment comes up.

In those moments, leadership looks like making the invitation smaller and safer. Not demanding, “Tell us your story now in front of twenty people,” but creating spaces where people can test how much of themselves the company can hold. Small circles, founder led coffee chats, anonymous story boxes that are actually read and responded to, mentoring calls that are framed as mutual learning instead of one sided advice. These are not fluffy rituals. They are signal gathering systems. Of course, nothing breaks trust faster than asking for stories and then doing nothing with what you hear. This is where many well intentioned leaders fail. They hold a listening circle, people are brave, painful experiences come out, and then the leadership team files it under “good to know” and carries on. The next time they ask for feedback, nobody shows up.

If you want leadership in encouraging inclusive storytelling to mean anything, you have to be willing to let the stories change your decisions. That might mean adjusting hiring criteria after realizing that every “culture fit” is starting to look and sound the same. It might mean redesigning your parental leave policy when a founder in your accelerator in Jeddah shares how she almost left the program because she did not want to disclose a pregnancy. It might mean admitting that your playful brand voice has been making some team members feel like they have to perform cheerfulness even on days when they are barely holding it together. There is also a cultural nuance that early stage leaders in this region cannot ignore. In many Asian and Gulf contexts, people are taught from young to protect the group by staying quiet, especially when they are junior. If you tell a twenty two year old intern, “Your voice matters,” but then you react defensively when she points out a blind spot in a campaign about women’s empowerment, you have taught her the opposite lesson.

Real inclusive storytelling leadership accepts that discomfort is part of the work. A Singaporean founder might discover that her team in Johor sees the company’s social impact messaging as shallow. A Saudi male leader might hear from his female colleagues that the stories he chooses to highlight on stage always center men as heroes and women as supporters. These moments sting, especially when you genuinely believe you care. The question is what you do after the sting.

If you want a practical starting point, treat storytelling as part of your operating system, not an occasional initiative. Set the expectation that major product launches and campaigns must include at least one story from someone who is not usually in the spotlight. Build debriefs that ask, “Whose story did we overlook in this sprint, and what did that cost us.” When onboarding new hires, do more than run through the pitch deck. Invite them to share the personal context that shaped their decision to join, and model that this information will not be used against them. You can also make it easier for people to contribute without needing to be performers. Not everyone wants to speak on stage or write a long LinkedIn post. Some people are better at one to one conversation, at drawings, at product examples, at quiet observations in a Notion doc. If the only stories that count are those that look good on camera, you will always hear from the same small group. As a leader, your job is to broaden the definition of who gets to tell the story and how.

One more hard truth. You cannot encourage inclusive storytelling if you only celebrate stories that end well. The founder in Kuala Lumpur who shut down a startup after a painful pivot, the product manager in Dubai who chose to step back from a promotion to care for a parent, the engineer in Penang who called out harassment and then left anyway because the process dragged on too long. These are not neat narratives, yet they are often the ones that stop future harm if you are brave enough to bring them into the light.

Inclusive storytelling is not about making the company look good. It is about making the company more honest. Honesty is what allows you to see when a founder is burning out behind a confident pitch, when a team feels unsafe challenging a client, when a pattern of exclusion is quietly becoming part of your culture. Leaders who lean into this kind of storytelling are not inviting chaos, they are building a more accurate map of their own organisation.

If you are a founder or early stage leader reading this, ask yourself a simple question. If you stopped talking for a month, would your team still tell stories about the company that feel real, complex and alive. If the answer is no, then your culture depends too heavily on your voice and not enough on theirs. Leadership in encouraging inclusive storytelling is not about being the best storyteller in the room. It is about being the one who creates the conditions for other people’s stories to surface, to be heard with respect, and to shape what you build next. When you do that consistently, the narrative your company shares with the world stops being a pitch and starts being a reflection of who you really are together.