Leadership and organizational small storymaking: inviting employee engagement and engendering open and sustainable workplaces

This chapter offers an organizational small storymaking perspective as a useful way for leaders to generate more open and sustainable work environments. Grounded in the notion that organizations are continuously (re)constituted in the discursive practices of everyday organizational life, we develop a storymaking framework, with associated tools for practice, that can guide organizational leaders’ attention toward the small stories that circulate among their employees with a focus on inviting the often quiet or silenced voices into organizing processes. This move offers a means for leaders to foster open and sustainable workplaces capable of creating and maintaining useful tensions among the top-down and bottom-up dynamics of organizing. We bring an integrative view on leadership communication as deeply entangled with, and dependent upon, a specific organization’s storymaking processes. As such, the guidance we provide can help leaders improve their workplaces by attending to diverse voices and stories (both counter to and complicit with more dominant narratives) that circulate in everyday organizing practices. We argue that an organizational small storymaking framework can help leaders incorporate the polyphony of voices and organize stories in ways that will support more transparent, inclusive, ethical, and sustainable work environments. By attending to organizational small storymaking, leaders can better recognize the complexities of organizational life, promote diversity, and generate more egalitarian organizing practices.