In my last post, I shared how you can strengthen your family by developing a historical narrative. This helps children grow up believing they are a part of something larger than themselves, resulting in greater well-being and resilience in the face of life’s inevitable challenges.

The same is true for the organization you lead, whether corporate, nonprofit or faith-based.

John T. Seaman Jr. and George David Smith explain this in their Harvard Business Review article, Your Company’s History as a Leadership Tool.

The bottom line: Effective leaders communicate organizational history. They help develop a historical narrative that’s a part of the culture. Here are three reasons why you should use organizational history as a leadership tool.

It reinforces the mission.

Just as developing a family narrative helps children feel part of something larger than themselves, your organizational narrative reinforces your mission. For example, the mission where I serve is to provide Christian hospitality and programming that promote God-inspired, life-changing experiences. Two of our former directors have told stories how they heard their calls to ministry in an outdoor chapel service during summer camp. A current staff member has a similar story, which occurred decades later. These stories give life to what we do, so that staff and volunteers understand that what we do makes a difference.

It creates identity.

Historical perspective helps your organization or ministry understand who you are. It helps you make the statement, “We’re the kind of people who…” For example, in a church that has a history of serving the poor in their community, the narrative will encourage people to say, “We’re the kind of people who serve those most in need so they’ll know God loves them.”

You might think that focusing on history just encourages stiff-necked people to glorify the past and resist change. Ironically, one of the key factors in effective change is an organizational identity. According to authors Dan and Chip Heath, in their book, Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard, identity has an important role in any change situation. People resist anything that violates who they think they are. On the other hand, they are likely to embrace anything that reinforces their organizational identity.

In the example above, church members are likely to resist a new ministry to corporate executives with hurried lives. It’s just not who they are. On the other hand, they will get excited about a new ministry to provide job skills for the working poor.

Which leads to the final way history can help you as a leader.

It can facilitate change.

Stories of the past can create resistance to change. But they don’t have to. The narrative can be a way to re-think how to do things or find new paths. One way to do this is find long-forgotten stories that shed new light on the current situation. These provide a counterpoint to often repeated stories that can keep things stuck. Another way to do this is to re-frame a well-known story to shift the narrative.

In 2003, we discerned God leading us to sell a beloved retreat facility and replace it with a new one on the camp property we already owned. It was a restored Georgian mansion that was given to our denomination by an anonymous donor in 1965, for use as a retreat center. The story goes that it was offered to another denomination first, but they turned it down. They thought it would be too expensive to operate. So we benefitted.

There was resistance to selling, because so many people had cherished memories of spiritual experiences they had there over nearly 40 years. We shifted the narrative to say how blessed we were that someone else turned down the gift because they thought it was too expensive to operate. It resulted in four decades of ministry. But, in the end, the other denomination was right. It WAS too expensive to operate and now it was time to sell. The retreat center was sold in 2005 and its replacement was completed in 2011.

It remains a cherished part of our history, but reframing the narrative helped others to see that a new path was not only possible, but was desirable.

Your role as a leader requires you to think about where you are going. But, that is anchored in a narrative that transcends you. Done properly, through reinforcing, and sometimes reframing, this narrative can provide meaning, purpose and direction for the organization you lead.