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OPINION
Tell a story
Y ou’ve mapped out the process. You’ve built the checklist. You’ve outlined the logic. You’ve even color-coded the dashboard. And yet – your team still doesn’t follow the process. To drive real accountability, leaders must pair logic with storytelling that engages emotions, creates ownership, and motivates lasting process adoption.
Why? According to Lisa Cron in her book Story or Die , it’s because people don’t make decisions based solely on logic. We make decisions emotionally and then justify them with facts. If you want someone to take action – whether that’s updating a project plan, completing a QC checklist, or closing out a phase – you have to give them a reason they feel, a reason they own. That’s where story comes in. And no, I don’t mean fairytales. I mean real, relevant moments that resonate with your team and frame your process as the path to something they already care about. See if this sounds familiar:
reminded his team to update their project plans. Every week, the same excuses came back: “It’s too time-consuming.” “I know what needs to be done.” “We don’t need software to tell us.” So, Jake doubled down on logic. He built a slide that outlined the benefits of maintaining a project plan: It provides transparency. It supports timely invoicing. It aligns the team with the scope and schedule. He explained how to use the software, showed screenshots, and asked everyone to update their project plans weekly. Except nobody changed a thing.
Greg Sepeda
An office manager I coached recently – we’ll call him Jake – had a recurring issue. His engineers weren’t maintaining their project plans. Tasks were tracked informally, deadlines shifted without documentation, and estimates-to-complete were consistently inaccurate. Every week, Jake
See GREG SEPEDA, page 10
THE ZWEIG LETTER OCTOBER 20, 2025, ISSUE 1606
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