Why HR Leaders Need to Master the Art of Storytelling

Good ideas stall out every day — not because they are wrong, but because they are poorly translated. That is the core insight driving Becky Roemen’s approach to leadership development.

Roemen has spent years developing trainings and growth opportunities for leaders, first at Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO), a global network for peer learning, and then as a consultant at Mind the Mic, helping entrepreneurs take the stage with confidence. Through that work, she developed a sharp understanding of how storytelling functions as a leadership tool — not a performance, but a bridge between vision and action.

In this conversation with SHRM, Roemen explores why storytelling is one of the most underused skills in leadership, how it can make invisible workplace challenges visible and actionable, and what practical steps HR leaders can take to start telling stories that stick.

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SHRM: You’ve spent significant time working with entrepreneurs and volunteer leaders. How did that experience shape your thinking on storytelling as a leadership tool?

Roemen: What really stood out to me as I grew within EO is how often good ideas stalled out because people weren’t telling the story. The ideas weren’t wrong — they were just poorly translated. People didn’t understand the why behind what we were doing.

When someone could use a story as a bridge between their vision and the action they were asking for, they got buy-in. That was a fundamentally different experience. You told me the story, so I could put myself in your shoes. I understood your idea — or maybe I just trusted you more because of it.

That’s especially powerful in a global environment. Storytelling is a more universal language than business theory. The feelings, the emotions, the experiences — there’s less of a translation gap. It’s easier to put yourself in someone’s shoes when you’re hearing their story.

SHRM: Within EO, you were exposed to a concept called Gestalt Language Protocol. How does that framework connect to the way you think about storytelling in leadership?

Roemen: It’s the foundation of everything for me. The idea is simple: you only speak from your own experience. Don’t tell someone what they should do. Tell them what you’ve been through, what you felt, what worked, and what didn’t.

It removes the advice dynamic and replaces it with something more powerful — relatability. You’re saying, ‘I’ve been where you are. Let’s talk about this like we’re the same.’ That peer-to-peer experience sharing is why certain business networks feel different. You’re not going to get advice. You’re going to talk to people who’ve walked a similar path.

For HR leaders specifically, this reframes the entire conversation with the C-suite. Rather than telling a CEO what they should do, a strong people leader can walk in and say, here’swhat we believed, here’s what we learned, and here’s what we think we should change. That structure — belief, learning, action — is one of the most powerful storytelling frameworks I’ve encountered, and it maps directly onto how HR leaders can show up as strategic partners.

SHRM: Why do you think storytelling is so effective at moving people, even when data and directives aren’t?

Roemen: When someone gives you a directive or tells you how to do something, you might be receptive — but you might also get defensive. If it feels like a correction, or if it challenges how you’ve been operating, the walls go up. Data alone rarely breaks through that.

But a story creates a memory. It makes meaning stick without telling you what to do. It shows you a way someone else has done something. It can bypass defenses in a way that theories and statistics can’t. It creates openness and a willingness to learn.

That said, storytelling isn’t a replacement for rigor. You can’t walk in with just a story and expect it to carry the room. You have to know your stuff — the facts, the risks, the outcomes.The story is the delivery system. It’s illuminating something: a risk, an opportunity, a consequence. But there has to be something solid on the other side of that bridge.

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SHRM: Can you share an example of storytelling done well — where you saw it genuinely change how someone received a message?

Roemen: A few come to mind, but a memorable one is Michelle Y. Hoover, a researcher who studies first-generation professionals. She was speaking to a group, and she started sharing concepts I could follow — loyalty, imposter syndrome, the pressures of being the first in your family to enter a professional environment. I was nodding along.

But then she started telling specific stories. Being in a conference room and feeling out of place. Going into a negotiation with no one who had modeled that behavior for her. The feeling that she had to work twice as hard to prove she belonged. I went from engaged to completely absorbed. That shift happened the moment she moved from concept to story.

SHRM: What are the most common mistakes you see leaders make when they try to use storytelling in professional settings?

Roemen: A few things come up consistently.

The first is overpolishing. People clean up their stories so much that they scrub the emotion out. The authenticity disappears along with the rough edges. A story that’s too smooth often lands flat.

The second is not practicing. The story either runs too long or misses the point entirely. Your audience might be entertained, but they leave not knowing what to do with what you told them. The point got lost somewhere in the telling.

The third is framing storytelling as performance. If someone steps up thinking, I’m performing right now, it shows. When storytelling is treated as a tool — a way to get somewhere — that’s when it’s most powerful.

And the last one: the story has to invite the audience in. It’s about you, yes, but the goal is for the listener to see themselves in it. If the story stays entirely self-contained, it doesn’tdo the work you need it to do.

SHRM: Many leaders hold back because they don’t think they have compelling stories to tell. How do you address that?

Roemen: Storytelling doesn’t have to be creative. It just has to be clear.

We tend to associate storytelling with writers, with fiction, with people who do ultra marathons and get frostbite and keep running. And then leaders look at their own lives and think, who am I? But that’s not the standard. Stories don’t have to be dramatic or monumental. They just have to matter.

We all have moments in our lives that were pivotal — that taught us something, changed how we saw a situation, or shaped how we lead. Sharing those clearly is storytelling. You’renot making anything up. You’re relaying lived experience. The confidence comes not from having a dramatic story, but from having a relevant one.

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SHRM: For leaders who want to build this skill, what are the practical steps you’d recommend?

Roemen: Start by building a story bank. The speakers and leaders you find most compelling aren’t telling those stories for the first time. They’ve identified the moments that taught them something and they’ve kept track of them — on paper, in their head, somewhere. Write down five or 10 moments in your life where you genuinely learned something. That’s your starting point.

Then practice in low-stakes settings. Share a story at dinner with friends when the moment naturally calls for it. Try one with your team in a smaller meeting. See how it lands before you’re in a high-stakes situation where you really need it to land.

When you ask for feedback, ask the right question. Don’t ask, ‘did you like it?’ Ask, ‘was it clear? Did you understand what I was driving at?’ Not every story is trying to win people over. It’s trying to communicate something. Clarity is the measure.

SHRM: How does storytelling connect specifically to the challenges HR leaders face — around burnout, engagement, and attrition?

Roemen: HR leaders are sitting on something valuable that they often underuse. They have the real, lived stories of what burnout looks like in their organization. They know the employee who quietly disengaged. They know the manager who stayed too long past their breaking point. They know what the warning signs looked like six months before someone left.

The challenge is that HR often presents those problems as data. Engagement scores are down. Attrition is up. And those numbers are real, but they don’t move people the same way a story does.

There’s a real opportunity for HR leaders to use storytelling to make invisible costs visible. Burnout isn’t just a metric. It’s a person. Disengagement isn’t just a number on a survey. It’s a pattern with a story behind it. When HR can tell that story — with clarity, with the right level of detail, and with the business consequence clearly on the other side — that’s when people actually hear it.

Roemen’s core argument is simple but worth sitting with: the leaders with the most impact aren’t always the ones with the most impressive resumes. They’re the ones who can make people feel what’s at stake and see themselves in the solution.

For HR professionals navigating complex organizational change, that’s not a soft skill. It’s a strategic one.