The Wall Street Journal declared in a recent article this week that companies are “desperately seeking storytellers.” According to LinkedIn job posting data, the use of storyteller as a job title has doubled in the past year. Organizations from Big Tech to nonprofits are rebranding communications roles and layering on flashy titles like Head of Storytelling or Director of Narrative.

At first glance, this feels right. We’ve all felt the pressure to cut through the noise, humanize our brands, and connect emotionally with audiences. But this framing treats storytelling like a function you can hire for, rather than a capability every leader and every team must cultivate.

The Assumption: We Need More Storytellers

The underlying assumption in the WSJ piece is this:

The barrier to communication, engagement, and alignment is a shortage of people who can “tell stories.”

This makes a dangerous strategic assumption.

The Reality: What Organizations Really Lack

What’s missing isn’t storytellers. What’s missing is clarity of strategy, alignment of priorities, and leadership that enables others to shape how that strategy gets expressed.

Here’s why that distinction matters:

1. Storytelling without purpose is noise.

You can hire a hundred storytellers, but if the organization hasn’t answered:

• Why do we exist?
• What difference are we trying to make?
• What change are we trying to accelerate?

Then all you’ve bought is a louder megaphone for confusion. True narrative coherence emerges from clear and aligned strategy, not from clever phrasing.

2. The people closest to the work are the ones who live the story.

Most “storytellers” companies are hiring are being asked to translate or manufacture meaning. But the real meaning exists in how employees, customers, partners, and communities experience the work day in and day out.

Great leaders don’t tell the story. They enable others to tell it through their own lens. That’s fundamentally different. Enabling means creating conditions where people can make sense of purpose for themselves, and then share that with others.

3. Storytelling skills aren’t substitutes for leadership capability.

Storytelling is valuable. But it’s just one component of strategic alignment. What organizations actually need (and what the WSJ article doesn’t quite confront) is:

• Leaders who define purpose clearly
• Systems that translate strategy into everyday decisions
• Shared language that connects individual work to collective outcomes
• Permission for people to interpret and own the narrative

Storytelling isn’t the answer. It’s the expression of an answer that already exists.

A Better Lens

Instead of saying:

“We need storytellers.”

We should be asking:

“How do we build environments where teams can understand the why and express that why in ways that resonate?”

When purpose is clear, the narrative doesn’t live in one job or one person, it lives in the organization. Leaders who want a real shift must focus less on packaging narratives and more on cultivating conditions where meaning naturally emerges.

The Lesson

Storytelling roles are a symptom, not a cure. The real challenge isn’t finding people who can write compelling lines, but creating organizations where people can see the purpose behind their work, connect their efforts to a larger mission, and share their perspectives in authentic, resonant ways.

That’s not a storytelling problem. It’s a leadership and alignment problem. And until we treat it as such, every new storyteller hire will feel like a band-aid on an organization that hasn’t yet decided who it is and what it stands for.

About the Author

Trained as an organizational behavioral scientist and customer-centricity expert, Andrea Belk Olson helps companies operationalize corporate strategy through understanding mindsets and behaviors. She is the author of three business books, including her most recent, What To Ask: How To Learn What Customers Need but Don’t Tell You.

She is a 4x ADDY award winner and contributing writer to Entrepreneur Magazine, Harvard Business Review, INC Magazine, World Economic Forum, and more. Andrea is also an applied entrepreneurship instructor at the University of Iowa and TEDx speaker coach.