Be A Story Shaper- Mark Sanborn - Leadercast

What's your story?

Not your resume. Not your title. Your story—the one with a plot, a struggle, a turning point. Mark Sanborn has a phrase for it that I can't get out of my head: consider your life a non-fiction book on the shelf of the bookstore of the world. Every person you lead is writing a chapter right now, whether they realize it or not. And here's the question that stopped me in my tracks:

Are they a better person because they work for you?

I recently sat with the ideas Sanborn shared at Chick-fil-A Leadercast, and I haven't been able to shake them. Sanborn, best known for The Fred Factor, opens his website with a line that sets the tone for everything he teaches:

"Leadership doesn't make a difference; it is the difference."

His talk built on that idea, reframing leaders not as storytellers but as story builders.

We live in a culture obsessed with hype. Bigger platforms, louder pitches, more polished highlight reels. But Sanborn's point cuts right through the noise:

"Leaders don't just tell a better story; they make the story better."

We don't need leaders with the best personal story. We need leaders who help us make our stories better than they would have been on our own.

That's actually the question Sanborn asks employees, confidentially, about their managers:

Are you a better person because of your manager?

Reflect on that one for a second. If someone asked your team that question today, what would they say about you?

Here's where it gets convicting. Sanborn points out that we so often treat people as WAC—Work Already Completed—rather than WIP—Work In Progress. We reserve "in progress" for ourselves, but hand everyone else a foregone conclusion. As Sanborn put it:

"Why do we treat them as foregone conclusions rather than a future possibility?"

He had one more line that landed hard:

"It's called Leadership, not Controllership."

Our job isn't to manage people into a fixed box. It's to lead them toward who they're still becoming.

If you see the people around you as WAC, you've quietly given up on their story. But if you see them as WIP, you become something powerful, a story shaper. Someone who recognizes potential before it's proven and invests in it anyway.

That's the leader I want to be. Is it the leader you want to be?

Sanborn broke this down into a framework I found both simple and convicting. Watch for these three places where people get stuck, and notice what each one actually needs from you.

Some people have quietly resigned themselves. They've decided they can't progress beyond where they are right now. Sanborn named the cure plainly:

"The antidote to 'stuck' is hope."

As a leader, that might mean doing some or all of the following:

• Resell them on themselves. Remind them of their own value—they've forgotten it.

• Re-narrate their story. Sanborn's exact words:

  "You might have to re-narrate their story… You might have misinterpreted your own story."

  Sometimes the version someone's telling themselves simply isn't true anymore, and they need help seeing that.

• Re-energize them.

  Give them hope!

  "Hope is having something new to try and being willing to try it."

  Not the future they currently occupy, but a different one.

Here's the part we'd rather skip: you have to let people struggle. Heroism doesn't exist without it. If you remove all resistance from someone's path, you also remove their shot at success.

What to do:

• Remind them nobody is exempt from struggle—not even you.

• "Refocus people from current struggles to future hopes."

• Redefine failure for them. This might be the single most important idea in the whole talk:

  "Failure is something that happens to you, not something you are. Failures are indicators you are making progress."

Read that last line again. Failure isn't proof you're off track—it's often proof you're actually moving.

This is where the real growth happens—but only if you're paying attention. You must learn or languish, no matter how bad the circumstances. There's no neutral option. You're either extracting the lesson or you're stuck in the story.

What to do:

• Look for the lesson in what just happened.

• Look for the destination—where is this story actually headed?

• Pay attention to how your story affects others, because it always does. As Sanborn said,

  "We as leaders need to pay attention to how our stories are affecting others."

  No story is lived in isolation.

And here's a line worth writing on a sticky note for your desk:

"Your resume is current until the day you retire. Your legacy will live beyond you."

The resume is what you accomplished. The legacy is who you helped become.

This is the part leadership books usually skip, and it's the part that matters most. Sanborn didn't just leave us with a philosophy; he gave us a framework. He calls it C.R.A.F.T., and I think it might be the most practical five-step tool I've come across for actually putting everything above into practice.

C — Catch

You can't shape a story you've never heard. Catching someone's story requires slowing down and making space for it. Not glancing. Not half-listening while you plan your next meeting. Genuinely slowing down.

R — Respond

Don't reject the story. Sanborn's warning here is direct: people have no reason to change until we accept them. Rejecting someone's story, even subtly, is the same as rejecting the person. Your response has to communicate acceptance before it communicates anything else.

A — Ask

Ask questions, and then let the silence do some work. A few worth starting with:

1. What is your greatest hope here?

2. What is your greatest fear?

3. What would you most like to learn?

F — Feel

Listen with your heart, not just your ears. And here's a line from Sanborn I won't forget:

"A cynic is a passionate person who doesn't want to be disappointed with you."

If you've grown cynical about the people you lead, it doesn't necessarily mean you've stopped caring. It might mean you're protecting yourself from caring too much. That's worth naming—and worth working through.

T — Tell

Finally, tell your story. This is where the connectivity happens. But notice the shift Sanborn makes here: the focus isn't on you, or even on what you learned. It's about how their story can be better because of what you learned in yours. You're not performing your journey for an audience—you're offering it as a tool for someone else's growth.

Sanborn quoted Tony Dungy, who said his story is really about the many people who poured themselves into his life. That's the legacy version of leadership, not "look what I built," but "look who helped build me, and look who I'm building now."

So ask yourself:

• Whose life are you investing in right now?

• Who are you pouring yourself into?

People, ideas, and experiences shape our lives—but people come first. People are where the ideas and experiences come from in the first place.

Here's where I want to leave you.

Your story doesn't have to be guarded. It can be generous—open, shared, freely given so someone else's story gets stronger because of it. Be ye openers of doors. Not gatekeepers. Door-openers.

Because at the end of the day, leadership isn't about having the best story in the room.

It's about being the one who makes the stories of everyone around you even better.

I'm grateful to Mark Sanborn for sharing this at Leadercast, and especially for the CRAFT model—I see a lot of alignment here with servant leadership principles I've written about before. If you want to go deeper into his work, you can find more at marksanborn.com.

So, one more time, slower this time:

Whose story are you shaping today?

Go find out. Slow down long enough to catch it. And then get to work helping it become something more.

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