Leaders try to inspire teams by telling stories about other teams succeeding. Yet a lot of those stories have been told so often audiences tune them out. Your audience won’t see your ideas are fresh when your stories are stale. Here are some of the best stories to tell your team (and one to avoid).

How do you check your stories for bias? Take a beat to look at the types of stories you tell in celebration at work. How do you reward various qualities in your people? It's hard to gauge bias yet everyone outside the usual stories sees it clear as day. Here's how to check yourself and fix it.

Explore each holiday's origin story. It will lend you immunity to the marketing mania and you might enjoy the season even more as you incorporate the real backstories.

Employers should beware of telling stories starring tokens. Being conscious about tokenism and inclusion is especially important for employers highlighting their diverse employee population as part of the organization's brand. And if you’re an employee, you can tell your stories with the x-ray vision your intersectionality gives you.

Brand stories without humans can lack humanity. Here are the three non-human protagonists to avoid and how to brainstorm the ones that work instead.