One of the things I’ve appreciated most about reading history more recently in my life is the chance to go deeper than the version I got in school.
I’ve spent a good deal of time with biographies of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Harry S. Truman, and what keeps drawing me back isn’t just the big moments. It’s the richer context—the details that never made it into my textbooks. Most of it was significant, while other personal facts were less so, yet still interesting because they made these leaders more relatable.
Take Washington’s teeth. I’d be willing to bet that most of you have heard he wore wooden dentures. It’s one of those myths that gets passed down without much thought—the kind of detail that finds its way into trivia games, and nobody questions it.
But historians have confirmed it’s false. Washington did wear dentures, but they were crafted from a combination of ivory, human teeth, animal teeth, and metal. The wooden myth most likely came from the fact that the ivory stained over time. Someone made an assumption, the story spread, and for generations nobody thought to question it.
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This personal detail is an important reminder that false narratives can take root and persist simply because they go unchallenged. Leaders today deal with this more than they might realize.
Every organization has narratives. Some are true, while others are repeated long enough to feel true. They might go like this: We’ve never been good at innovation. This team doesn’t communicate well. That’s just how things work around here.
Whether employees carelessly repeat them or feel compelled to share due to some unresolved gripe, these spoken thoughts shape what people feel about the culture, often without anyone asking whether they’re actually accurate.
That’s where positive influence comes in. Positive influence, at its core, is about steering the narrative toward something more honest and useful. It’s about a willingness to correct the story when it’s neither.
The historians who shared Washington’s dental records proactively pursued the right information. As a leader, you can do the same.
What’s one story that’s circulating in your organization? It may be about your team, your culture, what’s possible, or what’s on the horizon. Find out whether it’s based on fact or fiction.
If the negative story is true, what can you do to address it with integrity? If the story is like wooden teeth—neither useful nor correct—how might you refocus the team on what’s really important? You can lead more than processes and timelines; you can lead people to believe in a shared purpose.
That’s a different kind of leadership. And it’s often the kind that matters most.
