While faced while leading Relevention through a remarkable period of growth I was questioning ‘the why” of our work… bet you never felt that way before (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).
We got ourselves out of that funk by taking two courses of action (which produced a pretty awesome breakthrough):
- I hired an executive coach who worked with our director team on aligning the organizational direction. We found out that trust and effective communication were missing on our leadership team.
- Together, we watched a TED Talk by Simon Sinek, author of Start With Why. His Golden Circle approach to business recommends an inside-out thought process, beginning with understanding why you’re doing what you’re doing, then how you’re doing it and finally what you’re doing. This simple theory helps explain why some organizations are more innovative and influential, command greater loyalty and can repeat their success.
Relevention exists to help people succeed. That’s why we started in the first place and why we put in all the long hours and hard work. We genuinely want to see our clients succeed in tangible ways. We want our fellow employees to succeed in their careers and personal lives. And we want to give back to help make the world a better place through our work with non-profit organizations.
We needed to capture this vital foundation in a meaningful mission statement and a clear vision to give everyone a clear road map. So we translated that into our clearly laid out CREW values and then, finally, created short-term goals and objectives to help keep us on track.
Sure, we still get stressed or too caught up as a team sometimes, but we’re no longer thinking of shutting Relevention down anytime soon. The point here is that once we knew we were all struggling with the WHY we took action and dedicated the time, money (and yes, blood, sweat, and tears) to figure it out. We believe in what we do and we simply needed to rediscover why we love our work.
So my encouragement is this… if you’re not happy with your answers to your WHY questions, or maybe you don’t even know what questions to ask yourself, it’s time to reach out for help. Call or email a trusted adviser and block out some time next week to find a course of action that can help you, and your company, rediscover the WHY.