Mindset and Culture. Passion and Purpose.
Mindset is the central nervous system of any business. It affects all aspects of the business from office culture to client experience and every critical process in between. When you operate with the wrong mindset, you’re likely to encounter troubles popping up all over the place in your business, including poor workplace satisfaction and your own sense of burnout when times get tough.
To keep things moving in a positive direction, you need a guiding undercurrent that justifies all the work and energy you pour into your business. You need a force to shape your mindset. This force is your purpose and your passion for that purpose. This will light the fire that will ignite everything you are doing for and within your business every day. It will also help clarify the brand and build awareness from marketing efforts and the community. Your staff, clients, and the community should have no doubts about who your team is and what your business stands for.
To do this, consider the grand scope of the impact that your business wishes the services to have on the community. Then, build this mindset into the company culture and all that everyone is doing. Revisit passion and purpose in monthly team meetings to ensure business operations are aligning with the vision.
Visualize all major ideas, dreams, and issues into a transparent, flexible online organizational system. For each idea, document the benefit of implementing it and assign a champion (aka. leader) to gather information and share findings with the executive team. Productively collaborate to approve or eliminate ideas on a monthly basis. Use the meeting to also plan the timing of implementation of each approved idea. Finally, share this master plan with the staff to empower the staff, instill transparency in the company culture, and spark excitement and momentum that will make the implementation and adoption come to life.
Benefits
An adjustment in mindset helps to get to the heart of the bigger picture issues affecting your firm’s everyday operations and work to:
- Eliminate doubt about your company’s “why”
- Reduce unnecessary expenses for operations that don’t fulfill the company’s goals
- Increase clarity and buy-in among decision makers and staff
- Build brand awareness
- Streamline marketing messaging
- Create flexibility to change strategies and adapt to business challenges
- Retain key employees and attract more qualified candidates
- Decrease stress
Exercise
1. Watch the two videos below
2. Download the mindset exercise.
3. Revisit the videos and exercise twice a year until you form new habits around mindset, culture, passion and purpose.
Per the latest study by Lally out of The European Journal of Social Psychology, new habits take over 66 days to adopt. Be patient with yourself.
Reflect and Prioritize
Arguably the most important element of how you manage your business is your mindset. It will dictate everything you do. Once you can identify your company’s passion and purpose –aka the “why”—and align your mindset to achieving them, then you will be ready to tackle the techniques—the “how.”
Please remember to add any new epiphanies and ideas to your Master Plan of Ideas and Initiatives.