One critical mistake businesses often make is ignoring where they came from. I don’t mean the story you’ve crafted as part of your brand identity. I mean the less palatable things: no-win decisions you had to make, big mistakes, angry employees.
These things are often treated as points of shame when really, they are just markers of growth in the life of the business. Yes, growth happens in all kinds of ways, and sometimes it’s those really nasty, ugly things we’d rather never think about again that embed themselves in the history of the company. If we try to ignore them, pretend they didn’t happen, or fail to see the value in the experience, we’re missing out.
Just like any human, a business is formed by what it has gone through, succeeded in, failed in, nearly been crushed by. That round of layoffs you were forced to do in a downturn had an impact on the identity of your enterprise, and if you simply put it in the past, you’re not only missing the point but you’re missing an opportunity.
History binds us together. It helps us know who we are and why it matters. Those really impossible, difficult things you went through as a business grew everyone. Even if you are the decision maker, everyone came out on the other side with an experience that can work for or against the longevity of the business.
How do you engage with this business history, especially when it’s painful? Here’s three activities to help you get started.
- Make a timeline of your business.
- What are the significant events in your business’ life? You’re looking for seminal moments in in the life of your business thus far. It could be layoffs, a team member who came on and changed everything, a restructure, a radical change in the market, loss or gain of a big customer.
- For each significant event, identify what you learned.
- Is there anything going on today that is an opportunity to apply what you learned then?
- Identify the hardest thing you’ve gone through in your business since it started.
- What happened?
- Why did it happen?
- What could you have done differently?
- How are you better at what you do today as a result of that experience?
- Make a list of people who have left (I know, this is a really hard one).
- What did each person bring to your company?
- Why did each person leave?
- What did you learn from their departure?
Some people like to say business isn’t personal. Others insist it is. I don’t think it matters one way or another. The fact is that as human beings, it can be easy to fall into the trap of expendability, whether we’re dealing with other people, experiences, or opportunities. The purpose of our discussion here is to give you an opportunity to connect with what you’ve learned from the history of your business. Your business is not expendable – and neither are you.
That means everything in this history is important, and anything can lead you to your next opportunity.
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