Can you define the spirit of your company? Why should you care?

Every company has a spirit – period!!  It might feel positive, negative, just OK, exciting, dull, inspiring, invigorating etc, etc

“So what'” you might say. “Why do I need to know? How will identifying the spirit make any tangible difference to my bottom line?”

I believe that identifying,  articulating and communicating the spirit or essence of your organisation should be fundamental to ongoing growth and success of your company or organisation.

Why?

It is at the heart of what you do –  whether you know it or not. When you walk into your boardroom and all your colleagues are round the table, or onto a busy factory floor, or into one of your shops there is always a feeling whether positive, negative or neutral.

When a company is in true alignment with its spirit the energy you feel in different physical areas of the organisation will be the same wherever you go. So customers walking into your office or one of your stores will see and feel the same purpose and values as members of the board working at a strategic level.  The purpose and values can only be aligned if they are created as a result of the spirit of the organisation being articulated.

So the inside-out process starts with the spirit, which leads to the values, which are communicated and embedded and therefore become part of everything you do from HR to sales to products to finance to marketing to blogs.

What are the benefits?

Understanding and articulating the WHY will help everyone to understand who you are and why they want to do business with you – differentiate you from the company down the road who says that they do the same as you.

In addition to this your staff will feel that they are part of something. It’s not just about a pay cheque; every day they come to work they feel valued for their contribution to making a difference to somebody else’s life, whether it’s investing their money, keeping them clean, feeding them or making them happier.  They will be more motivated to come to work and they will be happier at work.

And we all know that having happier staff tends to lead to improved productivity – so the bottom line could well be better too 🙂