Finding meaning
One of the things I urge leaders and individuals to do is to regularly reflect on the value and meaning of their work and the organisation they lead or work for.
Why?
Because we bring passion, take risks through innovation, and find meaning when we feel alignment between our personal drivers with our professional effort.
You might use any number of terms to describe the action of refreshing your purpose, and you can employ a range of processes or approaches, either alone or in tandem.
For example, you might be redesigning your strategy to fit with emerging contexts, refining your value proposition to ensure it still has meaning, checking your mission statement describes your intent. Processes to support this might include staff reflection sessions, customer insights research, Board or leadership team Away Days, stakeholder interviews and surveys.
I tend to share stories about my own experiences – lived experiences and the storytelling that accompanies them have more weight with me as an audience, so I mimic that with the audiences I’m trying to connect with.
Our why-finding process
The past few months I have been reflecting hard on the value of my own professional contribution to the environmental and societal priorities I believe in.
And working together with my teams to:
assess if we are all aligned – it’s a collaboration not a dictatorship, and I want everyone who works for my organisations to have that clear link between personal drivers and professional effort, to ‘feel’ the purpose
ideate our offerings to stratify them – building them into layers for diversity and added strength, akin to layers of substances in the earth, which enable holistic bespoke design that fits client needs
determine how we create the space to effect the shifts required to implement these (within our own heads and capacity), and to be able to clearly articulate our value and purpose to our current and prospective clients and our partners.
This has taken time, deep thinking, daydreaming, laughter, experimentation and many many cups of tea and coffee. And its cost money too.
What you the audience might notice from all this, is that the JHA Consulting website is being updated to more clearly and unreservedly expresses the who and why of JHA Consulting. We are the same as we were, but have become clearer about telling our story.
Our ethos
We are driven by our ethics, and we monitor ourselves and our clients against them
We will encourage, cajole, inspire and push for putting environmental sustainability and social equity into the centre of our work with clients
We care about people, and we care about nature, and we believe there are better ways for people and nature to partner and integrate
We are intent on enabling transformative approaches by using concepts and principles from natural ecosystems as a way into disruptive design and rethinking
We are working for horizons of 20-30 years + to be the norm, so that decisions made today have a positive legacy for next generations.
Our bespoke offering, fit for the context of each individual client, leader or organisation, continues to be the cornerstone of how we work.
Yet we know we have to contribute meaningfully as individuals and as a company to doing what we can to influence, support and act in defence of environmental sustainability and social equity.
Your why-finding
Over the coming months as we continue with our discussions and ideation, we will be re-articulating the principles that guide our work.
And we’ll be sharing how our purpose will feel to you when you choose to work or partner with us.
In the meantime, I hope our story inspires you to open yourselves up to undertaking a little refresh of your own sense of purpose.
If you want to hear more about what we’ve done and where we’ve landed, connect with me on LinkedIn and check out my blogs and sign up to the Human Hub newsletter.
If you want our help to work alongside you and your organisation to re-define your value or redesign your strategy, message me.
If you want to understand why we believe this is so important a movement to be part of, have a listen to some of my humans at work podcasts – guests like Dan Sherrard-Smith, Carlos Terol, John Samuel, Jay Naidoo express in their own ways how collectively we must prioritise environmental sustainability and social equity (to the detriment and sacrifice of other things we are used to clinging to).
And you can read my thoughts on these issues on my humans at work blog and via the Human Hub. Join the Human Hub community, receive monthly inbox newsletters and share your ideas and challenges with like-minded people around the world.
And I’ll leave you from a quote from Kasper Benjamin Reimer Bjørkskov on LinkedIn:
“Remember you are closer to being a climate refugee than a billionaire. No country, no matter it’s wealth will be spared.”
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kasper-benjamin-reimer-bj%C3%B8rkskov-660a4899/