By Jernavis Draughn
Becoming better in anything starts with a clear vision on what you want to become better at. That may be in a particular sport, musical instrument, writing, painting, marketing, selling, marriage, or business. Carol Dweck once said, “Becoming is better than being.” Discovering your personal WHY for everything you do in life. Our reasons reap our results. The beautiful transparency that a business can never hide from is the results it produces. They say the truth can set you free if you’re not afraid to accept it and course correct. It was hard for me to accept the truth in business, when I first started. I didn’t understand or have a business, it was a hobby. I was interested in starting and running a business, but I wasn’t committed to building a successful business that produces cashflow. I didn’t understand the more people you help become successful, the faster the business will grow.
I’ve learned from John Maxwell, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” As a business owner, I’ve learned from failure to give more than I take, help more people than I hurt, never stop learning and growing as a leader, create systems in every department, think bigger, improve your technology in every way, and to scale your business 10x. In the book, Building Better Organizations, by Claudy Jules, he explains seven essentials for a successful, healthy organizations in the digital era.
1. Strategic Direction: Prioritize purpose over profit.
-Create a clear, long term vision and mission for your company that will be able to endure all storms.
2. Culture: Craft a shared but adaptive identity. Changing culture is about changing behavior.
-Make sure your culture is data and AI driven, flexible, gig like workforce, agile and disruptive.
3. Leadership: Be agile and human-centric in the age of intelligent machines.
-Make decisions based on active foresight. Create a digital ecosystem that includes people, process and technology. Leaders will need to be driven by purpose, resilient, impactful and able to create lasting partnerships for the digital era.
4. Talent: Unlock the full potential of your people.
-Identifying and quantifying the value of the most important roles in an organization is a central step in matching talent to value. Gather data about your employees’ experiences.
5. Organization Design: Create structures and systems for agility and sustainability.
-Leaders need to design their organizations for what they need tomorrow rather than modify what the organization is today.
6. Invest in data and lead with it: Use digital advances to conduct continuous ORG-Health checks.
-Seven elements of an organization health: purpose, culture, leadership, talent/people, organization design, EID (Equity, Inclusion, Diversity, wellbeing, technology.
7. EID (equity, inclusion, and diversity), and well-being: Change fluency, which means implementing a purpose infused strategy, design of a healthy organization.
–Adopt a bias for radical transparency and belonging. Embrace well-being as a vital sign of the organization’s health.
Fortune favors the prepared. The future looks bright for those who prepare for it today. Most industries will look different in the future. Increased implementation of Artificial intelligence, flying cars, living outer space, improved internal/external technology, increased virtual workforce and much more. Albert Einstein believed, “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.”