3 reasons why you’ll lose your company identity and 3 ways to keep it as you grow

At the heart of every company, you’ll find the core identity. This identity may come directly from the founder, or it may have evolved over time. This identity is made up of values and ways of doing things, attitudes and approaches to work that form the company culture.

It is the anchor point that helps everyone know what they are a part of and how things are done. Ultimately helps everyone in the organisation work towards its goals.

This identity is precious.

If you lose it, your company or team will start to lose its way.

If you never develop your identity, there’s nothing to anchor your organisation and no solid centre. You’ll end up like a ship, adrift, going nowhere and not even staying still long enough to plot a course. Your identity helps people belong and when people belong, they feel part of the team. They will work in a far more aligned and cohesive way. Without a solid understanding of who you are, things can easily fall apart.

Here are three reasons why your company will lose its identity, and three solutions to find it, develop it, and keep your business on track.

 

1. Lack of continued engagement with new staff.

When new people join your organisation, they bring with them a host of much needed skills and knowledge. They also bring their own fresh perspectives and hopefully some energy and enthusiasm for the job.

You have many opportunities at the start to make sure they understand the company’s expectations, values and culture. If you onboard them well, they’ll have a great insight into the organisation they have joined in a way that goes well beyond their new role. They will want to know where they fit into the bigger picture and how they should do that. But this engagement needs to be ongoing if you want them to really understand the identity of the organisation.

How do you do this? Once you’ve completed the on-boarding process, don’t stop. Do all you can to make sure they see the values and culture in action. You can do this with mentoring, buddying, lunchtime sessions, regular check-ins and team development. It’s also key that everyone, not just new starters, understands the importance of the company identity so that it is modelled by everyone throughout.

 

2. The absence of a clear and well-articulated vision and mission.

Your vision should be clear, well-articulated and resonate with everyone in your organisation. Agreed, this is quite a tall order, which is why a good vision is so important. It helps ensure that everyone understands the reason behind each and every task and keeps everyone looking in the same direction.

When this vision isn’t clear, or isn’t well articulated, people might interpret it differently, or not really know what it means. When the whole point of your work is missing, it makes the “who you are” bit feel shaky and the hard work is fragmented, cohesion is reduced and you stop working effectively.

Making sure you have a clear and well articulated vision and mission takes time. You probably won’t want to involve everyone in their creation but spending time helping people feel like it belongs to them will help embed it. Articulating it well means it needs to be easy to understand but it also means that it needs to be visible and communicated regularly throughout the organisation.

When you talk about your vision and mission with the people who bring that vision to life, they will feel a sense of ownership around their work and your organisation.

 

3. Forgetting to evolve

A company often begins as a one-person-band which makes identity relatively simple. But the identity of a company has to grow and evolve in the same way that everything else does as you scale. If you don’t allow your identity to grow, it will quickly stop reflecting the company, its values and culture. A dynamic company needs a dynamic identity to ensure it stays relevant and competitive.

That’s not to say you need to reinvent your identity at every stage. Instead, make sure you have opportunities to stop and check in on yourself and the organisation. As the people in the company shift and change, the type and amount of work you do, and who you work with will have shifted and changed too.

You might think that your organisation is one thing, but it may not be that anymore. Check in with people and make sure they still feel part of what they once did. If they don’t, spend time finding out what will help them reassert the organisation’s identity. Identity is not something to be foisted upon people, they need to be able to be part of it and in turn will shape how it evolves.

 

Once you realise how important your company identity is for guiding your business towards your goals, you’ll be able to find ways to engage new team members, keep the vision and mission front of mind and nurture the culture so it evolves as you do. When this happens, your team is motivated and knows exactly what they need to do each and every day as they work towards your goals.

We specialise in helping organisations get to grips with their culture and identity through facilitation. Get in touch to see if we can help you.