Letting Go of My Business

This month, I led our company in an exercise that effectively turned our entire organization over to the employees to run. After a period of rigorous self-examination through some personal development work I realised that I was a limiting factor for my organizations growth.

All the experience that I have collected had served well to create the organization. However, the same evidence was supporting a limited theory of what was possible for us. This theory was limited to what I was being, doing and creating.

I recently sold a similar business that hit a similar plateau in its growth. I was now aware that the only common dominator in both situations was me.

Having recently read “The Three Laws of Performance”, a brilliantly inspired book, I was able to find the process that I knew needed to be created.

We created a planning day in a business-as-usual way. We discussed the numbers; current challenges and invited everybody to contribute in a normal problem-solving format.

In this process my brother Damian (our CEO) laid out some of the “cold hard facts”. Painting a picture of what our future would look like if we continued to travel in the direction that we were. The direction we were heading was not bleak, but it wasn’t inspiring either.

Wrapping up for lunch, we asked our colleagues to turn their attention to the afternoon in which we would create a space for a new future.

I have to be honest, the process made me nervous at first. I grappled with the fear that my business was too “key-man centric” to survive without me – a fear I now realise was more based in ego than reality.

I felt there was something else that needed to get out of the way before we started.

I confessed that I had worked in organizations where we had created a future as a management team. We then engineered exercises to convince the staff to buy in to our objectives.

The intentions were honorable at the time. However, to me the process was inauthentic. I promised that our process would have no such parameters to restrain it.

I confessed too that I had no idea how the afternoon was going to turn out and that I needed assistance to create it.

We started by agreeing on qualities that existed in us individually that were common to us as a group. Qualities such as open-mindedness, sense of humour and integrity came up immediately.

Once the list was generated and agreed upon within the group. I asked that we only share within the context of these qualities for the rest of the afternoon.

Agreement was easy to reach given that the qualities were self-generated.

We then had a space for a new future. I asked that we forgot all the evidence that we had of what is possible and let go in dreaming of new possibilities. We took a few minutes to write out what we dreamed our lives would be like in 2 years.

One question that I threw out while the team were writing was “what would you like to be acknowledged for?”
When I asked this question, I had no idea it was going to awaken some of the most inspiring insights for the day.

We then created a future for our organization that was bigger, brighter and clearer than anything I had thought up myself.

I believe we had a view of each other and were speaking within that context. When we shared who we really were and what drives us there was a new respect and therefore a different quality of listening.

What I now notice is that we are speaking to each other in the context of whom we aspire to becoming. In effect – we are holding each other accountable for and supporting each other’s dreams.

We can now put our business under deeper scrutiny without the fear of the upsetting the people involved (mainly me to be honest). This new space allows us to objectively discard old assumptions leading the way to new innovations.

Our team has recently created some fantastic new innovations. I will share these as they develop.

Where my brother and I previously felt as though we were dragging the company along, we now have an organisation that pushes us from behind.