by Enrico Pedroni – CEO, LS Academy
Deciding to invest time in reviewing your company’s mission and vision is not always easy. Taking a moment to reflect means a race against time: time to plan, time to implement, time to listen.
In the last few years, however, much has changed, further accelerated by the Covid-19 emergency.
The pandemic has radically changed our lives, but also the way we work. For those of us who provide services, and primarily education/training, it has meant rapidly changing the approach which had been established over years. From one day to the next we have had to revise all the paradigms on which we had built our work.
To do so we have had to acquire new skills to ensure effective training for learners, bringing some elements of “in-person” instruction to “the online experience”, looking for new models and identifying different approaches.
The time we spent and our commitment has paid off. So, as soon as life began to return to normal, we took stock to understand what we had learned from this experience and how we had changed.
We decided to refer to the theory of corporate purpose and the approach of the classic “Start With Why”, the Golden Circle theory proposed by Simon Sinek.
The purpose is the goal that every company shares with its people and indeed which is expressed in the concepts of “what we do”, “how we do it”, but most importantly, “why we do it” in short, the impact that people and, consequently, organizations want make on their ecosystem.
Along with the entire LS Academy team, we participated in a workshop that allowed us to get in touch with the “Start With Why” methodology according to Sinek’s approach, and to analyze our skills both as a team and as individuals. We started from our daily work routines to identify established competencies and map new areas where we gained know-how and awareness. As the “what we do” and the “how we do it” became clear, we broadened the reflection to include the “why” and here we got the most interesting feedback.
Each member of the team, with his or her contribution built a piece of the company’s “why”, finding a shared meaning to our work, which first and foremost is an idea.
The Hungarian psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, on the topic of people’s satisfaction in personal and work settings, wrote: “The quality of life does not depend on happiness alone, but also on what one does to be happy. If one fails to develop goals that give meaning to one’s existence, if one does not use the mind to its fullest, then good feelings fulfill just a fraction of the potential we possess. Without dreams, without risks, only a trivial semblance of living can be achieved”.
Now we leave you having shared our new purpose, which says a lot about us, but even more about you, who are part of LS Academy in different but equally important ways.