How do we find home when we have been away for so long? Organizations everywhere are longing for the comfort of business-as-usual and the reassurance of old routines. But home is not what or where we think it is.
By Tony Tiernan and Allen Schoer
So here we are. The dragon slain, the treasure found, the wisdom hard-won, we begin our return. In every epic voyage or quest, there comes a time to turn towards home.
Many of us in business are at that point in our COVID-19 story, and we’re beginning to plan our way home. But what or where is home now?
Home is a state of being, not a place. For a business, home is authenticity: it’s when who you are, how you behave and what you say all line up. Home is when your brand and your business processes align in a self-reinforcing system.
But the road home is never a simple re-tracing of our tracks. It’s a perilous journey, fraught with danger yet rich with opportunities and insights, and it may not lead us back to what we knew or where we were before.
Who are you, as an organization? Why does your business exist? Who does it serve? Often the answers are clear when the business starts, but they blur over time. The business grows, your range of services or products increases, you acquire some other businesses, and that shared sense of identity and meaning becomes buried beneath the silt.
Gradually, your focus as a leader shifts to feeding the existing machine rather than figuring out whether the current business is really the best expression of the organization’s purpose and value.
Familiarity and comfort look inviting right now. They look like home. But those Sirens will quickly wreck the ship you’re steering. Home is no longer where you were, it’s where you’re going.
Now is the time to figure out why your business exists, what good it is here to do, what impact it seeks to make, what value it is here to create, and who it serves. The answers will guide you home to authenticity and a magnetic brand that signals your organization’s enduring uniqueness.
Over the next few weeks we plan to publish a few short pieces that extract leadership lessons from classic stories of the journey home. We invite you to join us on the voyage and share your own insights and stories in the comments as we go. Let’s think together about how to go home without going back.
Tony Tiernan is president of Authentic Identity, Inc Allen Schoer is chairman of The TAI Group, Inc
