Daydream With Purpose

Read time: 3:00 minutes

Hey! Humberto here.

Here’s the next issue of Invest in the Message to help you scale your operations with people-focused tactics.

What you get in each issue?

Genuine content from my insights, 1 actionable tactic, and my perspective of why it works.

Enjoy!

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Big thank you for taking the time to check out my newsletter!

Insight

What drives my thinking in this issue is the concept of prospection, or future-mindedness, if you want to get fancy about it.

It’s a unique superpower that separates us as a species and social creatures. We have a unique ability to daydream into the future and work our way backwards.

Organizations tend to tunnel vision on action without providing space to unleash our creative powers.

Action takes priority over context and this limits our ability to fully understand what challenge exists.

Instead, we show up with a solution looking for a problem. I want to change that by supercharging the way your strategy gets built.

Let’s dive in.

Action

Managing change is never easy. Transform this process into an inspiring experience.

One of the key components of Change Management for me is strategy development. It’s the ongoing assessment of what your company does in the short term to achieve the long-term.

Every year gather your leadership team. Look at your accomplishments over the past year.

What story did you set out to accomplish?

It’s a simple question.

Yet, it provides a depth of context from individual leaders guiding your operations. The question serves as a gauge for strategic alignment.

Gather information on your successes, failures, development, and people.

Successes

What did you accomplish? How did you accomplish it? Who executed the accomplishment? What did you learn from the accomplishments?

Failures

Why did you fail? Did you provide the right support? Did anything change? What did you learn from this failure?

Development

What did you learn throughout the year? How are you applying these lessons towards the future? What will these lessons allow your company to achieve? What are we doing to preserve and share knowledge?

People ?

Who are the new and upcoming leaders? How do you acknowledge and celebrate contribution? Do you provide opportunities to genuinely engage?

A lot more goes into this annual process of strategy development and deployment. But, consider building these elements into a standardized way for strategy.

The goal for your company is to always approach strategy in a way that looks familiar across the board. ??

Perspective

Prospection becomes highly effective when you understand the challenge(s).

Envisioning a the future for your company and people guides what truly matters.

It’s the emotional link between “what you value most” and how to maximize the value you deliver to customers.

Prospection makes company strategy more well-rounded because fuels what’s possible. As you refine a shared vision for your people, the mission becomes clearer.

Use the collective intelligence that exists at your company. It provides diverse context to building towards a shared future.

Build backwards by assessing what you bring to the table today. It surfaces what’s going right, what’s missing, and what needs to get improved.

Prospection is an exercise of curiosity.

I leave you with a personal story:

I grew up in a family-owned business and saw what aspiration looked like as an entrepreneur.

Discipline, sacrifice, and pushing forward by doing the work translated into operational success.

We grew and scaled to include two facilities in Mexico employing 2,000 people.

Eventually, I joined the ranks at our company and put in “the work”.

I experienced a lot of joy from the challenge of working in another culture and solving our F500 client needs.

This began to happen on auto-pilot by keeping my head down and pushing forward.

Our company got acquired, an accomplishment many entrepreneurs chase.

But, honestly, I still wonder what could of become with thoughtful prospection.

Our focus, keep doing the work to draw in more F500 clients and increase our operational workload.

Knowing what I know today, I would have created purposeful space to think about the future.

Where is our company heading? How have we evolved from Day 1? Why do we continue to do this type of work? Do our people see new trends with current and new customers? And, so forth.

We’re constantly evolving as individuals and the same is true for companies.

If we don’t take the time to think about “what can become and where are we going”, complacency sets in.

And when you become complacent, the spark of joy and creativity slowly burns out.

So, when you find yourself on an uninspired path in life and at work take the time to think about where you want to go.

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Until the next one, stay present, celebrate the small wins, and involve your people.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you’re company out:

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1. Personal consult for organizations going through transformation and need Change Management expertise.
2. 360° Operations Audit covering an end-to-end assessment of your company to create sustainable operational alignment.

Cheers!??

Humberto

P.S. Felt this helped, let me know. You want back those 3 minutes of your life, tell me about it. Like you, I’m here to learn and challenge myself to grow.