In my "And it's Gone" post, I mentioned a recent business trip to Huntington Beach, California. The meeting is the equivalent of an annual production awards meeting for sales. Of course, the company isn't 100% in direct commission sales anymore. Still, at precisely 100 years in business, the company is having difficulty separating the old school, bedrock, founding fathers' salesmanship from the current trends in fees and subscriptions.
The company opened its first offices in a major metropolitan city; however, it made its name on the main streets of rural towns across America. Face-to-face, handshake deals, and new employees often still cut their teeth greeting potential customers in the rustic door-to-door fashion, right up until COVID-19.
My company has floundered. The stumble has nothing to do with the product; the last few years have been amongst our most profitable. However, I assume larger profit margins would be actual for most companies that suddenly couldn't hire anyone saving millions of dollars annually in the training budget.
It's been three years since we've met as a region. I have worked for the company for many years; in early 2020 when the company said to lock the office doors to avoid COVID019 exposure, we closed the doors. I happen to be an extreme introvert. And I’m in sales. Weird, right? So the locked doors during the pandemic were a wonderful experience for me.
I live in a small rural town, and everybody hunkered down, wore masks, and said hi to their neighbors through windows for about two weeks. Then literally everything went back to normal. If I can find it, there is a meme that shows Clint Eastwood sitting on a porch with beer cans around him, and the meme says, "You never realize how anti-social you are until there's a pandemic and your life doesn't really change that much." My life didn't change much, and it wasn't until I sat in our summer regional meeting that I realized for most people, COVID-19 had had a very different effect on their life. In a recorded presentation, many people, including our CEO, discussed the devastating psychological impacts of the lockdowns, working from home, spouses losing jobs, and school closing. All these issues and more (toilet paper shortages!) caused them to lose sight of their purpose or, at the very least, to change their focus and priorities.
The company had spent a considerable amount of money on developing a program not only for their employees, but the program was designed for clients if we felt a need to share. As a group, an experienced moderator gave us each a handout and explained what he wanted us to do. I took one look at the page and smiled; perhaps I wasn't anti-social after all. In front of me was a list of words, probably 50 in total, listing potential values we could hold onto when things got rough; in essence, our purpose in life could boil down to living our core values every day.
I had completed an identical worksheet years ago that changed my life. After that, I live by and review my list of core values regularly. I wasn't anti-social (well, I probably am), but COVID-19 likely didn't affect me because I already knew what my values were, and even during COVID-19, I endeavored to live my values every day.
In part 2, I will summarize the process behind the Roles, Vision, Values, and Mission that make up the core of purpose.