“I am the soul that lives within…”

by Lionesses of Africa Operations Department

And so with little or no fanfare, December ’22 arrives. Where did the year go, indeed where did the last 2 years go from early 2020 when we had to look on a map to find this new place Wuhan, to now, Covid; PPE issues; the Ever Given ship that blocked the Suez; Supply Chain issues; a war; grain, sunflower oil and gas problems; to inflation and interest rates rising, all having been deep in our lives for the past 24 months. We could be forgiven for just finding a calm corner of our warehouse and falling asleep for a month in an effort to regain some energy for the battles ahead in 2023.

For those of you who are like the singer Michael Bublé, where you spend all year planning for December, your big selling month, please file this article and read when the dust has settled in January. For those with a calmer, more even year, and who can find the time to head down to the coast, or if you live in South Africa, ’Plet’ (Plettenberg Bay, a beach town where the entire Johannesburg business community retreats for a month over Christmas), this is a great time to reflect and check where you are.

What is the most important part of your business that may have gone astray during this last two year hectic period? Given what we have gone through, don’t be too hard on yourself, you can be forgiven for one or two plates that you are spinning going a bit off balance… Interestingly, the area that is most likely to have started to wobble is your ‘Why’. Why you do what you do. As Simon Sinek has shown us: Everyone knows ‘What’ they do - you certainly do. Most people know ‘How’ they do it, you probably do, but very few people know ‘Why’ they do what they do.

This ‘Why’ is intangible, difficult to see when it stops spinning. A panic, or even just orders piling up, or supply chain stuck in port due to a dockers’ strike etc, and corners get cut, our ‘Why’ gets blurred. It takes a strong will to refuse to err off course in these conditions that we have seen, to instead stay true to our ‘Why’.

Ask yourself, am I starting to lose my passion, or have I already lost my passion? If you are reading this from some dark corner of your warehouse with a duvet wrapped around you, we think the answer is clear… In front of others, are you like a Duck, looking so calm and serene on the top of the water, but underneath where no one can see, you are paddling like crazy just to stay still?

This loss of passion or feeling of frantic underwater effort may be your subconsciousness telling you that you have lost your ‘Why’. In Simon Sinek’s great book ‘Start with Why’ (here) he points out that when businesses lose their ‘Why’ this can spiral down. He uses the example of Walmart.

“To [Sam] Walton, the inspiration came not simply from customer service but from service itself. Wal-Mart was WHAT Walton built to serve his fellow human beings. To serve the community, to serve employees and to serve customers. Service was a higher cause.”

When Walton died this ‘Why’ died with him and Walmart became all about low prices.

“Wal-Mart slowly started to confuse WHY it existed—to serve people—with HOW it did business—to offer low prices. They traded the inspiring cause of serving people for a manipulation. They forgot Walton's WHY and their driving motivation became all about ‘cheap’.”

From being a company intertwined with its communities, it became one of the “…most vilified companies in recent history.”

As Simon states: "For great leaders, The Golden Circle is in balance. They are in pursuit of WHY, they hold themselves accountable to HOW they do it and WHAT they do serves as the tangible proof of what they believe. But most of us, unfortunately, reach a place where WHAT we are doing and WHY we are doing it eventually fall out of balance. We get to a point when WHY and WHAT are not aligned. It is the separation of the tangible and the intangible that marks the split.”

Take this time over the holiday period (again, sorry for all the Lioness Michael Bublés out there - you have January for this!) to really look back at your ‘Why’. Check that this is still what drives your business and your passion. This is the soul of your business, and without it, as with Walmart, the business will lose its way. Once you have re-discovered it, ensure that all within your business knows what it is as well. Simon calls this his ‘School Bus Test’, we have often written about a No.32 London Bus, it is the same (but without children) - if that hits you as you walk down the High Street in Lagos, or in Nairobi and you suddenly go to meet your maker - ask yourself the question, “Will your business survive?” Perhaps. But will it thrive? Possibly. But if your employees that you have just left behind, do not know, understand and believe in your ‘Why’, then thriving is very unlikely - certainly not in the way you imagined it. Sam Walton for example, never had teams of lawyers to fight off the next lawsuit, that’s for sure.

Your business has tangibles - your ‘What’ and ‘How’, but it is your intangible, your ‘Why’, your Soul, that is what drives you, gets you up each morning and feeds your passion.

This month take a moment for yourself, for your business, and go back to your ‘Why’, really find it again. Really drill down through your questions until you find that core. As with ourselves, it is not what is on the outside, our house, our car, our clothes, our hair, our skin, but what is within - that is what counts, each and every time. It counts in ourselves and it sure counts in our businesses. Never lose sight of that.

To give you inspiration to move from the warehouse corner - here is the incredible India.Arie and her song - I Am Not My Hair (see here).

“I am not my hair,

I am not this skin,

I am not your expectations.

…I am the soul that lives within.”

Stay safe.