Each piece of your brand’s ethos must be genuine in order to be effective. Your values must reflect your goal, and your vision must be a moonshot that connects with your team, consumers, and, maybe most significantly, you as the creator. A real ethos cannot teach or imitated. It has to come from the individuals who are constructing your firm (sounds painful, I know).
The visioning workshop can help with that. A visioning workshop brings together important members of your team in a room to explore your shared motivations, inspirations, and goals. A collaborative, creative process brings to light the ideas that are most important to your brand and business.
This is how you do it: Allow the founder or CEO to lead this process to emphasize the importance of the task. An outside facilitator can help keep things on track, but if money is tight, the entire session can be done on your own.
Skipping ethos work is an expensive error that results in a disconnected and rudderless brand, which has a direct and negative influence on the company’s development potential. Select five to six stakeholders for the working group, ensuring a diverse range of viewpoints in the room. Department heads and members of the original team are likely to be included in most early-stage organizations. This group will be in charge of doing the majority of the heavy work and offering ideas from their various fields.
Then, convene the team for at least a four-hour session (ideally off-site to avoid distractions) to participate in a series of activities, both individually and as a group. Encourage note-taking and make extensive use of a whiteboard (snap images of the board as you go). You might even want to videotape the session so you can go back to it later. These activities should be creative in nature, and the outcomes will be used to spark discussions and find trends.
This one is wonderful to start with since it is deceivingly difficult and tends to stimulate constructive discourse. Allow 10 minutes for each team member to complete the two phrases below. Responses should be brief, with a total length of fewer than 10 words. Then, for 20-30 minutes, share your thoughts and debate them as a group. The goal of this activity is twofold: The first sentence aids in determining your company’s mission, which is the everyday focus of your workforce. The second term aids in the development of your company’s vision, which is its direction and purpose.
