Because people matter…

One of the most common questions we are asked when we meet people is -“so tell me more about what you do?”

 

When we first started tendevelopment this question would be the signal for either of us, sometimes even both of us, to launch into a passionate explanation of all the things we could offer and all the things we had done.

 

Sometimes we impressed and patted ourselves on the back for a job well done, other times when less successful we could come up with a host of reasons why it hadn’t worked on that occasion. Interestingly and very encouragingly, much of our work is with a group of clients who work with us multiple times and appear to love what we do.

 

So why does how we express what we do, work for some and not for others? It would be very easy to just say well everyone’s different (and actually we do believe this is true) or we’re just not “their cup of tea”, but we recently came across a TED talk that gave us insight into a very different strategy we could use and one that really resonated for us.

 

Now we should mention this is not a new TED talk and some of you will probably already have seen it, but for us it gave us one of those real lightbulb moments.

 

The speaker is Simon Sinek and he talks about people been much more likely to make a decision based on shared beliefs than pure logic, simply because the biological fact is that our decision making ability sits firmly in the emotional part of our brain. It is the ability to connect with others by beliefs that truly inspires people. On the face of it not a new concept, we grant you, but what Simon does is take to the next level and talks about how you communicate those beliefs in order to buy people in, using some brilliant real life examples to illustrate his point.

 

We won’t attempt to recreate his words here, as he is far more adept at explaining his thoughts, so we have included a link to his video above – we promise you it’s worth a watch if you haven’t seen it before!

 

However we will say, in short he tells people to stop simply talking about what you do but stop and think about why you are doing it. As a business, he encourages you to change your mind-set – “your goal is not to do business with people who want what you do, but with people who believe the same as you”. It was this point that really hit us. Why were we talking about all the things we do, when we should be talking about why we do what we do and what we believe in that makes us want to do it.

 

Actually when we did stop to think about it this way round it was really easy – we do what we do because people matter!

 

How people feel, how they are treated and how they are led by others, all matter to us.

 

So the next time someone asks you what you do, before you answer just have a think about why you do it, it might just completely change your answer as it has for us. Enjoy the talk!