Our first lesson from the Ambition to Grow Programme: Values

We are fortunate to have a place on the Ambition to Grow Programme, a mix of masterclass sessions, coaching and peer support, designed to help high growth businesses.

Funded by Leicester & Leicestershire Enterprise Partnership (LLEP) and delivered by Leicestershire Business Growth Hub, ‘Ambition to Grow’ aims to help businesses like ours identify their own unique barriers to growth and guide them through a dedicated programme of support.

The first session focused on understanding the impact of your values. It was a challenging session, starting with ‘What is your WHY?’. It’s something we challenge our clients with all the time as part of marketing and communications strategy consultancy, but rarely do we look inwards at our own vision and mission and discuss them as a team.

We were tasked with distilling our personal values, the core, internal principles by which we choose to live our lives; and then our perception of our business’ values.

Values provide our inner compass; they tell us when we go astray.  They drive our ethics, action and excellence. They can make decision making easier by asking ourselves ‘Does this align with our organisation’s values?’

We started with this list of values from Brene Brown https://brenebrown.com/resources/dare-to-lead-list-of-values/  but there are many more lists available.

As a result of this masterclass session, the Sandstar team is working through our own values and our individual perceptions of the business’ values. This will prompt a strategic discussion to get us all aligned around a common set of values and create a foundation for the business to grow.

We’ll update this blog when we’ve agreed a set of business values for Sandstar.

For more information on the LLEP Ambition to Grow programme, visit https://bizgateway.org.uk/ambition-to-grow-for-high-growth-smes/