What happens when you realise your path is entrepreneurship rather than employment? Lindsay takes up the challenge and shares an account of her journey as it unfolds…

Hi again – I’ve been blogging with Femflections for just over a year now and thanks to those who have been reading and sent over good vibes during that time. As you know, it’s been a tougher ride than I thought it would be so far and now I’m going to send some good vibes out back to you, whoever you are, just because I can 😊.

 If you’ve ever launched your own business, you’ll have started with some sales projections that were based on research or experience, or maybe a bit of both. I did that too, but later came to realise that with a business, like Mirror Mirror, those figures are basically fiction. Mirror Mirror is a new idea and a new approach that is moving under unique conditions that I, as the driver bring to the table.

I’m looking for the most likely target audience to buy, the best situations to get the most value, the best language and positioning to communicate. I have no clear idea who will bite and how much. So far, the reaction has been enthusiastic, curious, but slow to take hold. It hasn’t been too bad – don’t get me wrong, things are going in the right direction. But I still feel like a small torch in the dark, looking for a key I haven’t seen before – unable to predict what it looks like or when I’ll find it.

So, I hereby declare that I have let go and am now just going on blind faith. I’ve accepted that I’m just going to keep on looking, investigating, and pushing forwards in the hope that the journey is going to be worthwhile or even better, it’s going to be amazing. And it could be amazing. I instinctively know that key could open the door to an exciting and radical world of opportunity.

Here’s what I have in mind:

The problem

A notorious problem faced by leaders is strategy implementation – how to get employees to deliver to forecast. At the core of this is a crucial disconnect: leaders and employees struggle to share a clear understanding about what’s happening and what’s needed to coordinate most effectively. Assumptions, interpretations, unconscious biases, missing information, and divided attention – these are some of the factors that muddy the waters and slow progress. The pain I see in every organization I’ve worked is the waste and frustration caused by this clumsy misalignment. 

 A label in the social sciences that describes this is ‘social alignment’.  But things are complex and busy, so people being misaligned to a certain extent is just life, right?

 Wrong. With all we know in the social sciences and with technology today, we can get this organized. And it can add a TON of value.

 The solution

 The Mirror Mirror vision turns traditional employee communications on its head because it starts by capturing how employees perceive things. It combines that data to show where the alignment gaps are: essential if you want to create clarity for effective implementation. The process is rapid, practical, immediate, actionable, structured, repeatable and measurable.  

 Social alignment doesn’t stop leadership ‘messaging’, it distinguishes between the ‘framing’ (setting out the purpose and requirements per team) and ‘aligning’ (facilitating a good understanding between team members on how they can deliver within that frame).

 The Vision

 In the future ‘alignment’ is a recognised standard. Companies run Mirror Mirror across all teams annually for these benefits:

•  They get outcomes covering ‘the whole people side’: leadership engagement, teamwork and team effectiveness, the promotion of an inclusive culture – all of which lead to improvements in the employee experience, attraction and retention rates, innovation etc.   
• They save costs because the process replaces the indiscriminate use of other separately offered, related interventions, such as employee communication surveys, pulse checks, leadership engagement training, coaching, culture change initiatives, psychometric interventions, 360 feedback tools, personal skill building courses etc.
• They get diagnosis of the need for further support / tools, such as the above
• They get feedback from teams that is joined up to inform the wider organization.

 And this is the right time to start disrupting things.  Employees are becoming more and more disengaged but right now, a change is happening. The generation of leader who doesn’t behave as if there is a relevance between what their people think and feel to business outcomes (an indicator of who will buy Mirror Mirror), is being replaced by a new generation of leader who does.

There will be other people out there looking at doing this, but maybe not as well as we could do it, given half the chance.

Mirror Mirror is a rapid social alignment process that gets teams to a shared current reality: www.mirrormirrorhub.com

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