You may resist thinking of your business as a ‘brand’ – and rightly so. The term feels too shallow, too marketing-focused, for something as substantial as the organisation you’re building. But it deserves your attention: every organisation develops a personality, whether you guide it or let it happen by accident.
This personality – the unique way your organisation thinks, acts, and relates to the world – is far more valuable than any brand. It’s the living, breathing character of your enterprise that will outlast products, outlast marketing campaigns, and perhaps even outlast you as its founder.
The moment of reckoning
There comes a pivotal moment in every growing organisation’s life. You’re past the scrappy startup phase where everyone does everything and survival is the only goal. You’re employing more people than ever before, and suddenly you realise something profound: your business has developed “a life of its own.”
This is your moment of reckoning – not just operationally, but morally and culturally. Because at this crossroads, you face a choice that will define not just what your organisation does, but what it becomes.
The culture you create is your legacy
As a leader, you carry an enormous responsibility. The culture you nurture – or neglect – will shape every interaction, every decision, and every outcome your organisation produces. This isn’t about a mission statement on your wall or your company values in a handbook. It’s about the actual lived experience of everyone who encounters your organisation.
Do you believe your organisation has its own particular culture? Is there a certain way of doing things – or deliberately not doing them – that feels uniquely yours? If so, you’re already stewarding something precious: an organisational personality that could become a genuine force for good.
When purpose meets personality
This is where the magic happens. Whatever your product or service, whatever industry you’re in, you have the extraordinary opportunity to gather a community of people who can become more than the sum of their parts. Your organisation can be a place where:
- People grow beyond what they thought possible
- Problems get solved in ways that honour people’s dignity
- Success is measured not just in profits, but in positive impact
- The culture itself becomes a beacon for others
This is business as a force for good – not through grand gestures or corporate social responsibility programmes, but through the daily cultivation of an organisational personality that elevates everything and everyone it touches.
Designing your organisational character
The challenge is that most organisational personalities develop by accident. In the early days, it’s all hands to the pump – long hours, everyone pitching in, practices evolving organically. There’s no time for reflection about who you want to become.
But now you’ve reached that critical juncture. Your organisation needs intentional design, not just in its processes and roles, but in its character. You must focus on:
Clarifying not just what people do, but who they are in relation to your organisation’s purpose. This prevents the confusion of overlapping responsibilities while ensuring nothing falls through the cracks – especially the responsibility to uphold your organisational values.
Agreeing on explicit values and behavioural standards that reflect the personality you want your organisation to embody. This isn’t corporate speak; it’s about creating an attractive and nurturing environment for the right people while establishing clear expectations for how your organisation shows up in the world.
Designing processes that honour people while achieving efficiency. How work gets done should reflect your values, reduce stress, and create space for the kind of excellence that only comes when people feel genuinely supported.
The collaborative path
Don’t retreat to your office and redesign everything alone. Engage your team in this crucial work of defining who you are becoming. Facilitate conversations where people can negotiate solutions, agree on behavioural norms, and redesign processes together.
This collaborative approach does something powerful: it teaches people to think and act like owners of the organisational personality you’re all creating. They become guardians of something larger than themselves.
Your organisation’s unique contribution
As your organisation grows, the challenge is to end up with something intentional – “just the way we do things round here” – that you designed together, that reflects your deepest values, and that creates conditions for humans to flourish.
This is your organisation’s unique personality: not a brand to be marketed, but a living system to be nurtured. It’s how your business becomes more than a money-making enterprise and transforms into a force that makes the world a little better, one interaction at a time.
The personality you cultivate today will determine whether your organisation merely survives and profits, or whether it becomes the kind of place that people point to and say, “That’s how it should be done.”
What kind of organisational soul are you nurturing?