What Even Is a Core Identity?

One of the things I offer is a Core Identity Workshop. In short, it’s an add-on to strategic planning that identifies the unique essence of your organization and leads to guiding principles that inform future decision-making.

But what even is a “Core Identity”?

It’s the ethos of your organization, the essence, the reason you do what you do, summarized into a short statement packed with implications. From it, we derive those guiding principles that shape future decisions. We also use it to effectively assess whether a project will likely succeed or not based on how congruent the two are. It informs your vision, gives practical guidance to your mission, and brings your people together under what amounts to a mantra that is easy to understand and packed with meaning.

Think of it as the reason the organization exists. It was there when the founders had a vision that drove them to start something new. It was there as the organization grew, to point the way forward in a sea of options. It’s there in every interview with new talent. It’s there with every client engagement. And it will be there as the organization changes and adapts to our evolving world.

The way we bring the “Core Identity” to the surface is by exploring the personal histories of employees and leaders in relation to the history of the organization. As stories are shared and responded to common themes arise. Then, When we have these themes in hand we distill them into that Core Identity statement.

The next step is to take that short statement packed with implications and tease out the guiding principles that will inform future decision-making. This step cannot be overlooked because when you make decisions that align with your core identity, they resonate with your employees and with all the stakeholders that have invested time, money, and loyalty. But, when decisions are made that disregard the core identity of an organization adoption will be abysmal and reception by the public will be lackluster at best.

Think about Apple. Just observing from a distance it’s clear that apple values high-quality products that keep the user experience center focus. They aren’t on the bleeding edge of technology, they are reliable. They don’t invent new components, they bring together the best parts into a beautiful user-friendly package. Every time they make a move in alignment with these values they achieve record-breaking success. When they stray from those values their users don’t buy in.

Consider education. Having spent some years working in education I found a good Core Identity statement to be,

“Equipping students to become thriving adults.”

A different approach can be summed up as

“Training tomorrow's workers for today’s industry.”

Can you see how the implications of those statements push you in very different directions and would result in very different decisions being made in educational facilities? One focuses on the student and their needs, while the other focuses on the wants of corporations and industry.

Finding your core identity and establishing those guiding principles also avoids the ‘ship of Theseus’ problem. As changes to the organization need to be made you avoid losing your organization's sense of self.

Being able to communicate your Core Identity to employees will increase employee engagement. Gallup’s State of the Workplace: 2022 report showed that only 33% of employees in the U.S. were classified as being engaged at work. Engagement can be described as ‘psychological and emotional commitment to an organization.” When employees can see that the organization's values align with their own and that their work directly contributes to the realization of those values, engagement increases.

If you want to breathe new life into your strategic plan, develop messaging that actually resonates with all your stakeholders, increase employee engagement, and streamline and standardize decision-making then it might be time to figure out your core identity. Photo by Redd F on Unsplash