In The Power of Regret, Daniel Pink’s latest book, regret is described as ‘a healthy, universal emotion that, when properly managed, improves decision-making, performance, and life meaning’.

I agree with Daniel’s philosophy and think it’s healthy to evaluate our regrets, not to beat ourselves up but to learn from them and take action to ensure we minimise these regrets going forward.

The corporate world was my professional home for over 25 years and as much as I loved it, I always knew that one day I would leave to focus solely on my entrepreneur work. These thoughts were kept to the back of my mind, mostly out of fear that one day I might actually have to do it!

That one day arrived on 21st October 2021, I left the corporate world and don’t ever plan on returning. Daniel’s book The Power of Regret made me think about what I regretted from my time in the corporate world that I didn’t want to bring into my new world as a full time entrepreneur.

It didn’t take me long to come up with the fact that I wished I had ‘done less and communicated more’.  

As a Lean practitioner, communication was a big part of my role yet I didn’t communicate enough – I didn’t communicate enough to the depth or detail that I could have. 

I didn’t communicate enough about,

🌟 the power of a Lean culture.

🌟 the reasons behind the Lean tools we used.

🌟 the complexity of the Lean systems we had built.

🌟 the problems that were solved and avoided by our Lean culture, systems and tools.

🌟 the enormous amount of infrastructure and work it took to maintain the Lean systems we had built.

⭐️ the autonomy and growth that Lean in all it’s brilliance provided to our people and how Lean enriched their professional and personal lives. 

The above shortfalls in communication came with a price.

One price was that the benefits of the Lean culture we built were never fully realised.

Another price was that I seemed to be always fighting,

🙄 fighting for the development of people to be prioritised over ‘making the metrics’.

🙄 fighting for a better way of working, thinking, learning and creating a better respect for people.

🙄 fighting to showcase how Lean could develop our people to solve so many of the problems we experienced on a daily basis.

It seemed to be a constant uphill struggle against the status quo and the culture of the corporate world. If you’ve spent any time in the corporate world, you’ll know what I mean by this – the same ‘large company’ culture problems exist in most large organisations

This constant struggle left me feeling undervalued and underutilised.

The dreaded 8th Lean waste of underutilising human potential had become my reality. As a Lean practitioner, how could I value and develop people when I myself didn’t feel valued and wasn’t developing to my potential?

This pattern repeated in every job where I practised Lean.

Every time I had this realisation was the moment I made the decision to leave the job. The last time I had this realisation, it wasn’t just the job I was leaving, it was the corporate world.

My regrets in terms of ‘doing too much and not communicating enough’ have given me a road map my full time entrepreneur journey.

I can sum up this entire roadmap by saying I will ‘do less and communicate more’ – this is a bit vague yet it’s where I am and every journey starts from where we currently are.

Communication in the corporate world meant communication to team members, managers, all levels of leadership, customers and stakeholders.

Communication in the entrepreneur world is vastly different – I’ve decided on two streams of communication that I will focus on – communication to myself and communication to others.

🌟 Communication to myself

As an entrepreneur, there are no team members, no managers, no levels of leadership and no stakeholders. I am all of these roles and so communication with myself is important. 

One form of communicating with ourselves is through daily journalling. Daily journalling is a big part of my life, it keeps me grounded and stable in a unstable world. When I am busy or under pressure, this is the first thing that gets dropped from my life yet ironically is what I need the most.

I often think if I could master my daily journalling habit that the rest of my life would just fall into place – the optimist in me finds some truth in this!

🌟 Communication to others

As I now play all of the roles of team members, managers, leadership and stakeholders, the only form of communication I need to do is with my customers, my community and my network.

This requires creating a communication strategy which is going to the top of my ‘to do’ list!

There is much work to do! 

• What’s your biggest professional regret?

• Have you evaluated the price you paid for this regret?

• Are you turning your regret into learnings and actions? 

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Thanks for reading 🙏

Siobhain

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