Our CEO, Ria, walks you through where we've been and how we've re-energised as a team, focusing on our mental health.
Over the years I’ve weaned myself off ‘launches’ with announcement culture which often gave us a sharp sting when the excitement fades. So the disclaimer here is: we’re not announcing anything, but sharing what we’ve been up to and where we’re headed.
It feels good to be stepping back into content again and communicating outwardly with the world! We’ve been in hibernation since November last year. I felt we’d reached a limit and hit a hilt. We were churning out fantastic content to no end and it didn’t seem to be conducive to a clear aim. Meanwhile MatriarchLtd. was booming after a year of delivering game changing racial inclusion work. There was a distinct divide between Matriarch and MatriarchLtd. and more so within the team - I was solely working on Ltd. whilst the rest of the team were on Matriarch. It was confusing, unaligned and the path ahead of us was looking unclear. Plus - I really missed working with my team!
So I took a real stock check. And like lightning in a bottle, it struck me. Bring it all together into one cohesive business, expanding the topic range of our game changing workshops to all the topics we’ve always covered at Matriarch - sex, grief, mental health - the list goes on. Meanwhile we continue to produce excellent, game changing content which goes hand in hand with our sessions. It was clear as day. So I pitched it to the team, sat them all down and gave them the vision with a theoretical framework I’d designed to support it (read here).
As always, I found myself astonished at the support and belief my team trusted me with. Some parts of the pitch weren’t entirely clear, I couldn’t answer all their questions. A lot of it has been a ‘figure it out along the way’ approach. But the direction with which we’re now all operating with is astonishing. We took our time to figure out our strategy - what we want to do and how we want to do it and now we’re channeling all our energy into one clear goal:
to disrupt the education industry.
I speak for our team when I tell you we feel entirely re-energised. It felt like a risk, especially as a leader, to step back and take time to reassess, particularly when our normal environment to function in is social media. It creates this constant ticking time clock to create, post, engage and stay relevant. But I believe those few months have not only been crucial to realign ourselves, but also for our mental health. We were getting pretty burnt out, we were understaffed and creating with very little feedback or retention. That’s a sticky formula. Giving everyone that time to just sit back a bit had breathed a new energy into the team. And even going into January, I learnt a valuable lesson as a leader.
I expected everyone else to jump into the January new energy with me - and that simply wasn’t the case. Some people weren’t ready, some had new jobs and some were still adjusting to the new path we were headed down. I learnt that me storming in with go getter energy needed to read the room a little more. So I stepped back and just listened to my team, gave them the time they needed and it was the best decision I made in a long time. By giving them a few more weeks, some a month or so, to get their motivation back, rest up, wrap their heads round it and find capacity again, I didn’t have to put so much energy into the external motivation. Huge and valuable lesson learnt.
That feels like the key part of the last 6 months I want to highlight. Leaning in and listening to what my team needed, what I needed was crucial and has ultimately led to far more creativity and engagement than I could’ve ever expected.
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