Three Essentials to Thriving as a 21st Century Organization
As a millennial, living now in a 21st century world, I feel so lucky to have had the opportunity to work in various capacities at several companies throughout my young career. Each has taught me such important lessons about the current state and the future of work. Being exposed to different team dynamics with distinct cultures and operational frameworks taught me that if any company is to thrive in the “post-COVID” world, it must know how to truly create, embody and adhere to the following three principles:
Core Values that Create a Collective Sense of Purpose – Thriving companies create the space for teams and employees to tangibly and concretely reflect on the set of core values that drive the company and its overall mission forward.
Generative Leadership – Thriving companies have leadership that leads with openness to growth and vulnerability, with a mindset of taking continual courageous action that fosters an integrated growth mindset.
Connectedness Through Co-Creation – Thriving companies enable a culture where generative thinking is encouraged across teams, and employees are recognized for their agency in building the company and generating its results.
I am fortunate to experience these principles as a member of the LINC team, an incredibly mission-driven virtual company that has been supporting educators in building the 21st century skills required to foster effective and student-centered classrooms. This has been pivotal in the current rapid shift to remote teaching and learning in the COVID-19 era through LINCpring, our powerful online coaching and professional learning platform.
In this first piece of my 3-part series, I will be discussing the first of these essential principles. Stay tuned for the next installment coming soon.
Core Values: More than Practicing What You Preach
Core values should drive the mission, not the other way around. To make this a reality, it is essential for leadership to create spaces for purposefully reflecting on core values as individuals and as teams. This is what ultimately creates the collective sense of purpose among all team members that drive a company forward, as it allows employees to concretely see how they contribute to the company’s mission.
Prior to joining the LINC team, I worked at several different types of companies including NGOs, public, private, and international institutions, all with distinct corporate cultures and all with fancy mission statements. Unfortunately, these mission statements rarely reflected the true operational nature of the company and did more to make me question the validity and congruence of our collective actions and team dynamics against the fluffy, dare I say, aspirational values. These mission statements would often get mentioned at the company onboarding sessions, yet then were tossed aside, only to be occasionally referenced at big team meetings as a relevant yet distant, blurry, and squinty-eyed memory.
This is precisely what did not work. Ultimately, my personal disconnect with the missions of these organizations stemmed from my profound sense of disconnect with how my personal actions (that is my day-to-day tasks and goals) were contributing to the company’s core values themselves. To drive this point home, in her recent Podcast “Together Apart,” Priya Parker, author and conflict facilitator, reflects on how the ways we gather impact our sense of self and our sense of belonging. She asserts that every gathering is a “social x-ray” of the sort that sheds light on what we deem important. She also highlights that gatherings of all types are simply expressions of our collective values, but that all too often, we do not pause to ask “does this form match our values and our current needs?” Her wisdom lent clarity on the fact that how we communicate, gather, and connect is the most important in creating a sense of cohesion and togetherness that allows teams and people to feel that they belong and that their contributions truly matter. With this, it became clear to me that true 21st century companies that know how to create this sense of belonging in their teams are the ones that most effectively drive their mission forward and are the best equipped to thrive, retain and maintain employees that are invested in and passionate about contributing to the company’s goals.
It’s been so incredible to feel and experience this first hand with LINC. Unlike most companies, LINC has made it a point to reflect on our core values at most team meetings, using our monthly meetings as an opportunity to engage in active reflection around what was accomplished in the month and how the work contributed to our values of Trust, Risk, Agency, Collaboration, and Equity. Other examples of how our core values are central to our work and how we operate include:
Processes – LINC has actively engaged in many conversations around how our company processes reflect our values, creating annual performance review structures, for example, that foster a focus on reflection of employee’s contributions against our values rather than constrictive evaluations to set performance standards that more often foster fixed-mindset and frustration.
Collaboration – The LINC team determines and re-evaluates our core values TOGETHER through team exercises at our annual team meetings, through iterative processes that distill what we collectively think is important to us as a team and our work.
Agency – Leaders and employees are all encouraged to take agency to request and provide feedback or accolades to other team members in the context of our values, meaning when something is done well, team members are usually recognized for exemplifying that core value.
LINC core values have even shown up in the way that our coaching team works with clients. Most recently I had the opportunity to see my colleagues in action and I witnessed how the content and messaging delivered to teachers during remote sessions exemplified our own lived values of:
Trust – We engage authentically with teachers, actively listening for what’s important to them on calls, supporting and responding to their needs with expert personalized care and attention through our PD platform LINCspring.
Risk – We took on the risk of shifting our in-person workshops to remote coaching and reformulated our content rapidly to deliver customized support for schools and teachers engaging in remote learning.
Equity – We instill calmness in the new remote structure through our sessions, by enabling teachers to experience first hand the same tools and virtual teaching strategies that they could use in their classrooms, allowing them to engage all students and therefore create more equitable education and learning environments.
Our actions with respect to our core values at LINC show that it is more than practicing what you preach; it’s about living the values, instilling them from the inside out. It’s true what they say, “How you do anything is how you do everything”.
The steps that LINC has taken to live out our values as a team has been a carefully crafted process of intention and meaning. By purposefully creating the structures to collectively reflect on the company values, more spaces were organically opened up for individual team members to feel connected, contribute, and engage in driving the company mission forward. If a company is to thrive in this new world, they must carefully think through and create structures that fit and reflect their lived company culture, needs, and offerings. It’s important to highlight that this process of creating these spaces will be different for every company but reflection is the SPARK, the key starting place to begin creating a generative team culture where people feel a sense of belonging and, as a result, align themselves to live the company values outwardly within their team, with clients, and in the world.
I’d love to hear your feedback or ideas about how organizations can create a sense of purpose through their collective actions and core values. Find me on Twitter (@NatMCasanova). I look forward to connecting!
