This is a tale of when two projects collide. Ever have a lucky intersection, where work on one project informs another? My YES! moment of the week came on the heels of a really rewarding session of facilitation.
Recently Jason, Leigh (two of my SmallBoxer team mates) and I had the great honor of leading a strategic session with Growing Places Indy, a small nonprofit doing great things in urban agriculture and sustainability.
We hung out with their board and staff for the better part of a day, working through exercises and conversations that will lead to a three year strategic plan for the organization. We covered a lot of stuff, but perhaps the most meaty – we sank our teeth into organizational values. We use a few sources as inspiration for this work, including two highly recommended books, The Advantage and Tribal Leadership.
Back in the office, I’ve also been tasked with rethinking how we set individual goals and support the professional development of each team member. A couple of days after our Growing Places session, I happened to have a few monthly check-ins with some members of our team. It got me thinking:
How do we live our core values through our individual roles? (For SmallBox, our core values are collaboration, curiosity and growth.) And how can we each use our personal values to complement that?
And then that YES! moment. We all have personal values, but we haven’t shared them with each other, much less considered how to leverage them for individual and group professional development. In Lencioni’s model from the Advantage, he defines different types of values – permission to play are baseline values, aspirational values are things you strive for, but haven’t yet begun to live, while accidental values are those for which you didn’t plan. Are their various kinds of personal values that might be channeled to improve our work?
With this mash up of value soup sloshing in my head – everything we’d done with Growing Places and my conversations with the team, I couldn’t help but think about leadership values. When it comes to leading, how do I want to behave?
Two things came very clearly to me:
When you balance deep empathy with high standards, you can lead people nearly anywhere.
Leading is something I still earn and grow into. With a team full of so many bright minds, the right to lead at a company like SmallBox is an honor. Everyone on our team, from the interns, up to the CEO is a leader among us. We all lead at one turn, follow at the next. A third core leading value emerged from this line of thought: flexibility.
When I say flexibility, I especially mean openness to sometimes follow, so that others may be empowered by leading and to recognize that everyone has different communication and work styles and may need a unique approach to further their professional development. This aligns closely with one of the greater lessons I’ve learned in leading teams: everyone can be reached. It’s just a matter of finding how.