Purpose Possible Core Values: How We Show Up Everyday
Our initial values brainstorm board from our first firm retreat.
At Purpose Possible, we think a lot about how our firm shows up for our clients, our fellow team members, and our communities everyday. In 2020, before Purpose Possible was launched, our early consultants spent time establishing a set of core values to guide the purpose and vision for the firm. Since then we have revisited and refined those values every year to best reflect how we work and who we work with. Now, as a firm of over 40 consultants in nine states, our values are ever more present in our daily decision making.
Partners, Susannah, Laura, and Starsha take a moment to share more about our Four Core Values and how we practice them every day for our clients, consultants, and communities.
Client Impact
Our business is built around the clients we serve: who we hire, what we do, and how we do it. Every decision we make is based on what will make our clients feel supported, delighted, and relieved. We intentionally hire team members with deep experience working with the organizations and in the industries we serve. This allows us to have a keen understanding of the quotidian challenges of our clients and create strategies for how to overcome them. It also means that our consultant teams can empathize with the work that our clients are tackling, allowing them to better gauge how clients can prioritize the things that will have the greatest impact on their organization. We also focus on creating a space where our team can grow and thus provide consistency for our clients.
Our services continue to evolve in response to the needs of our clients. One of our main promises is that we meet clients where they are to help them grow to where they want to be. This often means having the agility to move from one type of service to another as needs change and evolve over the course of our work together. We also regularly evaluate our success rates to assess how well we are doing. Just like with the boards we work with, the process of assessing our own work with a start, stop, continue lens helps us to maintain a high level of work for our clients.
Inclusive & Empowered Team
Our team is one of parents, caregivers, pet owners, siblings, and more. These roles are valued aspects of the lives of our personnel. In building an inclusive and empowered team, we aim to create an environment that allows for flexible, digital-first work, to support all of their identities.
We also know that WHEN our team works is just as important as WHERE they work. As a digital-first firm, our team members may work from home, one of our offices, or at any other location or time that is convenient. This flexibility allows us to recruit and maintain talent from all walks of life and experience. We offer a liberal paid-time-off policy and encourage rest, especially after busy seasons, throughout the year. We observe all federal holidays and everyone’s birthday is a paid day off as well. Our nontraditional approach to where and when our staff works allows us to have a more diverse and inclusive team across the country.
We also take careful consideration to bring in diverse perspectives and specialized skill sets. Having team members that can share experiences with each other and with our clients helps to foster a sense of belonging and camaraderie. Our consultants are often members of the communities that our clients serve. Many of our team members are volunteers for community organizations and they or their children participate in local programming. The people of Purpose Possible are neighbors and friends who utilize their expertise and local landscape knowledge to impact their projects more deeply.
Innovation & Experimentation
In the nonprofit world, where we often find ourselves falling prey to a scarcity mentality, it often feels safer to continue with what has been successful in the past versus trying something new. The same is true of consultants. In the world of consulting, there are hundreds of memes mocking the fact that consultants reuse the same presentation over and over, passing Power Points on for generations. At Purpose Possible, we know better. Our clients come to us because they need something different or more than they are able to accomplish on their own. We believe that it is our job to look at what has worked well, where the organization is today, and what’s is coming down the pike, to help figure out strategies and campaigns that will keep the organization moving forward. If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that we have to be open and able to change along with a very rapidly changing environment. Within our team, we share daily via Slack, meet weekly for status updates, and check in monthly to share thoughts, brainstorm, and workshop ideas, issues, and needs for clients.
For Purpose Possible, this means we are constantly in a state of learning and evolution. Our team regularly hears the phrase “we are building the plane while we are flying it!” We are constantly building, testing, evolving, and optimizing our systems and processes to improve them. Over the past year, Purpose Possible has doubled in size and with it, many of our previous ways of working have had to shift including our internal technology systems, reporting structures, team culture, and dynamics.
Mutual Respect
This seems like a fairly straightforward value, but it shows up across the firm in a number of ways.
We want to make Purpose Possible a great place to work, where employees are proud to say they work here and where they feel valued and appreciated. To that end, last year, when the labor market came roaring back after COVID-19 layoffs, we launched a firm-wide compensation analysis and then began a process of right-sizing where necessary. In addition, while crafting an updated Employee Handbook, we studied the vacation/leave policies of companies that we admire and instituted industry-leading policies for our team. Finally, we have a very collaborative leadership style, in which our team members are consulted on key practices and decisions throughout the year.
It may surprise some to see the hashtag #noassholes on our Core Values page but think about the places where you’ve worked in the past. We’ve all been forced to put up with a co-worker or client who was truly terrible. To avoid this issue, we strive to weed out the bad apples in advance by screening and researching potential clients. Before we work with an organization we want to know if they have and abide by a non-discrimination clause and if their leadership team is reputable.