Conscious Company Magazine | Issue 14 | July/August 2017

LINKEDIN’S SECRETS TO GREAT WORKPLACE CULTURE

CONSCIOUS COM PAN Y

1ST ANNUAL

CONSCIOUS LEADERS AWARDS

9BUSINESS COMMUNITY

HEROES HOW TO FIND THE RIGHT JOB DEAL WITH TRICKY COWORKERS

ALFA DEMMELLASH

STAY HEALTHY AS AN ENTREPRENEUR

Reinventing America from the Ground Up

LEADERSHIP | WORKPLACE | SUSTAINABILITY | ENTREPRENEURSHIP

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

7

SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP

2017 CONSCIOUS LEADERS AWARDS*

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22

FIVE MYTHS ABOUT CONSCIOUS LEADERSHIP

BY TINA YOUNG

INTERVIEW: HABIT’S NEIL GRIMMER ON STAYING HEALTHY*

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26

IS YOUR JOB A GOOD FIT?*

BY MOE CARRICK

FIVE BUSINESSES ADDRESSING BARRIERS TO EMPLOYMENT*

*Cover Story

GLOBAL IMPACT

WORKPLACE CULTURE

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USING BUSINESS AS A FORCE OF HEALING

BY GERRY VALENTINE

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INTERVIEW: RISING TIDE CAPITAL’S ALFA DEMMELLASH*

46

THE LIFE CYCLE OF AN INDUSTRY COALITION

BY DAVID BRODWIN

SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS PRACTICES

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INTERVIEW: HOW BI-RITE OWNER SAM MOGANNAM BUILDS COMMUNITY*

60

CREATE BETTER EMPLOYEE VOLUNTEER PROGRAMS

BY KRISTEN CARLSON AND FLIP BROWN

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HOW TO BUILD MEANINGFUL, EFFECTIVE TEAMS

BY MINA LEE

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INTERVIEW: PAT WADORS, LINKEDIN’S HEAD OF TALENT*

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WHAT TO DO IF YOUR COWORKERS AREN’T FITTING IN*

BY JESSICA HARTUNG

FOUNDER’S NOTE July / August 2017 | Issue 14 The Conscious Company Magazine Team EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Rachel Zurer CO-FOUNDER Meghan French Dunbar CO-FOUNDER Maren Keeley CHIEF EXPANSION OFFICER Aaron P. Kahlow CHIEF COMMUNITY OFFICER Kate Herrmann ART DIRECTOR Cia Lindgren CHIEF CULTURE OFFICER Amber Lee Eckert COPY EDITORS Robin Dickerhoof Shane Gassaway WEBSITE GURU Rolando Garcia TRANSCRIPTIONIST Carla Faraldo NEWSSTAND CONSULTANT Curtis Circulation Company PRINTING Publication Printers COVER PHOTO Tru Ferguson Photography GENERAL INQUIRIES info@consciouscomag.com SUBSCRIBE ONLINE consciouscompanymedia.com/subscribe

I was recently walking around Detroit with my teammate Kate

when she asked me if I knew what made Motown so successful.

You see, in the ’60s, Motown produced 79 top-ten Billboard Hot 100 hits by iconic artists such as Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, and Smokey Robinson — from the humble basement of a house not far away. Kate explained that Motown thrived thanks to a combination of two critical factors: economic opportunity and community. Detroit’s auto industry jobs allowed individuals to meet their basic needs, which laid a critical foundation for creativity. But the secret sauce to Motown’s success was the way that economic opportunity coupled with the community of artists created by the Motown label and the city of Detroit.

This insight has me reflecting on our workplaces. I think it’s safe to say that the majority of people in the workforce hold their job because of the economic opportunity it provides. However, similarly to Motown, it’s when we’re able to add the second layer — community and belonging — into our workplaces that individuals and companies truly begin the thrive.

Our cover person, Alfa Demmellash, had a similar realization while visiting Rwanda after the genocide there: people can do terrible things when they don’t have access to economic opportunity. However, when provided access to economic security and community, humans can do incredible things. That combination of community and opportunity is what she’s on a mission to spread with her team at Rising Tide Capital (see page 36). In fact, she’s so dedicated to the idea of teamwork and community, she even tried to convince us to feature her husband and co-founder on the cover with her. “No one does this alone,” she told us.

We agree that teamwork and a sense of belonging are central to what business, at its best, can create. So, with this issue, we explored community — from celebrating those in the movement who are walking the talk (page 7) to tips on coalition building (page 46) to interviews with community-focused leaders (pages 50 and 70), and much, much more.

We also know we would not be here without our community (read: you). So thank you for being a part of it, and for all you do.

As you absorb this issue, we invite you to reflect on what your community means to you and how you could add even more value to it moving forward.

With gratitude, Meghan French Dunbar Conscious Company co-founder

WRITER’S GUIDELINES consciouscompanymedia.com/pages/submit-a-story ADVERTISING advertise@consciouscomag.com PHONE 844.522.4768 www.consciouscompanymedia.com facebook.com/ConsciousCoMag Follow us @ConsciousCoMag

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CONSCIOUS LEADERS AWARDS 2017

MEET SEVEN OF THE CONSCIOUS BUSINESS MOVEMENT’S

MOST INSPIRING TRAILBLAZERS

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

WHY WE CREATED THIS AWARD

THE PROCESS

The conscious business movement is full of incredible people. Every day, we here at Conscious Company meet and hear about more dedicated, hard-working pioneers cutting paths toward new ways of practicing business, new ways of relating to one another, new ways of making meaning of our lives. And, as we also hear, it turns out that shaking off centuries of conventional wisdom about money, labor, economics, leadership, and more can be hard, grinding, and even lonely.

That’s why it’s so important that we pause at times to take stock along the journey, not just to reorient and recharge for the long march ahead, but to celebrate and recognize how far we’ve already come, what we’ve already accomplished. It’s tempting to think of “celebrating” as a party, a surge of (perhaps forced) positive energy, with cake, confetti, champagne. And of course, parties are great. But we recently learned of another way to think about celebration: as an integrative pause that honors all the effort, struggle, and growth that led to the moment of victory or triumph.

It’s a savoring of all we had to be, do, let go of, and become to get to right here, right now. It’s that pause, the theory goes, that reflection, that lets us truly grow and absorb and move forward in a new way.

We’re not always good at taking and creating these moments for ourselves. Sometimes it takes an outside force — like, say, an award from our community — to remind us to do so. Building that moment for some of the most deserving and inspirational figures in our sphere was our goal as we decided to create the Conscious Leaders Awards this winter. We also hoped to elevate and recognize both well-known and unsung role models for the rest of us to turn to throughout the coming year and beyond.

THE JUDGES Ben Anderson, chief B keeper, B Lab

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Once we had the idea for the awards, we proceeded in typical startup style: at high speed and with a faith that we’d learn whatever we needed to along the way. We recruited a team of top-notch judges (see below) to lend their opinions: 14 experts, including our two co-founders, with diverse vantage points on the conscious business landscape. We sketched our criteria and a process. We sent out the call and opened nominations.

Then everything got messy.

It turns out collecting the right information about every possibly awardee and then sifting through and weighing and judging them all against each other is, well, hard. The process brought up dozens of complications we hadn’t foreseen, as we evaluated close to 150 nominations. Some people were in the pool more than once. Some nominators wrote tomes in praise of the candidate, others haikus. The businesses these leaders run range from global powerhouses to one-person nonprofits. And so on. Each stage of the process took longer than we expected, while print magazine deadlines loomed.

Fundamentally, the challenge was that there are truly so many deserving people in this movement, and we hadn’t been terribly precise about what we were looking for in a “winner.”

So, also in true startup style, as the complications emerged, we began to evolve our strategy. We had our judges narrow down the initial pool, then rank their top finalists in three separate categories of accomplishment: personal journey, conscious workplace, and global impact (see right). That’s where the “judges’ picks” came from.

We also realized that our own team had the clearest idea of what we meant by each of those award categories, so we did a round of internal voting on a re-sorted pool of finalists in order to land on our “editors’ picks.” And we noticed that some of the top heroes of the movement hadn’t ended up in the original pool of nominees, so we also asked the judges themselves to nominate their picks for a new lifetime achievement category.

In addition to the Conscious Company editorial staff, our panel of expert judges included:

David Brodwin, VP Ryan Cabinte, Pamela Chaloult, and co-founder, senior faculty, chief opportunity American Presidio Graduate officer, BALLE Sustainable School Business Council (ASBC)

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Lori Darley, Meghan CEO and founder, French Dunbar, Conscious Leaders co-founder, Conscious Company Media

Andrew Hewitt, founder, GameChangers 500

THE CATEGORIES

THE AWARDEES In the end, what emerged from this year’s experiment was a cohort of seven amazing awardees we feel thrilled to stand behind. It’s with humility that we acknowledge that this list could have gone many other ways, that there’s not just one right answer or one set of “winners” in the “competition” of conscious business — that’s the kind of thinking we’re all trying to get beyond. And yet: holy cow, these leaders! Many have appeared in our pages before; others we’re already planning future stories about. All have accomplished so much, for the benefit of so many stakeholders.

Read on to learn about their achievements. Then, wherever you are, please join us in raising a real or virtual glass and taking a moment to savor and celebrate their work — and hopefully get inspired to new heights in your own. Cheers!

Maren Keeley, co-founder, Conscious Company Media

Scott Kriens, founder, 1440 Multiversity

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LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT In recognition of one exceptional role model who has demonstrated leadership in personal journey, conscious workplace, and global impact over a number of years.

PERSONAL JOURNEY

This category recognizes leaders who have demonstrated exceptional commitment to cultivating authenticity, transparency, and vulnerability. We especially considered evidence of a significant transformation.

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CONSCIOUS WORKPLACE In recognition of leaders who have created an exceptional workplace environment where others can thrive. We especially considered leaders’ commitment to fostering health, wellness, quality of life, and work–life balance for their organization.

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Mike Rowlands, president and CEO, Junxion Strategy

Yanik Silver, founder, Maverick1000

GLOBAL IMPACT

This category recognizes leaders whose work has had an exceptional impact on solving problems related to human rights, the environment, income inequality, or other social issues in their local community or the world at large.

Cory Smith, co-founder and CEO, Wisdom Labs

Paul Thallner, partner, Great Place to Work

Gerry Valentine, founder, Vision Executive Coaching

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

01

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT

EILEEN FISHER, FOUNDER AND CEO OF EILEEN FISHER INC. Designer Eileen Fisher makes comfortable, stylish, sustainable clothes for women. She also “embodies conscious leadership, humility, and an unwavering commitment to doing what’s best for all life,” as one of our judges puts it. Under her leadership, her namesake fashion brand has become a standout in its dedication to environmental and social sustainability. Its achievements include sourcing mainly organic ingredients, a take-back and upcycling program for used clothes, and more.

“Eileen is a rare breed of leader who seems to be able to check all of the boxes of personal, workplace, and global consciousness,” says another judge. “Her aspirations to create the most sustainable fashion brand in the world by 2020, her support of female entrepreneurs, and the amazing culture that she has created at Eileen Fisher are all examples. Building on those, Eileen is a truly authentic leader and is willing to be vulnerable, is willing to listen to everyone, and brings the feminine into her leadership in a really powerful way.” >> FISHER’S BEST LEADERSHIP ADVICE

“I think listening is a really important aspect of leadership. In meetings, I always prefer to hold my thoughts until the end and give enough space to the knowledge in the room. I find I learn so much, and it gives others confidence knowing I really value what they have to say.” >> FISHER’S ADVICE ON CULTIVATING HIGHPERFORMING TEAMS

“Our teams meet in circles. We check in and ensure that every point of view is expressed. We also do a moment of silence before most meetings, which allows us to get centered and bring our whole selves to the work. In addition, we try to support our employees with wellness and education programs, personal growth opportunities, and flexible work arrangements. I think we build stronger relationships within companies — and we do better work — when our employees are growing as people and when they feel cared for and are encouraged to pause and take time for themselves.”

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PERSONAL JOURNEY

JUDGES’ CHOICE: SHERYL O’LOUGHLIN, CEO OF REBBL After a stint as CEO of Clif Bar and Company, where she doubled its gross revenue and operationalized its sustainability principles, Sheryl O’Loughlin co-founded baby-food startup Plum Organics, raised $30 million in capital in three years, and led the acquisition of two small brands before Plum was successfully sold to the Campbell Soup Company. Meanwhile, O’Loughlin herself battled depression and a serious bout of anorexia that took her away from the business world — permanently, she thought. Once she recovered, though, she not only accepted a position at the helm of REBBL, which sells herbal beverages to help fund efforts to eradicate human trafficking, she wrote a book about her personal experiences.

“Sheryl realized the need to unveil the truth behind the hurdles that come with entrepreneurship so that entrepreneurs could get the help and support they need to lead healthier lives,” writes REBBL community manager Rachel Hauser in O’Loughlin’s nomination. “Her book ‘Killing It! An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Keeping Your Head Without Losing Your Heart’ became a platform on which she could start those deeper, often difficult conversations with her team and this community of entrepreneurs. With this as a backdrop, it has opened deep, meaningful conversations at REBBL, and not just with our team but also with our board.”

It’s this ongoing and courageous vulnerability, along with O’Loughlin’s compassionate, loving leadership style and commitment to growth and sticking by her values that earned her our judges’ choice award for her personal leadership journey.

>> O’LOUGHLIN’S BEST LEADERSHIP ADVICE

“Always lead from a place of love.”

EDITORS’ PICK: JAMES RUDER, OWNER OF L&R PALLET James Ruder owns a Denver-based pallet manufacturing company. He ran it like a typical manufacturing business until 2013, when he found God and decided that “loving on people,” including his employees, was his mission in life. Around the same time, he started hiring refugees and found himself investing deeply in changing his business to create a supportive culture for them, including totally redesigning training, hosting English classes on site, and hiring staff to help them deal with challenges (including outside of work, like spraying for bedbugs when landlords wouldn’t).

He’s now becoming an unconventional voice of the conscious business movement within his manufacturing and trade world, as other businesses admire and are starting to try to replicate his example of leadership and workplace culture.

Ruder’s transformation as a leader involved first reinventing himself, then reinventing his company. After profiling him for the May/June 2017 issue, our team agreed that his journey is truly worth celebrating, especially as a demonstration that there are many paths to a conscious workplace and room for all faiths along the way. >> RUDER’S BEST LEADERSHIP ADVICE

“Consider the responsibility that comes with providing employment to others. Business owners have an opportunity to impact everyone through their leadership either positively or negatively, as workers are a captive audience for 40 hours each week — enough time to demonstrate what love, family, and purpose looks like to someone who needs a place to belong.”

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

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CONSCIOUS WORKPLACE

JUDGES’ CHOICE: DAVID BRONNER, CEO OF DR. BRONNER’S

Under the leadership of David Bronner and his brother Michael, this natural soap brand has grown from $4 million in annual revenue in 1998 to $106 million in 2016. Dr. Bronner’s is a family business to the core and considers all who work for the company to be extended family. The total compensation of the highest-paid employees and executives is capped at five times that of the lowest-paid position. Employees receive 15 percent of their salary paid annually into a retirement/profit-sharing plan and up to 25 percent of their salary as a bonus, and the company covers 100 percent of the cost of health insurance. In addition, the company has advocated for higher minimum wage in several states. “David is the epitome of a conscious leader whose deeply held values are in full alignment with all facets of his life,” says Bruce Friedrich, executive director at the Good Food Institute, who nominated Bronner. “His personal commitment to the extended family that is Dr. Bronner’s is a constant inspiration to me.” >> BRONNER’S ADVICE ON CULTIVATING HIGH-PERFORMING TEAMS

“The constant stream of real-world projects — whether in our own supply chain; operations, sales, and marketing efforts; or in external political campaigns, causes, and impact investments — provides the training ground and learning experience that’s most benefited our staff and team performance. Anywhere stakes are high, the need is great; our individual and collective efforts make a real impact and difference, and the goals reflect our deepest shared values.”

EDITORS’ PICK: DUSTIN MOSKOVITZ AND JUSTIN ROSENSTEIN, COFOUNDERS OF ASANA

>> ROSENSTEIN’S ADVICE ON CULTIVATING HIGHPERFORMING TEAMS

“The most important thing any leader can do — from a project manager to a CEO — is to provide clarity of purpose, plan, and responsibility on their teams.”

Asana’s mission is “to help humanity thrive by enabling all teams to work together effortlessly.” From day one, co-founders Justin Rosenstein and Dustin Moskovitz (who is also a Facebook co-founder) have baked that into everything from their collaboration software application to the company culture. In fact, they see the culture as yet another product, something to design, ship, and iterate. Individually, every new employee is welcome to attend a two-day Conscious Leadership workshop led by Diana Chapman, author of the “15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership.” As an organization, every four months the company sets aside “roadmap week” — a time to step away from daily operations to plan and reflect together. Each employee has dedicated “areas of responsibility,” with manager giving input and advice, not dictating what happens. The result of these and other initiatives: one of the tech industry’s fastest-growing enterprise software startups.

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GLOBAL IMPACT

JUDGES’ CHOICE: CARYL LEVINE AND KEN LEE, CO-FOUNDERS AND CO-CEOS OF LOTUS FOODS As founders of specialty rice company Lotus Foods, Ken Lee and Caryl Levine have provided international leadership in preserving rice biodiversity, promoting organic rice cultivation, and elevating awareness of the need to change how rice is grown around the world. In 2005, Lee and Levine learned through Cornell University about a better way to grow rice — and vowed to help it spread. System of Rice Intensification (SRI) is a set of practices and principles that enable even the poorest farmers to improve their yields just by changing how they manage their plants, soil, water, and nutrients. They can double and triple their harvests using up to 50 percent less water, 90 percent less seed, and no agrochemicals, with less work for women, who generally bear the brunt of the hardest labor of rice farming. Since 2008, the company has been committed to working with farmers using these game-changing practices. Their pioneering development of supply chains with marginalized rice farmers — who previously never had access to global markets — and proactive education outreach have given consumers throughout North America access to healthier rice and a way to engage in solutions that contribute to a more sustainable future for our planet. “Lotus Foods is the first and only US company to invest in market incentives for these pioneering farmers,” says Norman Uphoff, professor emeritus of government and international agriculture at Cornell University, who nominated the duo. “The importance of their vision and leadership cannot be overstated.” >> THE MOST PRESSING CHALLENGE LEVINE AND LEE WOULD LIKE TO SEE MORE BUSINESSES WORKING TO SOLVE

“Global warming.”

EDITORS’ PICK: KAT TAYLOR, CO-FOUNDER AND CO-CEO OF BENEFICIAL STATE BANK Kat Taylor, along with her husband Tom Steyer, sure doesn’t think small in her attempts to change the world. Perhaps best-known for founding Beneficial State Bank, a community development financial institution (CDFI) and certified B Corporation whose mission is to change the banking system for good, Taylor is also deeply involved in activism, social enterprise, and philanthropy related to climate change and agriculture. Her other projects include the TomKat Ranch Educational Foundation, dedicated to inspiring a sustainable food system through ranching, and the social enterprise LeftCoast GrassFed, which humanely raises cattle and other livestock for the benefit of healthy ecosystems. “If you’ve ever had the chance to meet or work with Kat Taylor, you instinctively understand her brilliance, humility, compassion, and commitment to building a more equitable and inclusive world — because all are deeply embedded in every single thing she does,” says colleague Emma Guttman-Slater, who nominated her. >> THE MOST PRESSING CHALLENGE TAYLOR WOULD LIKE TO SEE MORE BUSINESSES WORKING TO SOLVE

“Sharing global resources and running businesses, nonprofits, and government in a way that inspires constructive genius in every ordinary person.”

Photos by courtesy CONSCIOUS COMPANY MAGAZINE

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PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

5 MYTHS ABOUT

CONSCIOUS LEADERSHIP

The key to creating a thriving company that serves all stakeholders is self-aware, values-driven leadership. Are any of these misperceptions about conscious leadership holding you back?

BY TINA YOUNG

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Anyone on the conscious capitalism journey knows that you don’t get far with leaders who lack self-awareness or who focus on their own personal power plays. Yet there are some who, basing their opinion only on what they perceive from the outside, will still say that conscious leaders are “soft.” When skeptics see compassion, generosity, forgiveness, and flexibility, they often mistake it for a lack of toughness. Meanwhile, the daily decisions that conscious leaders make to center themselves in emotional intelligence while driving bottom-line results requires considerable professional resolve, perseverance, and mental toughness to make a positive difference.

It’s time to debunk some myths that are keeping more of us from pursuing the gratifying reality of truly conscious leadership. Are some of the myths below keeping you from clearly seeing the kind of leadership that will propel you and your organization forward?

Myth No. 1

Conscious leaders aren’t tough enough to do battle in the marketplace Some people think conscious leaders are only about encouragement and appreciation — not holding people accountable to performance metrics and results. The opposite is true. Conscious leaders know that part of caring about the people they serve is helping them be their best. For example, Southwest Airlines, a leading airline in a highly competitive market, remains on top in part because its leaders know that demonstrating love for employees and customers returns more than just bottom-line results. Southwest leaders not only have “a servant’s heart,” as the company puts it, but also a warrior’s spirit that’s grounded in a strong work ethic and a desire to be the best. These leaders hold high expectations for their teams, and with more than 55,000 employees helping to lift more than 4,000 flights a day off the ground, the metrics and results definitely matter. Yes, the tough conversations happen — whether about a logistical mistake or the way a situation was handled with a customer — but a conscious leader at Southwest guides these in the context of learning and developing that person, not with an air of punishment.

Myth No. 2

Conscious leadership is only aimed at building great workplace cultures Actually, it’s aimed at building great businesses that best their competitors and attract top talent.

The culture nurtured by a conscious leader is one of the main reasons top talent stays and embraces a shared purpose. But conscious leaders are looking to create positive change in the world, not just in their workplaces, and their mindset and actions drive them to build market-leading companies. Exhibit A: Dallas-based conscious capitalist company Interstate Batteries, which has built itself into the number one replacement brand battery in North America. Yes, its leaders are intentional about building a culture where others can grow and thrive, but their leadership end-game isn’t just to build that culture — it’s to build an enduring business.

Myth No. 3

Conscious leadership is only for those with an executive title Conscious leaders show up in all levels of an organization, and they influence and inspire others around them — no C-level title required. Having conscious leaders across the organization, and especially on the front lines with customers, creates an environment where employees are motivated to do the right thing for all stakeholders.

Nordstrom knows this well. Its CEO, Blake Nordstrom, tells his leaders, “Rule number one is use good judgment in all situations.” And his next statement is always, “There will be no additional rules.” Regardless of title, the leaders at Nordstrom walk the walk on this retailer’s values, and they are empowered to do what’s right in every interaction with customers or other stakeholders. Conscious leaders empower others; having a certain title on a business card has nothing to do with it.

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PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

Myth No. 4

Conscious leaders don’t care about making money Some look at conscious capitalism and think that the leaders are focused on achieving social impact at the expense of hitting financial goals. Some mistake it for philanthropy. Others mistake it for environmental sustainability. While these pursuits are often part of it, at its core is using the power of capitalism to create value and enable widespread prosperity. What conscious leaders know is that making money equates to making a greater impact on the world — whether that’s creating new jobs, innovating, serving others, or courageously addressing an issue that needs solving. Satori Capital is in the business of making money, but as a conscious capitalist company, its approach considers stakeholder integration and the long-term impact a portfolio company can achieve with the capital Satori can provide.

“

Conscious leaders know that part of caring about the people they serve is helping them be their best.”

Myth No. 5

Conscious leadership is about how you lead others In part, conscious leadership is about leading others, but I’ve found it’s really more about how you lead yourself. It demands authenticity, consideration of different points of view, and the ability to filter information and make decisions that consider all stakeholders. Conscious leaders are learners and take responsibility for their actions. They see mistakes as great opportunities to grow, and they persevere even through the storms of business. It’s often easier to look outward and address the areas where others can improve, but the look inward — paired with a commitment to improving as a conscious leader — is where the truly transformative impact occurs.

Become a heroic leader The subtitle of the book “Conscious Capitalism” is “Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business.” I challenge you to think today about how you and other leaders around you can be the heroes of this new business narrative that conscious leaders are creating.

Tina Young is CEO and founder of Marketwave, a Dallas-based integrated marketing agency that has been on its conscious capitalism journey since 2012. Tina’s business has ranked three times on the Inc. 5000 List of America’s Fastest-Growing Companies, and her perspectives on conscious leadership, branding, and business growth have been featured recently in Entrepreneur magazine.

She serves as chair elect of the Dallas Chapter of Conscious Capitalism. Reach her at tyoung@marketwave.biz.

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PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

IS YOUR JOB Right For You? Work fit matters. Here’s how — and why — to make sure you’re in a job that satisfies you.

BY MOE CARRICK Finding the right place to work is neither simple nor easy. Several studies show that 70–78 percent of us say that we are not fully engaged in our current job. Yet a healthy fit between employer and employee is critical to activating great performance and meeting our powerful human needs for connection to others, engagement, and contribution (see the manifesto below).

My research points to six interconnected elements of work fit that matter individually, as well as in total: meaning, job, culture, relationship, lifestyle, and financial fit. People who are happy at work, love their jobs, and feel a high degree of work fit have at least three of

the core elements working for them, and none of the elements is causing regular pain. Use the Work Fit Checklist (next page) to figure out how your current position fulfills your fit equation.

If you find that your current job isn’t satisfying you in multiple areas, you owe it to yourself, your community, and the world to acknowledge that and begin doing what it takes to find a better situation for you, either by asking for changes in your current position or looking for something else. To solve the complex problems facing humanity, we need the magic that happens when people are working in the right job at the right organization.

THE WORK FIT MANIFESTO 1

It is possible to feel engaged, happy, and valued at work.

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Work fit varies based on time of life; needs change with circumstances.

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People are healthier in mind, heart, and soul when they feel satisfied in their jobs.

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Individuals who find the right job fit do better outside of work and help create resilient families and strong communities.

There is a place for everyone to thrive at work. What works for one person might not work for another. The fit equation is highly personal.

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A focus on work fit benefits people, organizations, communities, and the world.

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Fit matters. The global economy demands that people everywhere feel connected and relevant so that they bring their best work to work.

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Organizations do better in all ways (profit, performance, quality, mission) when employees are right for the work and the culture. Companies succeed when the people in them succeed.

Moe Carrick is principal and founder of Moementum Inc., a certified B Corp consulting firm dedicated to the vision of creating a world that works for everyone using business as a force for good. She believes work can and should be a place where we can thrive. Her book, “Fit Matters: How to Love Your Job,” co-authored

by Cammie Dunaway, was released in May by Maven House Press.

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THE WORK FIT CHECKLIST MEANING FIT

RELATIONSHIP FIT

Meaning fit exists when you feel that what you do matters.

Relationship fit exists when you like and respect the people you work with and you receive appropriate support and trust to do your job.

The things I care about also seem to matter to this company.

I regularly feel sure that I am contributing to something important.

I am clear on my contribution.

I am satisfied that what I do makes a difference most of the time.

My job taps into my interests and passions.

I feel pride in working for this company.

My boss and I share similar work-related values and philosophies.

I generally trust my boss and we communicate well.

I enjoy spending time with my coworkers.

I feel respected and trust my coworkers.

I have good friends at work.

Conflict is healthy and productive.

How many items did you check for Relationship Fit?

How many items did you check for Meaning Fit?

JOB FIT Job fit exists when the responsibilities of the job align with your talents.

My job is a good match for my skills, interests, training, and talents.

I have opportunities at work to do what I really enjoy.

My job makes good use of my previous experience.

I have the right resources and support to do my job.

I feel that I am learning and growing in my job.

I have the credentials and education needed to do my job well.

How many items did you check for Job Fit?

CULTURE FIT Culture fit exists when your values and beliefs are compatible with the practices of your employer.

The organization’s actions match its values.

My communication style works well here.

I feel fully engaged.

I understand my role and my job.

I am able to be myself.

Processes are consistent and reliable.

How many items did you check for Culture Fit?

what your score might indicate

LIFESTYLE FIT Lifestyle fit exists when your life outside of work is supported by your employer’s policies and practices.

I feel that I have the right balance between my job and time outside of work.

I find my work challenging but not overwhelming.

There isn’t pressure to work long hours that interferes with my life outside of work.

I feel I can meet my personal and family needs while also working productively.

My job is flexible in the ways I need it to be.

Travel to and from work is convenient.

How many items did you check for Lifestyle Fit?

FINANCIAL FIT Financial fit exists when you feel that you are paid fairly and when your compensation meets your needs.

I feel my pay is fair.

I appreciate my overall compensation package, long and short term.

There is a good match between my job and my pay.

There is a good match between my job and my benefits.

I can take care of my responsibilities with what I am paid.

There’s room for growth in my pay over time.

How many items did you check for Financial Fit?

- If you have at least one area that has zero or one items checked, your work might be causing you serious pain.

- If at least three areas have four or more items checked, there’s a lot working for you in your current situation.

Congratulations on a solid fit!

- If you have no areas with zero or one items checked, you are probably not experiencing pain in any element.

CONSCIOUS BUSINESS IS A RACE. TRAIN FOR IT.

After selling Plum Organics to The Campbell Soup Company, social entrepreneur Neil Grimmer launched a personalized nutrition startup, Habit.

We spoke with him about the connection between leadership and health.

SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP

HABIT AT A GLANCE Location: Oakland, CA Founded: 2016 Employees: 74 Recognition: 2016 Nutrition Business Journal Innovator of the Year Structure: For-profit Certifications: Taking steps toward B Corp certification Mission statement: “Help people become the best version of themselves through personalized nutrition and the transformative power of food.”

First, Neil Grimmer upended the world of baby food. The company he co-founded in 2007, Plum Organics, brought organic, healthy food in pouches to masses of children while simultaneously working to expose millions of disadvantaged kids to food experiences that would help them become healthier eaters later in life. After selling the brand to The Campbell Soup Company for $249 million in 2013, Grimmer’s next project became reinventing food for grownups via his new personalized nutrition business, Habit.

Habit Food Personalized LLC, which Grimmer launched with a $32 million investment from Campbell’s, offers eating plans informed by individual nutrition test data, plus optional coaching and customized meal delivery. “We need to start taking a more nuanced, personal, and — dare I say — intimate look at each individual and what they need to thrive,” he explains.

We spoke with Grimmer about why he chose this second act, the connection between health and leadership, and the role of values in business.

Tell us the story of starting your new company, Habit.

Neil Grimmer: After co-founding and running Plum for six years, we sold the company to Campbell’s. I stayed on because I wanted to make sure that we got through that transition; that’s always a very fragile period. We wanted to make sure that the mission, the values, were evergreen. Campbell’s was very supportive and excited about that, but there was work to be done, still. So I stayed on. But my wife, in all her infinite wisdom, said, “You’ve taken care of this company for six-plus years. Now you’ve got to start taking care of yourself.”

Prior to starting Plum, I was an Ironman triathlete doing races all over the world — New Zealand, Germany, Florida. I hung up those sneakers to run a different race: running a company. Fast-forward six-plus years, and I was 50 pounds heavier than I was when I was racing.

That wasn’t a byproduct of anything other than just not putting the time in to work out, skipping meals and then eating bad meals, drinking too much coffee, all the kinds of things you do when you’re working too much — grab-and-go convenience food as opposed to real, whole, fresh foods all the time.

I found out I was pre-diabetic, at high risk for a heart attack, and the three cups of coffee I was drinking every day just to get through was increasing that risk by tenfold. It was a huge wakeup call for me. I stepped back and I met with a functional medicine doctor. She said, “Okay, you can fix it with pharma, or you could probably fix it with food if you have the inclination.” And I said, “Well, I’d like to fix this with food.”

We talked through a lot of different ideas on how to get that done and how to personalize a nutrition plan.

Three months after that, I felt amazing. After six months, I had lost 25 pounds and I had more energy than I’d had in years. I thought, “Wow, this is powerful stuff. This should be available to everyone.” That was the genesis of Habit.

What’s your philosophy on how important it is to have your bodyhealth balanced as a leader?

NG: All of us who are leading companies get overwhelmed by the work, get too much on our plate. Our health and wellbeing maybe takes a backseat to some of the other priorities in the company. It’s a constant challenge to say no. Investing in your health and wellbeing — physically, mentally, emotionally, and even spiritually, whatever that means to each individual — needs to be up there at the same level as all the other elements, so that you can really be your best in the moment.

It’s an investment leaders tend not to make, but I think it’s one of the most important. The most grounded leaders are the ones who have taken inventory of their lives, and have taken proactive steps to get healthy across all of those different levels.

You can see it. You can feel it in their leadership. It becomes plain as day.

That’s what I aspire to as a leader.

As I was working up to starting this new company, I actually took the mindset that I was training for a race. Because I know what starting a company takes, and running a company at those early stages is hard. It’s difficult work and it’s all-consuming and it’s long hours. It’s some of the most exciting work I’ve ever experienced, but it also takes its toll. You really have to train for this, like you would for a marathon, like you would for an Ironman triathlon. You have to train your mind and your body, and you have to make sure you’re ready for the race you’re about to run.

How do you manage to stay healthy on a day-to-day basis?

NG: Entrepreneurs, they’ve got a lot on their shoulders. You can’t approach working out and eating healthy like putting another “todo” on your list that has some guilt associated with it, because that just becomes another burden, along with taking care of your team, your customers, your business, all these

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Habit offers nutrition advice and prepared meals based on personalized DNA and biochemistry tests.

“The most grounded leaders are the ones who have taken inventory of their lives, and have taken proactive steps to get healthy across all of those different levels.” things. You have to start making it into daily rituals. You have to recognize that there’s time.

For me, first thing in the morning, 6:00 a.m., the first hour is just totally dedicated to my health. It usually consists of a workout followed by some stretching, then a healthy breakfast or a smoothie. When I do that, I feel amazing. I don’t always get to it, but that’s the ritual I go back to every time. What usually happens is that when I set it off right in the beginning of the day, good choices and healthy choices follow.

I encourage people to find that moment in the day just for them. You’ve just got to carve it out and make it a ritual. You’ve got to put the work in every day to be a healthy individual, to be a great conscious leader.

Talk to me, if you can, about a failure that was personal in terms of the suffering it caused. What was that like? What happened and how did you recover from that?

NG: A few months after we sold Plum, my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. As a family, we went through one of our highest highs to hit one of our lowest lows. It floored me, honestly. She recovered, and it made us tighter. It showed us that above all else, family is absolutely the most important thing, hands down. No company is more important. No nothing.

Looking back, when she was diagnosed, the regret I felt that we hadn’t spent more time together … I write that up as being one of my biggest failures recently. There were many nights and days and even quite frankly years where Plum was more of a priority in some ways than family.

We all were just all-in. Even though it was a family-centered business, I would regularly miss [family] meals.

We’ve changed since then. Because you learn from it. I’m a very driven person, so I’ve always got a project.

But I now keep that in check. My family’s the most important thing.

What’s your advice for early-stage entrepreneurs trying to make it work, stick it out, persevere?

NG: First off, don’t give up. With Plum, there were many, many hard days, many hard weeks, many hard months, many hard years to get there.

If you have perseverance and endurance, you can get through some of that stuff. Stick it out. Fight the good fight. Keep the work going.

Second, own the moment. It’s not just enough to stick it out, like, “I’m just hanging on.” You’ve got to lean in. You’ve got to take every opportunity. You’ve got to think about it as an opportunity that makes or breaks your career, makes or breaks the company.

Even to this day, I have opportunities and I think, “Whoa, it seems really big, and I don’t know if I can step up to that.” Step in. Show up and shine.

Photos: Habit For a longer version of this interview, go to consciouscompanymedia.com/14-grimmer

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Social Enterprises Addressing

Barriers to Employment W

hile the current US unemployment rate suggests that the job market is quite strong, finding a job isn’t equally easy for everyone, and for some populations, it’s chronically downright tough. For example, while more than 650,000 ex-offenders are released from prison every year, some survey data suggests that more than half of them remain unemployed up to a year later. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for people with a disability of some kind is double that of the general population. And those are just some of the populations we have statistics on; recovering addicts and the former homeless, for example, also find it hard to become employed, but we don’t have data on how hard.

State, local, and federal governments sometimes create programs to help these groups, but businesses can also use creative tools to get people back to work. Here are five organizations using the mechanisms of business to tackle the employment issue in their communities.

East Van Roasters makes bean-to-bar chocolate.

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EAST VAN ROASTERS > Vancouver, BC > Founded 2013 > 10 Employees

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aking fresh bean-to-bar chocolate and coffee sourced directly from organic farms might be enough of a mission for some businesses. But East Van Roasters (EVR) also provides dignified work and training opportunities to women living in the Rainier Hotel, a 41-bed addiction treatment center and supportive long-term housing facility that houses EVR on its ground floor. “By providing a positive, socially conscious, healthy presence, we are able to share in the joy of chocolate making, coffee roasting, baking, and food services roles,” says Shelley Bolton, EVR’s managing director. “This shift in public perception through personal experience is a powerful and unique form of advocacy.” So far, 24 women have graduated from the program. “Their stories are all unique,” says Bolton, “but we have had women find stability and community, move on to full-time employment, go on to post-secondary school, regain physical and mental health, be reunited with family and children who were in foster care, and move into independent housing.”

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RecyleForce employees

WASH CYCLE LAUNDRY > Philadelphia, PA, & Washington, DC > Founded 2010 > 45 Employees

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ecycleForce creates job training and employment opportunities for formerly incarcerated people by delivering fee-based electronics recycling services to businesses and selling the scrap metals and other reusable materials it reclaims. “We are in the recycling business, which inherently allows for the reclamation of value from discarded electronics,” says Gregg Keesling, the company’s founder and president. “But we are in business primarily to provide men and women the opportunity to reclaim the value in their lives.” RecycleForce generates about 50 percent of its funding in earned revenue; the other half comes from federal, local, and foundation grants and other charitable giving.

The company is part of an ongoing randomized study by the US Department of Labor to understand this kind of program’s effect on helping people transition out of the prison system. Early results are encouraging, showing increased earnings, lower recidivism, and higher child support payments among people involved in the program as opposed to a control group. “A good community is one that can embrace those who have made mistakes and allows their talents and voices to be heard,” says Keesling.

edal-powered laundry service Wash Cycle has three overlapping missions: to be a launchpad into upwardly mobile careers for job-seekers with high barriers to employment, especially those with histories of incarceration; to prove that bikes are commercially viable for intra-urban freight delivery; and to provide ultra-responsive commercial laundry services to urban customers from neighborhood businesses to major hotel chains. Almost all of Wash Cycle’s staff is promoted from within, and the business has “returning citizens” (i.e., formerly incarcerated people) in positions at every level of the organization, including on the executive team. “There is nothing better than working every day to create a place where people whose skills might otherwise have been overlooked can thrive,” says CEO and founder Gabriel Mandujano. “Wash Cycle is a work in progress, but every day I get to work with people who have traveled an enormous distance to get where they are, and nothing could make me more excited to do what I do.”

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RECYCLEFORCE > Indianapolis, IN > Founded 2006 > 85 Employees Founder Gabriel Mandujano

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EDWINS LEADERSHIP & RESTAURANT INSTITUTE > Cleveland, OH > Restaurant opened 2013 > 14 Employees

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DWINS Leadership & Restaurant Institute is a nonprofit that, by day, gives formerly incarcerated adults education in the culinary and hospitality arts. By night, students put what they’ve learned into practice serving traditional French cuisine in a fine-dining atmosphere.

The restaurant makes enough of a profit to pay for its own operations and about 25 percent of the school’s programming expenses.

EDWINS’ main measure of success is preventing recidivism for its graduates. As of May 2017, only two of the 177 graduates had returned to prison — a recidivism rate of less than 1.3 percent, which is significantly lower than the national average of 43 percent and Ohio’s rate of about 27 percent.

“Additionally, our graduates are highly trained and soughtafter,” says general manager Jordan Levine. “We have at least a 95 percent job placement rate for each class within 30 days of completing the program.” Up next: a butcher shop opening in 2018, and farther into the future, hopefully a bakery, cheese shop, fishmonger, and more.

“By welcoming guests to enjoy exquisite food and wine,” says Levine, “we give each diner an opportunity to overcome biases and form new opinions about people who have been to prison. It’s hard to continue seeing someone only as a former felon when they are presenting you with Caneton de Rouen à la Presse or suggesting a wine pairing with your cheese course.”

EDWINS Restaurant serves fine French food.

SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP

FOCUS PROFESSIONAL SERVICES INC. > Vancouver, BC > Founded 2014 > 11 Employees

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arol Simpson, Focus’s founder and CEO, has two adult sons on the autism spectrum.

Sick of watching them struggle to find their place in the world, she harnessed her career experience in the IT services sector to create a consulting business that hires and trains people on the autism spectrum as software testers and data quality technicians. “Our clients are businesses that have a software development department or rely on clean, validated data,” says Simpson. “We teach them how to work productively with our employees. Our clients then benefit from our employees’ logical and critical thinking abilities, accuracy, productivity levels, and perseverance.” Focus now employs 12 individuals with autism, is already profitable, and has a growing client base and cash flow. “I want to contribute to embracing, accepting, and normalizing neurodiversity as part of the human condition,” says Simpson.

Photos by courtesy

Two of Focus’s employees

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GLOBAL IMPACT

Healing It’s Time to Use Business as An Instrument for

Conscious businesses and their leaders have a duty to use their positions of power to stand up for the issues they care most about — and against injustice.

BY GERRY VALENTINE

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artin Luther King Jr. once said, “The time is always right to do right.” We’re at a moment in history that is much more than the right time for business to do what’s right. We have an unprecedented opportunity to use the voice of business to focus our society on real solutions, to stand up against injustice, and to use the power of business as an instrument for healing.

No matter where you may fall on the political spectrum, as values-based leaders we can all agree that the current environment of rising insecurity, fear, hate speech, and violence is disturbing and dangerous. We’re witnessing a US presidential administration that perpetuates the cycle of fear, and is actively dismantling hard-won progress on many important fronts: protections for the planet, social justice, and economic equality. But this moment is about much more than a single individual or political ideology — it’s a referendum on an economic system that has left large swaths of the population behind. Conventional business practices are a big part of that economic system.

Many Americans face a bleak economic picture: 49 percent of US families with children are income insecure, meaning that they live below 250 percent of the federal poverty level; 55 percent of US households don’t have enough savings to cover a three-month disruption in income, such as a lost job or illness; 30 percent of Baby Boomers (people age 55 or older) have no retirement savings. Although the US economy has more than doubled since 1980, wages for Americans in the bottom 50 percent of earners have not increased.

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At the same time, income for the top 1 percent has more than tripled. Corporate profits have reached record highs, much of it due to dramatic advances in technological innovation.

Conventional thinking says that business growth through innovation is the engine of economic empowerment. And, with the appropriate protections for workers — i.e., labor unions and workplace safety legislation — economic growth is shared across many levels of society.

However, recent technological innovation has brought a different dynamic.

TECHNOLOGY IS CHANGING THE PROSPERITY MATH Innovations in technology have dramatically improved productivity. Now, more and better goods can be produced faster, and with far less labor. Some of the improvements are reflected in cheaper goods, but most improvements have gone into corporate profits and shareholder returns.

Money that was once paid to workers now goes to the investor class, and business innovation has become a form of wealth redistribution up the income ladder. The long-

need a new kind of innovation — a way to build ladders of opportunity so that workers displaced by technology are not permanently displaced from economic opportunity.

THE TRUTH ABOUT BIAS There’s another fundamental reality the current unrest brings into focus: the role racism still plays in America.

Racism is like a boil that’s deeply embedded in our culture, one that we’ve not yet summoned the courage to lance and drain. It sits below the surface in our national psyche, and it becomes inflamed in times of economic stress.

That’s why racial anxiety could be used as a crude means of rallying many marginalized working-class whites — and to distract from more challenging conversations about economic inequality.

This reality about racism means that it’s critical for business leaders to stand up against injustice, to speak out against voices of hate, and to demonstrate the value of inclusivity by creating working environments that are welcoming to all. It also makes it even more important to build those ladders of opportunity, and to refuse to leave anyone behind — no matter whether they’re urban minorities or middle-America working-class whites. The

“The economic strife that comes from leaving any group behind is a dangerous breeding ground for hate.” term negative impacts will not be limited to blue-collar jobs. For example, Google is already working on artificial intelligence technology to help identify breast cancer, something that in the past could only be done by a human radiologist.

We are in an environment where economic uncertainty and fear are being used as a rallying cry towards a misguided message: to stoke xenophobic anti-immigrant fears and to militate for isolationist policies. We must use the voice of business to turn the discussion back to the real issues, and to create real solutions. We need to find ways for workers up and down the income ladder to share more equitably in the benefits of innovation that are made possible by our society. We need to acknowledge that technology is changing the nature of work, and the number and kind of workers that will be needed in the future. We

economic strife that comes from leaving any group behind is a dangerous breeding ground for hate.

IT’S TIME FOR BUSINESS TO ACT Business has a large and powerful voice in our society. It’s a voice that has often been used to influence public opinion, government policy, and legislation. We now could use that same powerful voice as an instrument for healing: to turn our conversation back to the real issues, to use our powers of innovation to create solutions that generate broad economic prosperity, and to stand up against injustice and create inclusive environments. It’s an opportunity to do what’s right at the most important time. Let’s all figure out how to take it.

Gerry Valentine is the founder of Vision Executive Coaching. He helps build companies that work, and that work for all — supporting profit, people, and the planet. Gerry focuses on business strategy, innovation, and leadership. He has 30 years of experience with multiple Fortune 100 companies, an MBA from NYU, and a BS from Cornell University. Connect with Gerry on Twitter @gerryval or by email at gerry@VisionExecutiveCoaching.com.

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CAN THE COMING TIDE

LIFT ALL BOATS? Over the next decade, the challenges of climate change and the Fourth Industrial Revolution will require a radical investment in our highest values, says Rising Tide Capital co-founder Alfa Demmellash.

We spoke with her about the roles of communities and entrepreneurs in ensuring a thriving, prosperous future for all.

Rising Tide Capital co-founder Alfa Demmellash was born in Ethiopia and came to the US at age 12.

GLOBAL IMPACT

Tell us about how you ended up doing this. Why is this what’s worth your time?

RISING TIDE CAPITAL AT A GLANCE Location: Jersey City, NJ Founded: 2004 Team Members: 28 Impact: 1,770 graduates of the Community Business Academy, with 921 current operational businesses Recognition: Demmellash was a World Economic Forum 2015 Young Global Leader Structure: Nonprofit

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Mission statement: “Assist struggling individuals and communities to build strong businesses which transform lives, strengthen families, and build sustainable communities.”

f anyone thinks social enterprises spring exclusively from hotbeds of wealth or privilege, they need only look to Rising Tide Capital’s decade-plus record of supporting local entrepreneurs in underserved communities for mountains of evidence to the contrary. The New Jersey-based nonprofit has helped thousands of business owners, most without any higher education, launch or expand organizations.

“When we started,” says co-founder and CEO Alfa Demmellash, “we thought we’d focus on access to financial capital. We realized quickly there’s also social isolation for many of these entrepreneurs.”

So RTC launched its signature program, a network of Community Business Academies, to help its constituents develop their business strategy, business model, and core management skills. “We wanted people to have the language to more

effectively communicate their vision, and to help them make sure it aligns with their personal passions and the needs they’re trying to meet,” she says. Each session consists of 80 percent students on scholarships and 20 percent students with more socioeconomic privilege. “There’s an element of providing them all with intentional networking opportunities,” Demmellash says.

The popular academies now run in five cities in northern New Jersey, and in partnership with other organizations, are expanding to other regions.

After years of creating a thriving network of entrepreneurs helping their communities (see page 40), Harvard-educated Demmellash understands the role of business in bringing people together. Read on for her take on the biggest questions facing humanity today and what entrepreneurship has to do with answering them.

Alfa Demmellash: I was born and raised in Ethiopia. My mom got to the US as a refugee when I was 2. She made a promise to reconnect with me and bring me here when she was able to provide for me. That took her about a decade. She started a little business in the evenings sewing gowns that were partially Ethiopian and also adapted to her new home in the West. She sold these gowns as a way of making extra money in addition to waitressing. When I was 12, we reunited and ended up in Boston.

I’d always imagined her in America like a fairy/magical goddess with a castle of her own.

And here was my mom working incredibly hard in a small apartment, very concerned about the neighborhood and my education.

It gave me an eye for the struggles of people like my mom, even in a place like America. I spent a lot of time volunteering, doing all kinds of programming and work to better connect with and understand the struggles of people in inner-city communities in the US. My other focus and passion in college was related to why my mom had to run away from Ethiopia: the role of government in conflict and wars. I spent a lot of time studying history, the Rwandan genocide. I went to Rwanda and spent a fair bit of time there, better understanding the role of the marketplace in a place where things fell apart.

You’ve got 3 million people who participated in killing a million-plus people in three months. That’s very intense for a small country. I went there and met people who were still showing up at the marketplace — women who were working so

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incredibly hard. In so doing, they were re-weaving community.

They were creating something out of what one of the taxi drivers described as “living on the edge of derangement.”

I had spent very little time thinking about development or economics, but it hit me like a ton of bricks that the marketplace was where people organized their offerings, where they tested each other’s ethics, and where culture was created. What I was experiencing at that grassroots level was so disconnected from the things I’d read about or would research around IMF policies or the World Bank.

I came back to the States feeling committed to bringing that lens to the community I had the opportunity to connect with here.

I ended up in New Jersey because of my wonderful co-founder [and husband, Alex Forrester], who I met in college. We were best

friends. He was a postmodern philosophy and theology major, and we would debate about these ideas. There was a lot of ground to cover. He was born and raised in New Jersey, and we came back because of a family health issue.

We spent time going to Camden and Newark and Trenton and Jersey City, finding pockets of incredible people who were innovative, who were asking questions about belonging and opportunity in a broader economy that made all kinds of promises but failed to deliver. These communities were adjacent to incredibly wealthy areas: your Princetons and even downtown Jersey City, where a lot of global corporations have their headquarters. Then you have pockets of deep economic insecurity and poverty. Why? Why is this happening so close?

The more people we met, the more we fell in love with places and people and their aspirations.

We kept finding the same things over and over again: people were either starting something or they’d started something they were nurturing and it was not something they felt confident talking about. The more we brought that out, the more alive people felt, and emboldened, and we just kept going with it.

After that journey you just told us about, what do you think about the role of business in solving social problems, creating a better world, and creating community?

AD: What I’ve decided is that the work of connecting business and economic freedom and aspiration to community and belonging is the most important work of our lifetime. We are at an incredible inflection point as people, as communities, on a global level. That inflection point can be

RISING TIDE’S INFLUENCE BY THE NUMBERS

889

Number of entrepreneurs the nonprofit helped in 2016

81% people of color

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New Business Survival Rate After 5 Years Rising Tide entrepreneurs:

87%

US national average:

50%

New jobs created by Rising Tide entrepreneurs in 2016

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frightening, it can be exciting, and a lot of it is going to be driven by what we decide business is for, by what we decide investment is about. There is tremendous opportunity to do that.

What we’re innovating, when it comes to the kinds of business we’re creating, will define what our values are as people.

I feel strongly that the next decade is going to be the most important in terms of shaping where our societies will go. It’s a moment in our evolution. This Fourth Industrial Revolution, which basically is referring to artificial intelligence, biotech, the trends we’re seeing with regard to automation and all the innovations technology is presenting, has huge implications for the way we work, the way we connect with one another, what we choose to build and why, what we invest in.

There are huge disruptive technologies that are just finally seeing the light of day. Go watch the YouTube video “Humans Need Not Apply.” My big aha! was that these [coming automations and technologies] are investments that were made, in some cases, decades ago, by tech entrepreneurs and innovators with an expectation of return. So they are like heat-seeking missiles that have already left their bases.

Those highly motivated investments are looking for returns and they will get them.

A lot of that return is coming in the form of the displacement of labor. Lots of warehouses are getting automated, lots of everything is getting automated.

I don’t know if you’ve walked through an airport recently and seen that instead of having waitresses and waiters, you now have an iPad you can use to order whatever you want. Basically,

we’re on a cusp of a massive industrial shift unlike any we’ve ever experienced. Not even the car or the invention of the printing press is on that scale.

Then, all of the world’s most well-educated environmentalists and scientists tell us we have about four decades to really make a difference before we lose the planet [to climate change]. We have one generation to make the pivots we need to make, and business is very much at the heart of it.

Money is something we as a species have created as a way of communicating what we value.

I think we need to reconnect to the core reason for why a mar-

ketplace exists, for why business exists, for why innovation exists, and keep reaffirming our commitment to human wellbeing and planetary wellbeing — those are directly connected.

Now is the time to get really clear. We are either entering a season of incredible abundance that we can use to address the challenges presented, or we could end up, unintentionally, operating out of a scarcity mind-frame that really doesn’t make sense for the time we’re living in. That scarcity mind-frame is what so much of our business models are based on, and how our products are priced, how our labor is priced. So, we really have to re-

Rising Tide Community Business Academy alum Hilda Mera, an immigrant from Ecuador, founded S&A Auto Repair with her husband.

GLOBAL IMPACT

think the old models and figure out what we’re going to invest in, what we’re going to use to signal value, and how we’re going to reinforce those things that mean the most to us. Business is a tremendous platform to be able to do that.

How do all these big ideas you were just talking about filter down in practice, day-to-day?

AD: Fundamentally, I believe each of us is infinitely valuable and unique. We must continue to affirm that the individual is not [sacrificed] in some kind of utilitarian way to the broader goal.

At the same time, the individual emerges out of community.

None of us just showed up on the planet. Most of us have emerged out of relationships, out of a community that was created the same way.

Where it gets really interest-

THE MULTIPLIERS

ing is when we, as individuals who are infinitely valuable, get the opportunity to participate in the co-creation of communities and vehicles in the form of businesses, nonprofits, and other kinds of cooperatives or organizations. Those then enable us to collaborate with other infinitely valuable, unique individuals who are bringing all of their knowledge and know-how from whatever community, whatever soil they’ve emerged out of.

Our entrepreneurs are showing us the way. Part of what’s fascinating to me about the Rising Tide model is that when you bring together a community of entrepreneurs who feel like they have shared mores and values, they’re constantly pushing each other to rise to higher and higher levels of value creation.

You have somebody like our entrepreneur Myani Lawson [see below right], who starts

out saying, “I want high-quality early childhood education in my community; it’s very expensive in these other areas.” So she creates a Montessori school.

Three, four years later, what she’s doing now, in partnership with a bunch of alumni of Rising Tide, is creating a movement for Montessori to be present in every public school in Jersey City. She’s using her school to teach others why this model is phenomenal and important, that this could be a way of upleveling the quality of education throughout the city.

Usually, the entrepreneur starts with their own vision and then I see that vision grow a lot bigger when they’re connected with a lot of other people.

They’re saying, “Hey, this should be shared across a much broader community.” I know we throw around the word “ecosystem” a lot, but part of what’s

These Jersey City-based RTC Community Business Academy alums are prime examples of how the entrepreneurs RTC supports can spread positive change.

Perla Nieves (left), her husband Isael, and Alysis Vasquez

ALYSIS VASQUEZ AND PERLA NIEVES

Midnight Market // Founded 2016 // 15 part-time employees Chef Alysis Vasquez already had three jobs when she decided to partner with her best friend, Perla Nieves, to create New Jersey’s first indoor foodie nightlife event. Why add another? “We saw an opportunity to make a difference in our community,” Vasquez says. “Progress is a beautiful thing, but left unchecked, it leaves many people behind. We want to help shape the way Jersey City progresses.”

The duo’s solution is an affordable monthly international night market that appeals to newcomers and longtime residents alike, and that serves to help promote and incubate small local food businesses. Their vendors-first approach goes beyond low participation fees; the Midnight Market team creates a free 30-second promo video and food photos for first-time sellers, which it uses as the backbone of the event’s marketing. Meanwhile, an all-night happy hour vibe plus deliberately accessible pricing for attendees — all drinks, food, and entry fees are capped at $5 — creates an inclusive atmosphere. “We see such a diverse group coming out, mingling, and breaking bread together,” Vasquez says.

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exciting about how we’ve evolved as a species is our unbelievable ability to collaborate and to cooperate.

What I see us at Rising Tide Capital doing is creating the environment where it’s okay to be this way in business, to not just be competitive. You can compete for excellence. You can compete for what you feel is the most creative and beautiful way to do something. But the soil out of which this community of entrepreneurs comes, it’s very much collaboration and constantly practicing expanding our vision to incorporate the visions of others.

The entrepreneurs are identifying what their rules of engagement are and creating different kinds of vehicles for the things they value to come to life.

Part of our next step and our challenge at Rising Tide is, how do we get the broader world of investment and capital to shift to

meet all of these vehicles where they are? We want to at least help trigger the conversation around what we invest in. I’m not in any way dinging the R&D departments of emerging tech companies; that’s cool. But how do we rebalance some of that to all of this grassroots creativity burgeoning around us and helping us ensure we have a community and a structure that enables creativity by independent and free human beings?

What’s your advice for how to actually create the type of vibrant community where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts?

AD: The first thing I’ll say is that the spaces where you gather people matter. We locate the Community Business Academies in areas that are easy to reach, and are definitively chosen to invite the

Myani Lawson is founder and head of a Montessori school.

maximum amount of participation and access — so your church basement in a particular neighborhood.

Not the downtown headquarters of a major firm, even if they’d give us the space for free.

We use events very strategically to tie our alumni together, to bring different kinds of people into community with one another in such a way that there is inspiration and practical know-how shared regularly and consistently.

Consistency is key. It’s the reason church works. It’s every Sunday at a certain hour. You never hear, “Oh, the pastor didn’t show up,” or “We’ve switched our location.” People can really anticipate it, show up for it, be in it. There are, right now, 12 Community Business Academies happening simultaneously twice a year, so a total of 24. It runs like clockwork.

People know to expect it.

And then experientially showing people how to build something

MYANI LAWSON

Bergen-Lafayette Montessori School // Founded 2014 // 10 employees Myani Lawson always knew she wanted to be a teacher, and dreamed of opening her own school someday, probably when she retired from teaching. That timeline sped up when, in 2013, she began looking into preschools for her 2-year-old daughter. She loved the Montessori education method, with its emphasis on independence and respect for a child’s natural development. But instead of covering her daughter’s tuition at an existing school, she used her resources to open her own school with a more affordable price accessible to a wider population of students.

Fast-forward to 2017, and the Bergen-Lafayette Montessori school is serving 33 families, with nearly half of them taking advantage of some kind of financial aid. But Lawson wants to do more. So this year, she and collaborators drafted a proposal to the Jersey City Public Schools to offer a public Montessori option. There’s still a long way to go, but Lawson and the school community she’s created are committed to seeing a public option available, and spreading what’s working for them to everyone in their town.

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GLOBAL IMPACT

in partnership, how to confront the competitive dynamics that emerge [is important]. You can have, say, multiple restaurateurs in a given class, and watch their evolution from walking in and being competitive, like, “Oh, I was thinking of that. Can I share these ideas?” to a place where they feel like, “Actually, my idea’s always going to get even better the more I’m willing to share it.”

How does that transformation happen?

AD: In the 12-week course, our entrepreneurs play large simulations three times. The entire classroom is broken up into different teams where they’re re-creating a local economy. We have volunteers — a lot of our funders — play the role of the banker, the exchange market.

We have “life cards” and things that happen to people.

It’s amazing how much we underestimate the role of play in getting adults out of their set mind-frames and giving them an opportunity to inhabit other roles; the dynamics and the momentum and the ways in which your decision-making is impacted by constraints, whether around time or other stressors. A whole bunch of stuff just happens when you bring together people in a marketplace and you give them common vocabulary and rules, and then see what happens — the ways in which they innovate, co-create, compete, solve conflicts, and learn about themselves as well as team dynamics.

Those simulations live on in their minds for a very long time.

Then it’s the constant balance of paying attention to someone as an individual, and paying at42

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tention to them as they’re inhabiting a role within the business.

And introducing a lot of space — or spaciousness, I should say.

Part of the scarcity mindset is that it’s hard to throw off. When you’re first starting out, or if you’re a small business and you actually need many more employees than you have, you’re just constrained for time, no matter who you are. But 70 percent of our entrepreneurs are women, and of those, more than 70 percent are single moms. They’re making $35,000 a year in an area that would require them to make $50,000 a year [just to get by]. But they’re also choosing to be entrepreneurial; it’s more than just the necessity of figuring out how to net $15,000 from whatever goods or services you’re selling. It’s more than growing this business into a vehicle that can take you places, economically and otherwise. There’s also a huge personal determination to be creative, to be more than economic circumstances are prescribing.

There is nothing like the constraints of set economic boundaries. If you’re creative, or if you’re somebody who’s just interested in working outside the boundaries of your zip code, genetics, or inheritances, then this is an environment where you can go, “Yeah. We’re all resourceconstrained, for a variety of different reasons. We tap into each other to create an environment that enables us to be just a little bit more creative, a little bit more purposeful in how we direct our energies, our time, whatever resources we feel we have more of than others.”

I see that dynamic playing out over and over again. Our job is to create specific infrastructure;

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the place, the space, that consistency, the quality of information that is entering, and the reciprocal nature of that information so it’s constantly evolving and we’re learning from external factors but also from the internal creativity and constraints. That’s what’s organic and beautiful about this.

What are the trends you foresee in your industry?

AD: At Rising Tide Capital, we’ve been spending a lot of time figuring out our response to the Fourth Industrial Revolution I mentioned before. Essentially, how do we make meaning of this trend for our audience? How can they begin thinking about what it looks like to have a creative economy, to have culture, to have meaning, and to increase confidence that we can meet this massive challenge that’s coming our way? It’s going to require a lot of consciousness on the part of businesses, investors, public leaders, others like us who believe that business could be used for good.

Then when you add the layers of the populism, nationalism, that is just surfacing — these trends are not disconnected from one another. For me, this is the highest moment of calling and purpose. I started this work having studied the Holocaust and World War II and Rwanda, these moments of great violence and failure to imagine a different way of getting past some of our constraints.

It’s coming again, and there is a particular role we can play as social entrepreneurs, as communicators. That’s what a lot of our entrepreneurs are. They’re communicating what they value.

“Innovation disconnected from human wellbeing is not innovation.�

Rising Tide Capital co-founders Alex Forrester (left) and Alfa Demmellash

GLOBAL IMPACT

They’re creating things that enable us to see things better, to make better decisions; creating the spaces where we can eat, where we can have more help, where we can focus our energies on educating our young, or playing with our elders, or having rituals.

There’s a huge opportunity to say, “This is a lot of undervalued work and we need to invest in it because this is what it means to be human.” This is what innovation is about. It’s about human wellbeing. And innovation disconnected from human wellbeing is not innovation.

We need to make a connection

belonging that is fundamentally about our human wellbeing and our ability to solve any challenge, whether it’s environmental issues, whether it’s violence, or all of the things that we care about.

We are at a moment where, over the next decade, we either solve our challenges and have deeply abundant communities that are sharing and valuing what matters most, or we’re going into significant darkness, with masses in unemployment, depression, war, and violence.

I have two sons, and I’m just like, “We are not handing them this crazy world.” I’m not even convinced we’ll be handing any-

“Consistency is key. It’s the reason church works. It’s every Sunday at a certain hour. You never hear, ‘Oh, the pastor didn’t show up.’” of the dots in the most accessible language possible to the greatest number of entrepreneurs, business leaders, consumers — and investors in particular. I’ve been out on the road talking to so many people and so many investors, and they say, “It’s funny you mention that, because the top things I get from investment briefs are artificial intelligence, biotech. … It’s all tech, tech, tech.”

The reality is, we need those investors, we need those tech innovators to have a more nuanced view around what innovation actually is. We can only keep society stitched together when we have a sense of community and

thing over within a generation.

I’m going to be running around as a climate refugee or a refugee of some other kind with them.

My mom already did that, and I would rather not have us be refugees again. With my education, with my networks, with all of my creativity and passion, I would rather not doom my kids to a life of being a refugee. I’m pretty on about it.

Ten years is like ten days in this context. It’s taken us 14 years to build this nonprofit, and it’s going to take us another decade to get all of our lessons learned and our tools into the hands of many local social entrepreneurs and innovators so they can create their

ecosystem and we can all learn together and create the communities we want to see.

Meanwhile, I feel like there’s this other gigantic plane heading our way and we have an opportunity to respond with, “Hey, it’s coming, and let’s get creative.

Let’s get busy building community, building belonging, and investing in the right things. But let’s not ignore it, because we’ll be swept away by it.”

What’s giving you hope?

AD: The trends I’m talking about, the assumption is, “You can’t talk about this stuff with the guy who runs the laundromat or the woman who’s creating an auto shop or the restaurateur or the notary or the health specialist or the educator.” But I came back from the World Economic Forum in Davos in January determined to have the conversation.

And every time I talk with one of our entrepreneurs or community partners about this, they are fully there and acknowledge it. I’m connecting the dots, but they’re saying, “Oh, yeah. I left my job because that [became] automated. I never thought of it in those terms. Here’s the way I changed, and I’m now living the best possible life I could have imagined. This one is actually more automation-proof than other things I was doing.”

I’m having conversations like that. I’m rarely having: “What do we do now? This sounds terrible, and terrifying, and I’m depressed.” That’s not what’s happening, which makes me believe that social entrepreneurs, business owners, when they have access to meaning-making, to information, and to community, are, humbly speaking, our most important resource.

Photos by Tru Ferguson and Jay Savulich

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GLOBAL IMPACT

THE LIFE CYCLE OF AN

INDUSTRY COALITION

Thinking of joining with other business leaders to achieve a collective goal? Here’s an inside look at what to expect and plan for.

DAVID LEVINE Mission-driven business leaders do a great deal to address problems affecting environmental and social sustainability within the confines of their businesses and with their immediate stakeholders. But some problems are just too large to be handled that way.

When market-wide or policy change is needed, that takes organized action — often in the form of a business coalition. Business leaders who join coalitions find unique and powerful opportunities to help advance their values in the larger economic and political system.

Here’s an inside look at the key stages of a coalition and issues that arise for business leaders who engage in one.

Stage 1 // Conception: Setting the Foundation Why do we need a coalition? Who should be involved? Answering these questions early will ensure that the mission, framework, and other foundational elements work for everyone.

Then the group can proceed to finding common ground in defining the problem. Avoid jumping to solutions at this point. Success is contingent on developing a common goal and a set of principles that will guide the work. Don’t let political orientations or specific strategies and other details block the development of the principles. Those can be negotiated later.

Right from the start and throughout the life of the coalition, it’s important to acknowledge and respect the concerns and priorities of each member while balancing those with the needs and goals of the coalition 46

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as a whole. For example, when we set up the American Sustainable Business Council (ASBC), we recognized that companies couldn’t be expected to support every position we’d want to take. So we created an infrastructure that enables each business organization and company to play as great or small a role as it wants on any given issue.

Stage 2 // Planning: Charting the Course In this stage, it’s time to formulate your theory of change and agree on the steps that will lead to the desired outcome. For example, decide what strategies to pursue, including lobbying for new legislation, petitioning government agencies, working with courts, participating in elections, and talking to media. Establish your basic arguments and messages, decide how much of the work will be public versus behind the scenes, and agree about who will be the public face and voice of the coalition.

Next, articulate an integrated plan with timeline, objectives, funding, budget, and so on.

Stage 3 // Implementation: Doing the Work All of the foundational building and planning pays off while implementing the campaign. For our business campaigns that push for policy change, ASBC uses multiple tactics and activities, such as: • Roundtables to develop policy.

• Business-case materials development.

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• Business leader fly-ins to Capitol Hill and state legislatures.

• In-district meetings with elected officials and their staffs.

• Working with the media for broadcast, print, online, and social media pieces and editorials, op-eds, letters to the editor, and advertising.

• Sign-on letters and phone calls.

• Business-to-consumer outreach and campaigns.

Other coalitions with other goals might use other tactics. For example, in addition to its government affairs and policy efforts, the Outdoor Industry Association publishes the outdoor industry’s economic impact study and regularly convenes meetings to collaboratively address industrywide supply chain challenges as well as provide a forum for companies to work together in a pre-competitive fashion to develop standards, identify and address information gaps, and build collective knowledge.

Stage 4 // Renew or Disband: Deciding What’s Next

The goals of coalitions shift over time, and coalitions don’t last forever. For example, after the Companies for Safer Chemicals coalition achieved its goal of improving the reform of US toxic chemicals law, it re-focused on challenges and opportunities at the state level, and engaged in California to advance a bill for ingredient disclosure in cleaning products.

Sometimes a coalition decides that its work is done and it should dissolve. The Sustainable Biomaterials Collaborative, for example, disbanded when it finished developing guidelines for the newly emerging biomaterials market.

All coalitions should reflect periodically on their work, gauge progress, and revise their plans for the future. That’s what we do at ASBC around our goal to push government policy that moves toward a sustainable economy.

For instance, we revised our strategies with our members given the most recent shift in power in Washington, DC. The value of coalitions is to make change that requires a greater voice and power than any individual business has on its own. It’s time we recognize the power of being together with other businesses, and do what we can to exercise that power — as a force for good.

3 EFFECTIVE INDUSTRY COALITIONS TO KNOW ABOUT There are hundreds of business-led corporate responsibility coalitions around the world, including general and industry- or issuespecific ones. Here are a few examples that have been especially influential lately.

1. We Mean Business Coalition

Founded: 2014 Cause: Climate action — to accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy Members: 746 companies and investors who have made climate action commitments, including big names like Apple, Coca-Cola, Wells Fargo, and Xerox Key Accomplishments: Companies representing over $8.1 trillion in revenue have made over 1,200 different climate action commitments.

The list of commitments the coalition’s nonprofit members help businesses execute includes adopting science-based emissions reduction targets, sourcing renewable power, and reporting climate change information in mainstream reports as a fiduciary duty.

2. Sustainable Apparel Coalition

Founded: 2011 Cause: To reduce the environmental and social impacts of products Members: First created by Walmart and Patagonia, the coalition now boasts more than 205 brand, retailer, manufacturer, NGO, academic, and affiliate organizations.

Key Accomplishments: The first major victory of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC) was creating the Higg Index in 2011, a suite of self-assessment tools that empower brands to measure their environmental, social, and labor impacts and identify areas for improvement.

Today, the Higg Index has more than 20,000 posted assessments from over 7,500 companies across 81 countries. Additionally, the SAC is leading the facilitation of the Social & Labor Convergence Project, which aims to develop a common assessment framework and data collection system to address issues like child labor, forced labor, occupational health and safety, and wages.

3. OSC2 (One Step Closer to an Organic and Sustainable Community)

Founded: 2012 Cause: Sustainability in the natural products industry Members: 17 CEO members, 20 packaging-collaborative members, and 50 marketing, supply chain, and finance working group members Key accomplishments: OSC2’s projects include the Climate Collaborative, launched in 2017 to leverage the power of the natural products industry to reverse climate change, and the Compostable Packaging Collaborative, a network of leading brands and packaging companies.

David Levine is CEO and co-founder of the American Sustainable Business Council (ASBC), formed in 2009 to advocate for policy change to build a more sustainable economy. ASBC has a membership representing over 250,000 businesses and helps its members engage with policymakers, gain media exposure, inform the public, and more.

Find out more at asbcouncil.org.

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Bi-Rite Market owner Sam Mogannam explains his best lessons from nearly 20 years as an icon in the San Francisco community and sustainable business.

Bi-Rite Market has been in current owner Sam Mogannam’s family since 1964.

BI-RITE MARKET AT A GLANCE Location: San Francisco, CA Founded: 1940; in the Mogannam family since 1964 Number of Employees: 320 Recognition: Forbes’ Best Small Companies in America, 2016 Structure: Privately owned, for-profit Certifications/Memberships: B Corp, San Francisco Certified Green Business, Good Food Retailers Collaborative, Social Venture Network 2016 Revenue: $45 million Mission statement: “Creating community through food.”

SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS PRACTICES

When Sam Mogannam graduated from high school, he literally vowed to never be a grocer. Eleven years working in his family’s community market, Bi-Rite, had given him his fill of that. Instead he trained as a chef, traveled the world, and eventually opened his own restaurant in his hometown. The family sold the San Francisco market in 1989, and that was the end of the Mogannam grocery dynasty. Or so it seemed.

Then in 1997, Bi-Rite’s new owner was looking for an out, and Mogannam and his brother Raphael decided to purchase it back. Thus was born — or rather, reincarnated — one of the most iconic community businesses in a town obsessed with the importance of “local,” a mission-driven gathering spot that has become an anchor of its neighborhood and the broader community.

Sam Mogannam: I fell in love with food and cooking fairly early. Initially, I thought I wanted to be a hotel manager. I couldn’t get a job in a hotel but knew I needed to start getting experience in hospitality, so I started applying in restaurants and a young chef took a chance on me.

It was those first few months in a commercial kitchen that really sparked something in me. I loved the transformative power of taking raw ingredients and turning them into something that somebody else is putting in their body, and seeing the transformation that continued to happen once that food was eaten and experienced.

Ultimately the reason I do what I do every day is that I love food and I love people, and grocery stores are a great way of bringing both together. They’re a great way of anchoring

them were thriving or doing anything that was deeply meaningful for the community.

Soon after we took over, a restaurant company got started a couple of doors down — the Delfina Restaurant Group. They opened up in a tiny little space. They now have six or seven different businesses, and they’ve twice expanded into adjacent storefronts. Then Tartine came, and Tartine has become recognized as potentially the best bakery in the world.

We’ve got an extraordinary Japanese restaurant on the opposite corner, and a Korean restaurant on the other corner. Both of them maintain the same philosophy [as the rest of us] around sourcing great ingredients.

What’s interesting is that the spot that the Japanese restaurant is in currently was considered a cursed corner. But all of the businesses

“Often when you pick up a product in a grocery store, you forget that there’s a person behind it.

And for us, it’s all about the people.”

“When we reopened the store,” Mogannam explains, “we brought a chef’s perspective to the grocery world. We built a kitchen into the middle of the store so that we could prepare foods — as a continued expression of my creativity, but also a way to connect with our consumers.”

These days, after close to 20 years under Mogannam’s leadership, the Bi-Rite family of businesses includes two grocery stores, San Francisco’s first organic ice cream shop, a catering company, a three-acre farm in Sonoma, and an affiliated nonprofit community cooking school, 18 Reasons.

We spoke with Mogannam to hear his best lessons on creating a thriving business that’s also a community hub.

How did you end up doing what you’re doing today? Why is this what’s worth your time?

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a community and creating a space where a local economy can thrive.

What we’ve done on 18th Street is a prime example of what a local food block can do to create an identity for a neighborhood.

For folks who haven’t been to San Francisco, explain “what we’ve done on 18th Street.”

SM: When I first took over the market in 1997, all the storefronts on the block had metal grates on the windows. There were fewer than 40 people working on the block.

Through the late ’80s and ’90s, the neighborhood had gone through a down period where there was a lot of crime. Dolores Park — which now has become an important community gathering place — was unsafe. There was a lot of drug dealing. There were a bunch of storefronts, but none of

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that opened up in that corner prior to Yuzuki Japanese Eatery didn’t use the great ingredients that Bi-Rite, Tartine, and Delfina were using.

They failed. It shows how we shape the community’s desire and demand for high-quality, high-responsibility ingredients. Once Yuko [Hayashi] opened her restaurant, she did well because she brought that same philosophy that was already existent on our block.

As a consequence, we’ve got a “model food block.” All of the businesses are complementary. We all work together and continue to push the food movement forward and create a community that everybody who works and lives in can be proud of.

There are over 300 people working on the block now too, which is amazing — nine times the number of jobs that previously existed, on one single block.

Bi-Rite’s nonprofit partner, 18 Reasons, hosts community dinners with local food producers.

Bi-Rite’s mission is to “create community through food.” Tell me more about what the word “community” means to you today and how that has evolved over time.

SM: We’ve clearly defined what “community” means for us as a company. There are three primary stakeholders, but really, truly, four stakeholders, for how we define community.

One is our guests, obviously.

That’s the people who shop with us. The second is the producers: the people who grow, make, raise, and craft all the amazing food we sell. The third is our staff. We can’t operate a business without a team of people who are equally passionate and caring about connecting this amazing food to these people who are going to buy it and consume it. And then the fourth is our

overall greater community and our planet.

We know that we have a responsibility beyond our four walls, beyond the people we actually do commerce with. There are people who live on our block, in our neighborhood, who don’t shop with Bi-Rite, but we have a responsibility to them. There are organizations that do great work in the communities in which we operate that we don’t engage in actual transactional business with, but who are doing work to sustain and to create a much more livable community for us, and so we support them.

We also have a responsibility to our overall planet. So, we want to do everything we can to support producers who are in line with our values. We want to operate a business that’s sustainability-minded and considering of the environment at every step of the way as well.

Do you have any concrete lessons you’ve learned about what works and what doesn’t in creating that sense of community? How do you actually do it in practice?

SM: That’s great. I love it. I feel like 18 Reasons is a perfect example of going deeper in creating community. And 18 Reasons — the nonprofit that we started in 2008 — was a total experiment.

There was a tiny little office space around the corner, 250 square feet, that friends of ours, guests of ours, were renting to use as their real estate office. They had let us borrow the space a couple of times to do lectures. We brought in a winemaker and a rancher to talk about the work they were doing, to teach our guests — the community of people who were supporting them — more about why their work was so important.

Not just about the production and

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SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS PRACTICES

BI-RITE’S MANY MISSION STATEMENTS In addition to its overarching mission of “creating community through food,” the Bi-Rite family of businesses has the following explicit missions for other aspects of its business.

1. SERVICE

“We welcome each and every member of our community as a guest in our home. We serve seamlessly, we inspire, we surprise, we feed and are fed.”

2. PRODUCT

“We cultivate genuine, dynamic relationships with the numerous and varied individuals responsible for our food. In the ever-evolving food landscape, we make educated decisions and push the boundaries of responsible sourcing. We inform our guests about the true cost of food and advocate a positive impact on our food system. By celebrating craft and heritage, we preserve diversity, traditions, and taste. As a result, our food is honest, memorable, and full of flavor!”

3. PEOPLE

Mission statement coming in 2017.

4. TRAINING

“Bi-Rite training is a challenging and rewarding journey that cultivates the critical skills necessary for success in any workplace. Trainees and trainers are equally responsible for the results of training — a dynamic process and conversation which fosters growth, strengthens our culture, and reinforces sound operations.”

5. COMMUNITY

“We are making a difference by empowering youth, strengthening community, and creating resilience.”

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value of the commodity, but also about the impact they were having on the environment. We’ve always taken this approach, that education is an important part of empowerment. We consider ourselves sellers, feeders, but more importantly, teachers as well.

So we experimented with [using the space], and when our friends made the decision to move up to Portland, they asked us if we wanted to take over the lease, so we did. We didn’t really know what to do with it, but we decided that we would create a space that would give artists walls to hang work up. There is a tremendous need for local artists to have space to show their work.

We also knew we wanted to take some of these conversations we were having with our guests on the grocery store floor that were two, three, maybe seven minutes long, and take them longer and take them deeper and give the people who were buying cheese or meat or tomatoes the chance to actually meet the humans behind the work. Often when you pick up a product in a grocery store, you forget that there’s a person behind it. And for us, it’s all about the people.

We started to do more tastings and more lectures and dinners, and have now grown the program. We’ve moved into a 500-square-foot space that’s across the street from the market, and now our programming reaches about 3,500 students a year here on 18th Street. We have all sorts of classes, which can range from the cuisine of Azerbaijan to really simple community dinners where we open our doors and, for 12 bucks, people can come and sit down and break bread and meet their neighbors and connect. We’ve had some community dinners where people have literally sat across from each other only to realize that they lived in the same building.

In this world where we’re so hyperconnected through our thumbs, we need more opportunities to connect on a human level, on a face-to-face level, where we can touch each other

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and break bread with each other. So many of the world’s problems could be solved if we just spent more time around the table.

We’ve done this here on this block, but 18 Reasons’ programming also now includes a whole other set of classes that we do in the five Bay Area counties, in underserved communities. Over the course of six weeks, two hours a week, with students who range from kids to teens to adults to seniors, we spend an hour teaching them nutrition with a certified nutritionist. We’re often tailoring their diet around any particular food-related diseases they may have so they can better manage their health.

Then the second hour is taught by a chef. Oftentimes it’s a professional, sometimes it’s an amateur. The students all work together to prepare a meal and then sit down together and share in a hot meal. For many of the students, it’s the one time a week that they actually get to eat a hot meal that’s nutritious, that’s cooked with others.

We have an extraordinary 86 percent success rate in graduating these students, which means that they have attended five of the six sessions. As we’ve done our longitudinal studies, it’s not a dramatic impact, but we’ve seen a 10 to 12 percent improvement in how our students are changing their habits and improving their diets and the amount of time they’re spending cooking and feeding their families better food.

We know that if people are healthier, then they’re feeling better about themselves and they’re going to make others feel better, and then our community is going to be tighter and stronger and more vibrant. That’s one example of what we’ve done.

That’s within a nine-year horizon, and I’m excited about that work continuing for the next umpteen years.

How is the nonprofit funded?

Is it all from Bi-Rite?

SM: It’s funded through private donations, of which Bi-Rite is one donor.

But also through grants and through basic fundraising activity that we do throughout the year.

What do you say to the people who question the value of this from a traditional business bottom-line point of view?

SM: I’ve never been driven by how normal businesses run. We know that as a business, we have to operate in a fiscally responsible way. Unless we’re profitable, we can’t do anything. We can’t achieve our mission, we can’t hire good people, we can’t treat them well, we can’t support a good food

system, and ultimately, we won’t be able to bring people around the table and see the social change we’re after.

I understand being fiscally responsible is important, but I’ve never been driven by the status quo business mindset — or I guess what we used to consider the status quo.

Businesses have a responsibility to the community they operate in. I grew up where community service was driven into me, and have been doing community service since I was a kid. To me, community service really shouldn’t be, like, this side project. It should be integrated into everything that we do. And when we

can integrate it into how we make a living and into our work, then we’re actually doing much more meaningful, important work.

Nobody’s ever really questioned it. I think people see and recognize it and say, “Wow, it’s fucking cool.

It’s amazing that you’d do that and still have a business that runs and still treat your staff well and still support a good farming and agricultural system and have fun doing it.”

It’s in line with our values. We’re set to hold true to what we believe in.

That’s why having a mission is so important.

I think what ends up happening

18 Reasons’ Cooking Matters program teaches nutrition and meal prep in local schools.

SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS PRACTICES

is that those who haven’t bought in are like, “Well, it’s just too fucking expensive,” and don’t understand that by shopping with us, they’re contributing to so much more than just the food that they’re going to put in their bellies. It is a challenge — one that’s definitely difficult for us to manage on a business level, especially as larger companies, now, are adopting our buying practices, and are developing their own community programs, and then it all ends up being under the guise of a larger marketing scheme as opposed to being true values-driven care, mission-driven care.

We know we’re not going to be the market for everyone, but we also

coming on board as our new executive director, she said, “Well, why don’t we just merge the two organizations together?” And I was like, “That’s great, an even better idea.”

We both went back and presented the idea to our boards and came back with enthusiastic delight. It was really amazing. Both the boards were excited about the possibility. We had the boards meet and then started the process of merging.

It took about six months, but in the process, we assumed the 501(c)(3) of Sarah’s organization, Three Squares, and 18 Reasons took on that 501(c) (3) status and became its own independent nonprofit.

sharing how we do it, because if more businesses did the right thing and operated from a place of care, from a sense of purpose, then the world would be a better place. That’s what drives collaboration for me. I just know that when people work together, a lot more can get done. It might not get done as quickly, but a lot more can get done in a more sustainable way. And it’s fun. It’s fun seeing people grow. I love being a mentor. I love teaching people. It’s important.

Are there best practices you’ve picked up over the years around how to look for the right type of collaboration partnerships?

“I get fired up about sharing what we do and sharing our story and sharing how we do it, because if more businesses did the right thing and operated from a place of care, from a sense of purpose, then the world would be a better place.” know that we need to hold true to our values. Otherwise, the minute that we begin to compromise on those values, we’ll be compromising the impact we can have. And it’s not a compromise we’re willing to make.

At least not at this point, and I hope never.

How did you make the decision to split 18 Reasons into its own nonprofit? And why is that the right choice, instead of having it be part of the for-profit family of businesses?

SM: For us, it was very practical.

About five years in, our executive director at the time was moving back east, so we started a search for a new executive director. We found [Sarah Nelson], somebody I had done some work with who had started her own nonprofit in San Francisco. She was great, and when I suggested her 56

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In 2015, you started the Good Food Retailers Collaborative. You talk about how you see retailers as incubators for other food businesses.

How do you think about collaboration versus competition in business?

SM: I believe in sharing. I’m a pretty open book and I’m pretty generous with sharing information. I’ve been given a lot from others in the past, and I’ve wanted to reciprocate and do the same, especially when it’s with folks who share values, folks who are trying to do something important or meaningful or impactful in the communities where they work and live.

So, for me there are very few walls.

We’ve even had executives from Kroger and Pepsi and Kraft and Nestle who have come through or who I’ve gone and spoken to.

I get fired up about sharing what we do and sharing our story and

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SM: I try to understand their motivation for why they want to collaborate.

Sometimes you get a total sense that somebody’s into it for their own personal reasons or just financial bottom line as opposed to a triple bottom line. And we’ve made mistakes. I shouldn’t call them mistakes, but we’ve collaborated with people we probably shouldn’t have in the past. I never regret it. They’re good opportunities to learn. I’ve found talking to folks, this constant process of asking the whys — why are you interested? why do you want to do this? what are you after? — helps you get a sense of whether or not they’re truly doing it for good reasons.

What kind of inner work on yourself as a leader does achieving your mission both require and perhaps facilitate? Do you think about that at all?

When it opened in 2006, Bi-Rite Creamery, part of the Bi-Rite family of businesses, was San Francisco’s first ice cream shop using only local, organic dairy.

SM: I’m thinking about that a lot right now. My [business] partner [Calvin Tsay] and I are thinking about getting executive coaches, to help us grow as leaders. We’re almost a $50 million company and we’ve got about 320 people working for us. If we add a couple more businesses in the next couple of years, we could be a 500-person company. So we need to take that next step in our evolution as leaders.

We’re currently going through a structure evaluation internally, just to make sure we’ve got everyone assigned in the right roles and responsibilities, that everyone’s clear on what they’re accountable to, and that Calvin and I are also clear on what we’re accountable to, that we’re helping people grow themselves as leaders, and continue to look forward and grow the Bi-Rite family in a responsible way. We’re definitely in an important reflection point.

How do you keep from burning out?

You’ve been at this almost 20 years.

What kind of specific practices or mindsets do you have to avoid that?

SM: I love what I do. Even when the work is hard or emotionally draining, I still get a kick out of it. I get a kick out of getting my ass beaten on some days, because I can just look at it and go, “Fuck, that was a hard day.” Then I just think about how great the next day or the next week’s going to be after that lesson. It starts there. It starts with just enjoying it, whether it’s good, it’s fun, easy or challenging, and emotionally draining. I still love it both ways.

I take my two days off pretty religiously. I don’t completely disconnect, but I take my time off and I spend my weekends with my family, my wife and my two daughters.

I’m now trying to consistently take about six weeks of vacation a year. We love to travel. For the last four years now, we’ve taken a three-week bit continuously and then I’ve taken single weeks and longer weekends throughout the year, just to make sure we’re getting break times so we can connect as a family and recharge.

I also will go on trips to connect with other retailers, to go to seminars or trade shows. That time away from

business and family also helps me recharge and continue to be inspired.

And I cook a lot. I try to spend time on our farm in Sonoma. Being in the dirt is probably one of the easiest ways to clear your mind and to get grounded.

Do you have any practices you do every day to clear your mind and stay grounded?

SM: I guess there’s nothing in a meditative sense, but I have a routine that helps me tremendously. I’m an early riser, so I’m typically up around 4:00 in the morning. I spend the first 30 to 45 minutes in my day just reading and seeing what’s going on in the world, and writing. Any time I need to do any sort of thoughtful writing, I do it in the morning. It’s my quiet time.

I review what I’m trying to accomplish for the day and what I’m trying to accomplish for the week on those mornings, and then continue on with my day. But those mornings when I don’t find that time, if I get up late or if I’ve got to get out of the house earlier than normal, I definitely feel the pinch.

Three mornings a week I go to the

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gym and I work out hard and try to work up a sweat and get my heart rate going and clear my mind that way. It’s been an important part of my maintenance and just helping my endurance and my clarity, no question.

What’s the best piece of leadership advice you’ve ever given or received?

SM: Whenever I’m talking to folks who are starting a business or have a business and are struggling, I always ask them if they have a mission and if the mission is well articulated and if everyone in the organization understands the mission and understands their role in accomplishing and achieving the mission. It’s critical for any leader to bring their team along and to do it in a way where everyone’s going to feel good no matter how hard the work is.

And then I ask if they have a vision that they’ve articulated and written down. Have they been clear about what they’re trying to accomplish, where they want to be in the next one, two, three, five,

ten years? And does the entire team know that? Does the entire team know their role in how they’re going to accomplish that? Is there discipline around getting to that goal that is being practiced consistently?

But I think probably the most important thing is that I tell people to love what they do. And if they don’t love what they’re doing, then they’re never going to be effective at leading the team. There needs to be the love of the purpose, but also just love in general, loving of everybody you engage with. I feel like love is so absent in the business world, and it’s the first and the most important — I shouldn’t say the most important, but it’s one of our three core values. People are more skeptical of that than of this community work, but I feel that BiRite has thrived because of the love it shares with its entire community.

Tell me about a low point and how you got through it. Some kind of failure or challenge or mistake.

SM: I’ll tell you what’s top-of-mind for me right now: I’m at a low point

The deli at Bi-Rite’s original location.

because I got into an argument with my daughter this morning. I did everything wrong. I got emotional and I got angry, and I let my frustrations come through, and I was calling her out for treating me the same way I was in turn treating her. I’m upset about it, to be honest with you. I’m lower right now than I’ve been in a while because of it.

She’s 14, and I’m just learning how to navigate being the dad of a teenager. It’s crazy.

I love that answer. It highlights the fact that we are all full human beings, and that answer had nothing to do with your business.

It’s about another big piece of your life.

SM: It has everything to do with my business because my family, my business, everything, we’re all one.

There are lines, I guess, of separation, but we’re all in it together and it’s hard for one to be in a good place and everything else to be shitty. It all needs to work together.

It’s similar to how we’re describing how we define our community, when I was talking about our producers, our guests, and our staff. We draw it as an equilateral triangle, because there’s no member of the community who’s more important than the other, and each of those members are inextricably linked and each member of the community’s success is driven by the success of the others.

It’s the same with my family. I can’t be successful at work without the support of my family, and my family’s success is often driven by or dependent on the success of the business. It’s difficult, at least for me, to keep the separations completely clean.

As you’ve been scaling, how do you make sure the rest of the company is living those values and understands it’s all connected?

SM: Everybody in our organization knows the mission and their role

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CONSCIOUS COMPANY MAGAZINE

in it. We teach it and we talk about it every day. If situations arise, we come back to the mission. And we have lots of missions (see page 54). We have our overall mission of “creating community through food,” but we also have a product mission that guides us on what we want our product to look like. We have a service mission, which guides us on what we want our service to our guests to look like and the service to each other. We have a training mission, which guides what we want our training and development to look like. So we’ve got these aspirational pieces that keep us aligned and going in the right direction.

The other piece that keeps us working on a real fundamentally strong path going forward is the fact that we have a 10-year vision and we spent about 16 months — part of 2012 and all of 2013 — writing our 2024 vision. I included every single person in the organization in the process of writing the vision. We were about 250 people in the company at the time.

Initially, a small group of us came up with the outline and the areas we wanted to address. We got seven key buckets we wanted to make sure we covered. What we wanted our food to look like; what we wanted our service to look like; what we wanted life for our staff to look like; what we wanted our impact on the community, our impact on the environment to be; what we wanted our relationship with our vendors to look like; and what we wanted our financial scope and growth to look like.

We started to fill in this outline, and had an initial rough draft that I then shared with everybody in the company. We shared it in both English and Spanish. Then I went to department meetings and literally went line by line and deliberated word over word with everybody in the company. Everybody had a chance to give me feedback. I cherish the copy I used; it’s so full of red marks with the input I got.

I realized at that point that everyone really cared and everyone

Bi-Rite runs a 3-acre farm in Sonoma wine country.

wanted to do a good job, that everyone wanted to be part of having this impact. This vision then went through a couple more iterations — I also had staff come to me on their own, one on one, because they didn’t feel comfortable talking in a group — and then we finalized it with everyone’s blessing. That then became a shared vision, which gives us the alignment we need and the sense of purpose and understanding of what everyone’s role is.

Now we use our mission and our vision to make sure that we’re hiring appropriately. It’s helped attract great talent to us. It’s also helped us make sure that we didn’t hire people who didn’t fit in. Folks come along and want to be a part of a company that’s going to grow nationally?

Well, that’s not what Bi-Rite’s going to be. We’re not going to get much farther than San Francisco. So, if you want to be this VP of Operations who’s going to scale it and turn it into the next Whole Foods, it’s not going to happen here. But if you want a company that’s going to go deep and really make a difference in the community we operate in, then it could be a great place for you.

It starts at the interview process

and then it continues with every single day of training, which never stops; we’re all in training every single day while we’re here. Understanding that, I think, helps us also work much better together.

What’s giving you hope?

SM: Oh, God. So much. My daughter’s generation gives me hope. I’m so excited about the next generation of our future leaders. I love interviewing staff members who are in their 20s and talking to them about what they’re hopeful for and what they see. They’re limitless in how they see possibilities. I’m excited about how much they care, how much difference they want to make.

I’m excited that they’re wanting to find that intersection in their work that has purpose. I get fired up about it. It makes me really happy to see that. Photos: Bi-Rite and 18 Reasons

GET MORE INSPIRATION

Go to consciouscompanymedia.com/ bi-rite-vision to download the full text of Bi-Rite’s 2024 vision statement, available publicly for the first time ever.

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LEARN THE FOUR C’S OF A

SUCCESSFUL EMPLOYEE VOLUNTEER PROGRAM Volunteer programs for employees help workers feel more fulfilled and engaged. Use this framework to raise your program to the next level.

BY KRISTEN CARLSON Nearly three-quarters of employees say their job is more fulfilling when they have opportunities at work to make a positive impact on social and environmental issues, and 77 percent say it’s important their employer provides them with hands-on activities around social and environmental responsibility, according to Cone Communications. It’s no wonder that we’re seeing a growing interest from businesses on how they can develop employee volunteering programs that positively impact employees, the workplace, and the world.

King Arthur Flour employees at a local foodbank.

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Yet it can be hard to know where to start. Or maybe you already have a volunteer program in place, but participation rates are lower than you’d like. Try using the Four C’s framework, which identifies the four most important elements of an employee volunteer program.

Keep in mind that this framework is not a step-by-step program. Instead, you should reflect on your organization’s culture, strengths, and weaknesses to determine how to develop these four elements in your employee volunteer program.

INSIDE FOUR B CORP 1 // COMMIT Grassroots support for company initiatives can spur action, but for important, companywide programs like an employee volunteering program, it’s vital to have executive-level commitment. Ideally, there should be an executive who will oversee the employee volunteer program and who can advocate for it amongst their peers.

Making your employee volunteer program an executive-level conversation also ensures that leaders of all business units are aware of the program, increasing the chances of information spreading to all employees from the top down. The more executives, managers, and business leaders who support and evangelize an employee volunteer program, the more likely it is to become embedded in a company’s culture.

2 // CONNECT In order for employees to see the value of a volunteer program, it’s helpful to connect it to something that they already view as important to the business. The best way to do this is to review your organization’s mission, vision, values, or purpose statement and explain how the employee volunteer program relates to that statement.

Reviewing your mission, vision, and values can also provide guideposts for what types of volunteer opportunities your business should offer. Providing opportunities that relate to your corporate goals ensures that employees don’t feel like they’re just being asked to volunteer on behalf of an executive’s personal philanthropic interests.

That said, the best volunteer programs provide a variety of ways for employees to participate in employee-sponsored volunteering.

Timberland’s employee volunteer program, called Path of Service, was founded 25 years ago and provides its employees worldwide with up to 40 paid community service hours each year. Atlanta McIlwraith, the senior manager of community engagement at Timberland, says, “When service is easy, balanced, and flexible, it stays relevant to employees, and encourages them to volunteer for causes that matter most to them.” Mcllwraith also notes that one of the key lessons her company has learned is to “strike a balance between volunteer events that address strategic issues for the company with the ability for employees to serve in ways that speak to their own passions.”

EMPLOYEE VOLUNTEER PROGRAMS

BY FLIP BROWN

>> BEN & JERRY’S HOMEMADE INC.

At one of the most iconic socially responsible companies, the employee volunteer program is celebrating 10 years of activism. In 2016, the company’s 475 Vermont employees contributed 3,258 hours of service. The company provides each employee with 40 hours of paid time off every year to work with local service providers.

>> OPTICOS DESIGN INC.

This urban design and architecture firm with 17 staff members started its EVP in 2016, and 12 employees logged 72 hours of service. Employees can donate up to 16 hours per calendar year towards a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, with the stipulation that the time may not be used for nonprofits “that discriminate based on creed, race, religion, or sexual orientation.”

Managers noticed that employees tend to forget the program exists, and so have committed to participating as an entire firm during an additional community service day once a year.

>> KING ARTHUR FLOUR COMPANY

This employee-owned company has an EVP going back to 2000, and in 2016 it had 278 workers contribute 5,294 hours of service. King Arthur donates 40 hours per year for all employees — whether full- or part-time — who can use them to support a 501(c)(3) organization, library, or school.

Key lessons learned: Provide specific guidelines (e.g., whether or not travel is included), set up specific events so employees don’t always have to look for their own projects, and have a tracking system to measure progress and impact.

>> RHINO FOODS

Cookie-dough inclusions maker Rhino is perhaps best known for its innovative Income Advance Program, yet its EVP is now in its second year. Its 130 employees receive 8 hours of Volunteer Time Off per year, and in 2016, the company documented 137 hours. “We are an around-the-clock operation with three shifts and many different departments,” says special projects manager Rooney Castle. “From a business perspective, the experience people have working alongside co-workers outside the plant is invaluable, and builds internal community in a way no other company initiative can.”

He suggests that some folks are not comfortable having the details of their projects shared, so managers now ask what they can share. Regular reminders and encouragement are also useful to increase participation.

Flip Brown is the founder and owner of Business Culture Consultants, a Burlington, Vermont-based certified B Corp that helps individuals and organizations experience more meaning, fulfillment, and results. He has a background as a furniture maker, ski industry executive, psychologist, nonprofit program director, and musician. He is the author of “Balanced Effectiveness at Work: How to Enjoy the Fruits of Your Labor Without Driving Yourself Nuts.” He loves his job.

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Ben & Jerry’s employees get 40 hours a year of paid volunteer time.

3 // COMMUNICATE When developing an employee volunteering program, it’s important to think carefully about how you will brand your program and communicate volunteer opportunities to employees. Even the best-designed programs will fall flat if employees aren’t aware of the opportunities.

Make a list of all of the communication channels available to you — e-mail, intranet, posters, table tents, green fairs, etc. — and learn what they’ll require from you in order to get your message out.

Philadelphia Insurance Companies (PHLY) has a long history of volunteering, which has become a cornerstone of its company culture.

The program, called TEAMPHLY, encourages employees to enhance the communities where they live and work through volunteering.

In 2016, TEAMPHLY volunteers completed more than 25,000 hours of community service.

One of TEAMPHLY’s keys to success is that its organizers have identified employees at the local level and given them the autonomy to identify and run volunteer programs, rather than having every event developed by the corporate team. Given that the TEAMPHLY Acts Administrators know their community and employees in the region better than those at the corporate level, this group can organize volunteer events that they 62

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think will be of interest to employees. They’ve also been trained to resolve any issues that may arise, answer questions, and share feedback with the corporate team. Thea Valero, corporate social responsibility specialist at PHLY, says, “This team is one of the most important keys to our employee volunteering program’s success. I have complete confidence in our TEAMPHLY Acts Admins to run events, which allows my team to focus on the broader corporate strategy.”

4 // COUNT We’re living in a data-driven society, and to be taken seriously, employee volunteer programs need to be examined from a quantitative point of view. The best way to do this is to develop measurable goals for your employee volunteer program. Metrics such as number of employees who volunteer, number of hours volunteered, and number of employees who use their full volunteer benefit are all common.

Measuring these data points and working toward a goal are the best ways to see when changes are happening.

Be transparent with your employees about your goals and the progress that you’re making toward them. Take the time to acknowledge those employees who participate and are helping you work towards those goals. We encourage compa-

CONSCIOUS COMPANY MAGAZINE

nies to set aggressive and challenging goals, but to celebrate successes on the way to hitting them.

CHOOSE YOUR FOCUS TO GROW YOUR PROGRAM Commit, connect, communicate, and count are the essential elements of an employee program because they demonstrate to employees that volunteering is a business priority, in addition to being good for them personally and for the community. If you’re just starting your employee volunteer program, start with the “connect” element.

If you’re trying to improve participation, pick the element that you think you’ll be able to improve the fastest, and go from there. With a little work, you’ll have an impactful employee volunteer program embedded in your company culture.

Photos by courtesy

Kristen Carlson is the marketing manager at WeSpire, the positive business company that helps companies design, run, and measure employee engagement programs for their entire workforces.

SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS PRACTICES

HOW TO BUILD

MEANINGFUL AND EFFECTIVE TEAMS

BY CREATING A SIMPLE CHARTER

You can turn any team into a community of practice and purpose by aligning intentions with practices through a charter document.

BY MINA LEE

Picture Team A, a group working on launching a new product at a successful midsize company. One associate worries that if she asks to spend time with her newborn, the rest of the team will think she’s not committed. Meanwhile, her boss just poked holes through another associate’s idea in front of top company managers, leaving him wondering if he should look for a new job. The work is getting done, but most people leave meetings feeling drained and confused, and morale is waning. Now imagine Team B, with the same external goal. Meetings are a place for laughter and connection in addition to productivity; everyone’s smiling before they even start. When someone suggests a new idea, the group takes time to consider whether it emerged from a place of fear or creativity and if it makes sense to prioritize it. When conflict arises or hard decisions need to be made, the team returns to its clear statement of values and principles to see if an answer lies there.

Which team is more likely to have a rewarding, positive impact on its members, achieve its goals, and create real change in the world? Which would you rather be a part of?

THE BEST TEAMS ARE REALLY COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE AND PURPOSE Team B is an example of what I call a “Community of Practice and Purpose” (CoPP). In contrast to spiritual communities focused on personal growth, or traditional business or volunteer communities focused on action, CoPPs are a hybrid that recognizes that our inner and outer worlds are linked. CoPPs focus on both personal development (practice) and contribution to the world (purpose). They are avenues for the personal growth and development of the individual, as well as avenues for the individual to express his or her purpose and contribution to the external world. No matter where you are, if you’re coming together with others for a purpose, you can be in a CoPP. And there’s more good news: as an individual, you can shift the communities you are already a part of towards practice and purpose.

WHY COMMUNITIES OF PURPOSE AND PRACTICE ARE SO IMPORTANT Communities are at the root of social change, and are necessary for the

integration and continuity of personal transformation. But don’t be misled into thinking that community is something that only happens once in a while, in particular settings. As humans, we’re always in community, anytime we’re in a relationship with a shared context and shared call to action. That could be with a partner, within a family unit, with employees, on a board, or with investors, for example.

At their best, communities hold their members accountable to commitments each person makes to themselves on how they want to show up, and provide reflections to uncover the roots of our unconscious patterns. A growing movement recognizes that communities of purpose and practice are crucial for creating the leaders of the future, as a leader’s personal development is directly related to how well they can manage volatility, uncertainty, ambiguity, and complexity (or VUCA, as they call it at Google).

Within the business world, regardless of industry, nourishing communities within and outside of an organization ensures its evolution and growth. Creating meaningful communities to engage customers, suppliers, investors, and partners

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over the long term develops enduring relationships that don’t fade with the latest trend. Meanwhile, communities within a company create more fluid knowledge networks and accelerate talent development as people coach each other more often. This persuades employees to stay and recruit their friends, increasing an organization’s talent competitiveness, especially among Millennials. It also creates a constantly evolving talent pool

Having a clear charter can help point to routines, rituals, and practices you’ll want to implement when you meet, and it also frees members from the need to ask for permission all the time when making decisions about how to act on behalf of the group.

Everyone becomes self-authoring and empowered as long as they’re acting in accordance with the principles. A charter is also useful because it allows the group structure to hold up even if

way to get clarity, and setting firm, authentic, mutually agreed-upon boundaries lets team members trust each other to take care of their needs and thus be in deeper connection.

What do you need in order to be at your best? For example: “We will avoid phone calls or emails over the weekend unless a decision needs to be made within 24 hours with revenue on the line.”

Finally, to create an effective

“You can have a value of ‘integrity,’ but what does it mean to act that way?” from which innovative solutions can spring.

At the core, the underlying “why” for CoPP is human development.

Creating these communities is a way to truly understand ourselves through our relationships and what we create in the world. A CoPP responds to a deep spiritual yearning, yet is grounded in doing something about the here and now.

TO CREATE A CoPP, START WITH A TEAM CHARTER Most likely, communities are already happening organically within your company and in your life as cohorts and colleagues come together to share information, support or coach each other, or accomplish tasks. One of the best ways to turn any community or team into a real CoPP is to start by writing down the group’s core principles in a shared team charter document. Think of this as a commitment the group members are making to each other concerning how to interact and what they’re trying to accomplish.

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a key leader goes away. And having clear, up-front agreements that the whole team buys into allows for much easier adjustment when someone falls out of line. It’s much easier to reflect on information and make a course correction about something a person has agreed to than to impose a need from the outside. No one gets empowered in monologue!

WHAT BELONGS IN A TEAM CHARTER Team charters should be full of actionable sentences that you can do something about. This is different from your team values. You can have a value of “integrity,” for example, but what does it mean to act that way? What are the commitments that you make to execute that value? For integrity, the commitment could be “We will do what we say, and we will inform each other beforehand if for some reason things change.”

In addition to affirmative commitments, charters should also include boundaries: what you’re not going to do. Defining the negative is a helpful

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guiding vision, a team charter should include your ideas of how you want to feel as you relate to each other; this is the part that most people forget.

Close your eyes and visualize how you are relating to each other in the future. What’s the tone? Does it feel friendly, inspiring, allowing, playful, easy, open, authentic?

HOW TO CREATE YOUR TEAM CHARTER How exactly you get started writing your charter will depend on the size and nature of the group, how well the members already know and understand each other, and how invested they are in going deep to become a CoPP. For a 200-person spiritual community that I’m a part of, the four primary leaders drafted the initial version of our charter, then brought it to the group. This worked because gathering for practice and purpose was already why everyone was there, so we just needed to come up with guidelines for how to hold that space. At the Boston Consulting Group, where I worked

as a consultant, every new team I joined was its own community. The manager would suggest the operating principles of how they liked to work, the team would discuss and give feedback, then a partner would read and sign off on the final version, leading to top-to-bottom buy-in. Meanwhile, for a 10-person board with lots of new members, I’d recommend that the person drafting the charter do one-on-one interviews with each member to get their feedback and buy-in before bringing a draft to them as a group.

While the exact method for getting started will vary depending on the situation, any team should follow these three basic steps.

1 INQUIRE AND CHECK IN TO CREATE AN INITIAL DRAFT An initial leader or small group should head the charge to start. Ask the questions below, and the ones above in the “what belongs” section, to begin articulating a set of initial commitments and principles. If you know the group well or you’re the one really setting the tone, check in with yourself about them. Otherwise, consider interviewing key team members to get a sense of what’s important to them.

• What’s really important with what we’re doing?

• What are our values, and how do we live them? In other words, what does someone doing that look like? What are the behaviors we admire?

• Why are we really here? Why did we decide to become a part of this, from a personal point of view?

• What kind of success do we want to celebrate as a community?

• What is the pain we want to relieve?

2 GET ALIGNMENT AND BUY-IN Once the core group of leaders has a working principles document, invite feedback from the larger community.

A key tip here is that the power of the principles document is contingent on the conviction of its ambassadors and how committed they are to living those values already. Move from that conviction inside of you and don’t be apologetic about asking for and presenting the idea. Trust.

Trust that all people want connection and are looking for clarity and safety to connect. You are creating a pathway for them to feel safe to express their needs and wants. (As a side note, Google found after two years of research and millions of dollars that this psychological safety was the number one factor for highperforming teams.) At this point, you’re trying to instill ownership in and emotional buy-in with the document among all members of the community, so really listen to what they have to say and their concerns.

3 LIVE IT Develop rituals and practices to anchor your principles in the way your community interacts. For example, if feeling gratitude and connection is important for how you want to be, you might want to start every meeting with a single-sentence gratitude statement from each person. As a guideline, speaking from “I” versus “we” or “you” creates more connection, vulnerability, and space for people to share their own experience separate from yours. Whatever the rituals, make sure there’s always someone designated to be in the lead to hold the space and remind the community that these principles are

important.

Depending on the cadence of the group’s work together, I recommend reviewing the charter and reiterating it nearly every time you meet so that you turn what’s on paper into a living culture.

Finally, whenever the group asks a strategic question, see if the principles can help answer it and guide decisions. Ideally, this charter will give you guidance on what to do in tough situations.

THE TRUE POWER OF COMMUNITY What if communities were the new social and human success metric?

What if we could see the human relationships and connections we foster as the legacies, products, or outputs of our companies and our lives? We’d create a world with less loneliness, fewer silos, and more common ground — more connection, more elation, more growth and progress, and more leverage for an organization’s underlying cause and purpose.

It is widely believed that Einstein once said, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” CoPPs recognize that in order to solve today’s challenges, we need to work together and evolve our inner consciousness as we go. In other words, we are what we create and we create what we are. The first step in creating what we want — both in ourselves and as communities — is to get clear with each other on how we’ll do that. Start with the charter, then go from there.

Mina Lee has served as COO of Xiaomi Southeast Asia and a consultant with the World Bank and BCG. These days, she provides support to individuals, foundations, and companies focused on raising consciousness. She has built communities of practice and purpose in Asia and the US and is passionate about scaling them.

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WORKPLACE CULTURE Pat Wadors is LinkedIn’s head of talent.

Inside LinkedIn’s

CULTURE OF BELONGING

LinkedIn’s head of talent, Pat Wadors, says treating people beautifully and helping them belong is the key to creating diverse, innovative teams.

LINKEDIN AT A GLANCE Location: Sunnyvale, CA Founded: 2002 Number of Employees: 10,000+ Impact: 500 million registered members worldwide Recognition: Included in the Human Rights Campaign’s 2017 Corporate Equality Index; Ethisphere’s World’s Most Ethical Companies list; Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work 2017 Employees’ Choice list; and the 50 Best Places to work in 2017, According to Employees list by Business Insider.

Structure: For-profit 2016 Revenue: $960 million Mission Statement: “Connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.”

“Honey, talent is the magic of any company.”

That’s what Pat Wadors’ uncle Roland told her when she was just 20 years old. A career counseling test had just suggested that “personnel” might be a good field for her, so she went to learn more about it from her uncle, who worked in HR. Several decades of dedication later, she’s making a name for herself as senior vice president of global talent organization at LinkedIn — a company that is itself focused on helping other businesses solve human resources problems. “I love what I get to do,” she says. “Here I am, head of talent at a talent-focused organization that makes revenue on talent products. That’s pretty cool. I get to be customer zero.”

Stepping into Wadors’ fourth-floor office at LinkedIn’s Silicon Valley headquarters, it’s clear she’s aiming for a very different vibe than the buzzkill, “follow-the-rules” stereotype of what an HR department is like. Her desk is made from refurbished barn wood and her own colorful paintings enliven the walls.

The cozy, inviting mood is deliberate — and

WORKPLACE CULTURE

it reflects her philosophy on what her job is all about. “I get to yes, I don’t start with no,” she proclaims. “I lead by ‘What are you trying to solve for?’”

Lately, Wadors is trying to solve for the thorny question of diversity: how to create a culture that truly, organically fosters more of it and harnesses the clear business benefits it brings. “The data shows that, especially in the tech space, we have not moved the needle on the number of women, blacks, or Latinos in our ranks, despite

Why is this human resources work your passion?

Pat Wadors: On average, 80 percent of a company’s operational expense is directly related to people. That’s on average. If you’re a service organization, you’re in the high 90 percent, and if you’re in a capital intensive [field], it’s maybe 25 percent, but still meaningful in how you navigate the market.

My uncle taught me that if you unleash people’s discretionary effort, that purpose-driven

I can’t help you in today’s job, let me help you get connected to somebody else, let me help you get to your next gig. If we can teach every leader to do that, and every employee to do that, the companies really thrive.

There’s no downside.

Tell me more about “belonging.”

PW: I stumbled on belonging in an odd way. I was invited to be a panelist at the Professional BusinessWomen [of California]

“I believe that everyone can give belonging moments to each other.” efforts to do so,” she wrote in a 2016 Harvard Business Review article. “Why not? What are we missing?”

Wadors thinks she has an answer: belonging. Despite all the talk in her field about recruiting and pipelines and unconscious bias, no one was talking about the feeling of being a part of a company’s culture or not — and how that affects who chooses to join or stay.

Wadors is now on a mission, both inside LinkedIn and beyond, to explore what it means to bring this idea of “belonging” into the heart of our conversations about how to create the best workplace for all. We recently sat down with her to discuss what “belonging” really means, how to create thriving company cultures, and more.

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person, into the work the company needs to do, you unleash unlimited power and opportunity for that business. It just makes sense to align a person with passion, purpose, and business, and celebrate who they are in a respectful way to unleash that capability in the marketplace.

That’s why being head of talent was exciting to me, because you can tweak the levers to get to the outcome of a great culture, this amazing experience, and teach people that even when you’re giving bad news — when I tell you of a performance gap or your job’s being eliminated — I can help you feel respected and supported, your anxiety is lower, you’ve been communicated to transparently along the way. You feel that I care about the outcomes, and if

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Conference in 2016. The moderator asked me to tee up the panel with a speech, and I said, “On what?” She said, “Diversity.” I almost scoffed. I said, “This is a diversity forum for women. I think they know.” She laughed and she said, “No, I want you to talk about how you feel.”

When someone asks me how I feel about something, I can’t help but change my perspective. I thought about it a lot that night; my mind was twirling.

Diversity and inclusion is necessary, but not sufficient. We need rules, we need processes, we need to make sure we’re fair.

I believe in all those things. But I know it’s not enough, because the world hasn’t changed enough and we’re all stumbling on this path. We embrace, intellectually, diversity of thought. We don’t embrace emotionally how to

make that real.

My aha! moment at 3:00 a.m. was remembering when I didn’t belong, when I knew I was other. You know the Sesame Street song, “one of these things is not like the other?” I felt that a few times in my life. It’s a distinct feeling. When the crowd leaves you, when you’re not picked for the team, when your gender gets in the way, when your sexual orientation — or, in my case, my dyslexia got in my way and shut me down — you’re “less than.” You don’t feel safe.

But when someone opens a door of belonging and says, “I know we have to read this long book and you’re really struggling. Can I help you read? Do

you want to switch paragraphs?

I’ll read a page, you read a page,” and they help me read it faster and not make me feel bad or stupid, that’s a belonging moment. It’s through those belonging moments I found my superpowers, my voice — at work, at home, with peers. I believe that everyone can give belonging moments to each other.

So, I shared with the moderator, “I think belonging moments matter,” and she said, “How would you introduce this?” I got to have another sleepless night.

Then the next day I was driving and thinking about how do you remember something? Especially in technology, it’s acronyms. So I came up with diversity, inclusion,

A great workplace culture is more about connection and trust than about perks — though having both is obviously nice.

belonging — “DIBs.” I’ve called dibs for the front seat all my life, because I’m the baby out of eight and if I wanted the last cookie, I’m calling dibs. I thought the acronym worked and I introduced it at this event and then I started researching, because it struck an emotional chord.

Professor Greg Walton at Stanford has been doing research for over a decade on belonging, on the mindset and the genetic push that we have as human beings to belong and why that’s needed for survival and thriving. Then I found Paul Zak, a social economist, and what the brain does when you tell stories and how it brings community.

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6 WAYS

TO HELP YOUR COLLEAGUES FEEL LIKE THEY BELONG 1. MAKE INTRODUCTIONS. Show appreciation for the whole person; go beyond their role and responsibilities. Add tidbits that are unique to the individual.

Use the language of belonging: “This is Sara — she is part of our research team.”

The word our really adds the feeling of being on a team.

2. ASK. Start with a simple, genuine question: “How do you feel? How are you today?” Then listen.

3. SOLICIT INPUT IN MEETINGS.

There are three ways to foster inclusiveness at meetings. Invite someone to the meeting, ask their opinion, and follow up with questions so they truly feel heard.

And when someone speaks, let them finish their thought — do not speak over them.

4. DELEGATE. When you as a manager “give” an agenda item to someone on your team, it conveys real ownership of the item, trust, and an opportunity for impact.

PW: You can. [See tips, left.]

You can give moments to each other, but if you want to operationalize it and make it real, you sit with your team and have your stories being told. You talk about a moment when you didn’t belong and when you did belong, so I feel for you.

Storytelling releases serotonin, certain chemicals in your brain. Hearing a personal, vulnerable story, it gets in your heart, because you start putting yourself in that situation. The biggest tool I use is storytelling, and then trying to teach my leadership team and their teams to pause for the story, to hear the story, to give it a moment. You’ve got to give it a moment.

Do you do this in teambuilding or before you start every meeting?

5. PAY ATTENTION. Put away devices

PW: Both. If you want to form and storm a team, you’ve got to go pretty deep.

6. SHARE STORIES. An important part

You have to go offsite, tell your stories, open your hearts?

at meetings. Be fully present for conversations with colleagues. Show respect to everyone.

of creating a sense of belonging is sharing our stories. Storytelling means two things.

First, you, as the storyteller, care enough about your audience’s career journeys to show your own vulnerability and share your mistakes and successes. We can learn from each other. Second, we can begin to see ourselves in someone else’s shoes. We begin to see possibilities.

These tips from Pat Wadors originally appeared in the Harvard Business Review.

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PW: Or onsite, and have dinner together. Share a pizza.

Whatever you need to do, but you have to get to know the human. My staff, we start every meeting with, “What am I grateful for?” We just go around the horn quickly and —

personal, professional — you give thanks for others. You immediately pull the heart into the room. When you have operators who want to go on to the checklists, you have introverts who want to be quiet, you have extroverts who just want to dominate, it pulls everyone in on an even field for a bit.

I want to go back to DIBs. What are the steps your fellow leaders need to start taking?

PW: “Diversity” is what makes us unique. “Inclusion” is about actions. It’s how we treat you, how we invite you to the table and do it fairly and honestly and trustingly. How I feel is the “Belonging.” Do I feel psychological safety? Do I feel a sense of community? Can I be my unique self? Because then you can unleash superpowers.

If companies look at that full equation, that creates the employee experience of diverse thought. That’s what companies really need: diverse thought to create great products, to go out into the market and understand diverse customers and serve the needs and be profitable. Giving your employees permission to be authentic. And permission means model it. Don’t just say it, show it. Be willing to get in an awkward conversation and stay there because there’s not one right answer. Having the right intent, the right heart, that these diverse points of view and experiences actually make us better.

Is there a way to encapsulate what you’ve built here?

PW: I have a personal belief about treating people beautifully. And we teach managers and teams how to welcome talent into the workplace. Not, “This is Crystal. She’s great at Excel.”

Rather, “This is Crystal. She loves horseback riding. She loves to paint. She’s really going to help us craft our stories, and I’m super excited she’s on our team.”

We actually show videos teaching managers about onboarding and

storming. We’ll have a site where you can put in your notes after the meeting.”

We’re trying to figure out ways that you can be you, contribute your voice, where you feel safe and respected and that sense of belonging, and that accommodating your uniqueness is actually a gift, because you’re not alone.

There are five other people with the same need.

What’s your advice to others trying to unlock the secrets of talent?

wasn’t quite what I wanted. It doesn’t work in Timbuktu.” I’m saying, “Yeah, that’s fair feedback. Let me tweak it.” So the next year I improve. Then you as an employee go, “You know what, Pat listened to my voice.

She cares about my experience.

She didn’t tweak everything I asked for, but what she did made sense.” And so when I ask you to change more behaviors, you’re going to be more willing to go with me on a journey, less resistant.

“Every decision point, every interaction, you will create a feeling. People remember the feeling, not what you said.

They’ll remember the behaviors and how you treated them.” what an impression you make.

How you welcome someone sets the tone of, perhaps, how long they stay with your company and how willing they are to share their ideas. Every decision point, every interaction, you will create a feeling. People remember the feeling, not what you said.

They’ll remember the behaviors and how you treated them.

We also teach managers how to run an effective meeting so every voice is heard. We launched the Quiet Ambassador Network program [within LinkedIn] last year with Susan Cain’s “Quiet Revolution” to teach extroverted leaders how to pull the most out of introverts. “I’ll give you the notes of the meeting 24 hours in advance so you have time to sift through and have a point of view. I won’t put you on the spot. We’ll reduce our brain-

PW: You won’t be a great organization unless you have a foundation of trust. Because we’re going to fail fast to move forward, but to fail you’ve got to have humility and vulnerability and trust. To move fast, you’ve got to be able to work within the gray. So, you can look at the soft skills that enable you to be great.

Then you build that capability of trust and you can iterate and innovate.

Talk more about that idea of failing and innovating and what that has to do with trust.

Large-scale change takes two to three years. And I know I’m going to screw it up the first year.

I can bet my lunch. Then, when I screw it up, you as a manager and employee will be like, “That performance management thing

What do you love most about yourself?

PW: My authenticity. I have strived my entire life to be who I am at every moment.

What’s giving you hope?

PW: The fact that we’re having these conversations. This never happened in my professional career a decade ago. Talking about compassion, talking about belonging, didn’t happen in the workplace. Talking about racial issues, talking about this tension, didn’t exist. The world is better because we’re having this dialogue today.

Photos: LinkedIn

GET MORE INSPIRATION

For a longer version of this interview, go to consciouscompanymedia.com/ /14-wadors.

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WORKPLACE CULTURE

WHAT TO DO WHEN YOUR CO-WORKERS HAVE BEEN

New employees in a conscious workplace won’t always immediately fit into the culture, especially if they’ve learned other patterns at previous jobs. Here’s how to help your new colleagues better align with the rest of the team.

JESSICA G. HARTUNG

Remember the legends of children found in the woods having been “raised by wolves”? Isolated from human contact, they had no manners and didn’t know — or care — about the accepted cultural norms of the society that found them. As a result of their circumstances, their behavior was seen as raw and uncouth by human standards.

In the modern workplace, co-workers arrive at your organization from all types of prior workplaces, some of which could be more analogous to a den of wolves than a conscious company. Recent high-profile cases in the news reveal that some aggressive startup cultures may cultivate questionable ethics and underhanded behaviors in their eagerness for growth, promoting destructive norms that can cause tremendous damage to people, purpose, and profits somewhere down the road — maybe even after those people have found jobs in your organization.

These are likely smart, competent people, but because of where they were “raised,” they may fight with co-workers, create drama, withhold information, or have some emotional maturing to do before they can be a successful leader in a purpose-driven company. This is especially true if they haven’t had a chance to practice more effective ways of working with others. If they’ve been “raised by wolves” so to speak, they’re used to eating food off the ground and fighting for what they need, and they don’t think much about how their actions or behaviors affect other people.

Conscious corporate cultures strive for higher ideals like teamwork, civility, collaboration, and respect for a diverse community, which conflict with hyperdefensive behavior, overt aggression, and sabotaging

rather than supporting co-workers.

Conscious companies care and invest in culture because they know it permeates everything: decisions, expectations, performance, and more.

Yet even those who purposely escaped from working in a culture where one-upping, yelling, backstabbing, and being critical were the norm may find it hard to adjust to an open, transparent, team-oriented, diverse meritocracy. Building trust, establishing new habits, and gracefully navigating different perspectives takes time.

THE IMPORTANCE OF COWORKER RELATIONSHIPS

Co-worker relationships are key in taming the wild wolf habits that might otherwise have a negative effect on your team or culture. One of our clients — let’s call him “Josh” — experienced this situation: Josh is soft-spoken and conflict averse. He is known for being kind and collaborative in his role as a team leader at a research company.

One of his biggest pain points has been holding others accountable when they aren’t delivering what they were assigned or have agreed to do. He’s just not comfortable being confrontational, so he sends reminders and gently coaches team members to get what he needs. As a result, he’s now having trouble with a peer — Tracy — whose work intersects with his.

Tracy came to Josh’s company from one with a very competitive, combative culture. It wasn’t uncommon for her colleagues, even in the same department, to undermine one another to advance their agendas. The employees of Tracy’s former organization fiercely carved out a territory of expertise, chased funding sources, and aggressively defended projects against others who might have tried to claim credit for a discovery or take a slice out of available resources. Although Josh understands this, he feels blindsided

by Tracy’s oppositional approach to getting things done.

From the get-go, Tracy has raised

her voice at other staff members, interrupted, and seemed to compete for airtime with whoever is in the room. When Josh works alongside her, he feels bullied into solutions that seem better for Tracy than for the company. Josh cares about harmony in the team, and Tracy’s behavior is a violation of the company’s practices around valuing diverse opinions and collaboration.

In response, he begins avoiding Tracy, which of course doesn’t solve anything. What he needs is a way to deal with the breach of their culture without creating an enemy.

What could Josh do to bring back harmony? These three stages of change can guide you and your coworkers in deliberately developing more effective behaviors.

USE THE THREE STAGES OF CHANGE TO HELP COWORKERS ADAPT

Behavioral change of the type that Tracy will need in order to fit in with a conscious company culture does not happen in one step. When we first try out new ways of thinking and acting, we are clumsy, like a baby learning to walk. Over time, we catch and correct ourselves and learn more effective methods. At each stage of change — awareness, willingness, and skill-building — a person grapples with a different set of issues, and co-workers, including conflict-averse folks like Josh, can help propel these transitions.

1. AWARENESS

Think back to a time when you had a professional growth spurt — a time when you were really learning a lot about your field, profession, or role.

How did you first become aware of the areas that needed growth?

Perhaps you received feedback from someone pointing out a weakness, or a class inspired you to reach for a higher level. Sometimes we become aware of the need for growth because what worked for us in the past isn’t working any more. Awareness is the first step in the professional growth cycle we all use to become

more effective leaders.

Becoming aware of the gap between a desired level of capability and our current ability is the realization that kicks off deliberate growth on the job. Trying to help someone build skills before they are aware of the need to do so can be a waste of time. They just don’t see the relevance and tend to fight to maintain the status quo. Once they become aware, co-workers are more receptive to your efforts to help them — that is, if they are willing.

2. WILLINGNESS

Just because we are aware of a weakness or gap doesn’t mean we are willing to do anything about it.

Maybe the issue doesn’t seem that important, or it seems too overwhelming. We may unconsciously resist change by blaming others or making excuses. Sometimes, we are just not in the mood. We are simply not always willing to act on improving every professional area that we recognize needs it. A lack of willingness sounds like this: “I know I should, but [insert excuse here].”

When we are willing to improve, we move to exploring alternatives and considering new practices.

Perhaps we never want to make the same mistake again, we were backed into a corner, or we inherently want to get better. No matter our motivation for development, willingness is a critical ingredient to growth.

3. SKILL-BUILDING

This is where the action is. We read, discuss, try, study, experiment, ask, try, fail, try something else, get slightly better, and then try again more intelligently. It is an iterative process of developing skill and building new abilities in a specific focus area over time. Along the way, of course, you become aware of another area that needs developing — and then you go through the Awareness– Willingness–Skill cycle again.

Use the “co-worker feedback tips” (see next page) for each stage of the change process to help those in your workplace come more in line with

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STAGE

PROCESS UNDERWAY

COWORKER FEEDBACK TIPS

{ {

AWARENESS

WILLINGNESS

SKILL

The transition from not realizing any need for change to acknowledging (at least to oneself) that there is an issue that needs to be addressed.

Recognizing the need for change.

Cultivating an interest in doing something to address the issue.

Wanting to change.

Trying out new behaviors to build new habits and abilities. Making change, while making allowance for occasional returns to former behaviors.

• State the obvious in a non-judgmental way.

• Reflect on themes, using facts from several occurrences.

• Provide honest feedback and compassionate understanding.

• Use your imagination to consider alternative ways to handle the situation.

• Discuss which might be best or see if they have other suggestions.

the company’s culture.

When Josh quietly asks Tracy if she is aware that her behavior is inconsistent with their company culture, Tracy explains that intellectual arguments at her last job almost always involved direct criticism. Voices were raised when people argued, but it was valid to challenge one another. It was “no big deal.” It showed people were passionate, she says. Everyone learned to roll with it. Her implication is that Josh should too.

However, successful collaboration in Josh’s company involves more curiosity and stronger teamwork. All voices need to be heard. That means there isn’t room for any one person to dominate meetings or belittle others’ ideas.

Tracy doesn’t believe this is important at first, but after some reflection and observation of how the rest 78

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• Discuss the costs and benefits of current behavior(s).

• Help focus their time and energy on the issue.

• Encourage small, specific steps or experiments.

of this team functions, she realizes that she is out of step and begins working on shifting her approach.

She talks with Josh before meetings to bounce thoughts and impressions off of him and learns to listen, give more support, and strengthen relationships with team members.

It isn’t a straight line to improvement, and conversations with Tracy are more candid than Josh is really comfortable with, but by building understanding — and learning to laugh at some of their own idiosyncrasies — a stronger sense of cooperation and mutual respect emerges.

It’s unrealistic to expect people to have proper manners when, in effect, they come to us having been “raised by wolves.” Learn to recognize moments of influence with your co-workers and address them with humor and grace. We are all works in

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• Learn what supports the progress or triggers relapse.

• Provide tools, practical suggestions, and encouragement.

• Appreciate and acknowledge successes and new skill levels.

• Be understanding about the ups and downs required to grow.

progress, with mastery in some areas and arrested development in others.

Learning from, and with, co-workers is how we all strengthen professional relationships and synergize a corporate community we can all be proud to work in.

Jessica G. Hartung is the founder and CEO of Integrated Work, a company that partners with mission-driven organizations to apply leadership development in everyday work experiences, accelerating impact and achieving measurable results. Building customized, real-time, applied leadership development systems for executive teams is their passion. They help clarify focus, co-design strategic options, provide tools and mentorship, and build leadership capacity to accelerate positive impact. For more resources for renewing yourself and avoiding burnout, visit integratedwork.com/ resources and its sister site, workthatmatters.com.

parting thought...

“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.”

— Albert Einstein