How Self Awareness Can Empower a Healthy Company Culture
by Brian Pageau
At Foresight, our Purpose is to “Accelerate Sustainability, Champion Energy Management and Increase Profitability for our clients”. This statement is why we exist and a source of inspiration to each of our teammates. Our ability to feel connected to something larger than ourselves while seeing how our individual efforts impact the people and companies we serve is paramount to our ability to inch closer to our Purpose.
Viktor Frankl once said, “He who has a why, can bear any how.”
Simon Sinek helped us all realize in his TED Talk the importance of “Starting with Why”
Although Frankl and Sinek are two of our favorite authors, and we are intentional about Starting with Why and being as purpose-driven an organization as we can be, a Purpose statement is aspirational. It, therefore, can be tricky to operationalize into the day-to-day of any company. As a result of this dynamic, we created a Mission Statement about six years ago, which has been a phenomenal tool for catalyzing our team on a more consistent and tangible basis than our Purpose Statement.
If Purpose is Why, Mission is How
The word “mission” dates to approximately 1590, with Latin roots meaning “a sending off”. One of the more modern definitions of “mission” is “the business with which such a group is charged”.
At Foresight, when we talk about “mission”, we are talking about how we attempt to fulfill our Purpose. Our “sending off” is toward the destination of our Purpose Statement. How we get there is “the business” of our charge.
So, how do we attempt to fulfill our why? Our Mission is comprised of three distinct parts:
Pursue Individual Vitality
Develop Long-Term Partnerships
Embody a Growth-Mindset
Individual Health = Team Health
Over the past 14 years in business, we’ve developed our own tools, processes, and services to partner with our clients. We’ve also created our very own utility and ESG data management software platform. Despite our pride in building the business and making these significant investments in non-human initiatives, we intimately understand there is no replacement for the health and well-being of our people. The individual well-being of our team members directly impacts our ability to achieve greatness and fulfill our purpose. If our people are not in a good space mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, then our work will directly and or indirectly suffer.
We intentionally build a culture around Individual Vitality by promoting self-awareness and awareness of our teammates. There are many great personality assessments available, and at Foresight, we have found alignment with and value in Strengthsfinder and the Enneagram. The power in these assessments is not only in the assessment itself but in the collective experience. Through them, we develop a common language to layer into many aspects of our work throughout the year.
This emphasis on awareness cannot be a fleeting initiative if it is going to infiltrate a company culture. Consistency and persistence often outperform whatever the “new”, “hot” thing is. We try to continuously nurture and highlight the learnings from our tools throughout the year. Everyone from leadership to new employees must buy-in, and attempt to be living examples of the self-awareness we seek to embody.
How to Strengthen Awareness into Your Company Culture
A few ways we operationalize “self and others-awareness” include:
Every single one of our teammates takes the Strengthsfinder and Enneagram assessments as part of our new hire onboarding process.
Every one of our teammates also creates an “Employee Blueprint”. This one-pager is a “cheat sheet” of sorts for teammates to quickly remind each other of how they are wired, how they prefer to be communicated with, and how they prefer to be recognized.
Every week during our stand-up meetings, our people are encouraged to share both professional and personal highlights and lowlights from their week.
Our office has several graphic representations of these assessments on the wall as physical and visual reminders of our unique personalities and strengths.
Every quarter we meet as a whole team for a day and do individual and group exercises with these assessments.
We have consultants and coaches for deeper one-on-one sessions, whether our people are struggling with something specific or simply want to find new growth pathways.
If part of how we pursue our purpose is to advocate for the vitality of each individual, we must get great at knowing ourselves and knowing our teammates. If we can do this well, we can more effectively become the best versions of ourselves and do our best work. The challenge is immense, but we've found the reward of doing this work together to be well worth the effort.
