Working with Purpose: 5 Pillars for Values-Driven Teams
When Coforma was started (as &Partners) in 2017 by Victor Garcia, Andrew Miller, and myself, we knew that this company would bring together talented people to leverage a host of capabilities — research, design, engineering, product management, problem solving. Those are the cornerstones of any tech forward firm, but but we wanted to be more than just a talent pool.
We wanted to create an organization that had purpose, that valued craft, and that truly cared for the people at its core. We wanted a firm that was empathetic, that valued care and understanding personally and professionally, and that valued evolution in the way we were organized and in the way we engage with the world. In order for our research, design, engineering, and problem solving to truly hinge on those core values, we needed to lay a foundation that supported both those basic business capabilities and those core values. That meant we had to do things a little differently, and there was no playbook to follow.
In setting up our firm, we developed five major pillars to form that supportive foundation: establish norms and habits, foster creativity habitually and intentionally, engage in ethical projects, enable mutual accountability, and work in transparency.
Establish Norms and Habits
We developed norms and habits for our internal and external practices based on our company’s core values. Clearly defined norms and habits, whether it’s a certain way we communicate about a certain type of scenario, or a rubric that helps us select which projects to go after, enable us to work effectively and in a mission-driven way that gives everyone an understanding of our approach. We can honor the individual’s work needs within a pre-established framework of habits that we know support an organizational foundation that we believe in because every norm and habit stems from a core value.
For example, one of our core values is small, adaptable teams. We believe in the power of small, diverse teams to collaborate and get things done. We align theory with practice to ensure our team is nimble and adaptable by:
- Empowering directors to make decisions within each of the major components of our business.
- Using Agile practices to help us iterate more quickly, keep project development moving forward productively at every step, and keep all of our internal work processes lean.
- Using technology to facilitate collaboration between small teams who work on many different projects, including Asana as a task management and project management tool, G Suite as a complete command and control suite of products, Zoom for virtual meetings between distributed team members, and Slack as the main communications channel. In the end we just do what is necessary to get the work done. If that’s a great tool, we use it. If that’s an adjustment we make in a workflow, we do it.
- Partnering with like-minded companies to pursue contracts that require more extensive skill sets, or a combination of skill sets where we have some strengths and they have some different strengths. This allows us to stay small but to broaden our opportunities and our impact on a case-by-case basis. We look for projects that suit our team’s abilities and try to partner with companies with staff that fill in our gaps, and vice versa, so that we can deliver the greatest amount of good to the largest number of people.
- Monitoring small business legislation with the help of the Digital Services Coalition, of which we are one of the founding members and board members. We monitor SDVOSB set asides for federal contracts. We advocate for local, remote, and small team awards.
Norms and habits are our cornerstones, and they keep us all on the same page. When a new person joins the team, we introduce them to the core values at the outset of employment, and they quickly become versed in the norms and habits that guide our daily work practices to ensure those core values are reflected in everything we do.
Foster Creativity Habitually and Intentionally
We can’t expect our people to provide creative solutions if we don’t foster creativity habitually, intentionally, and responsibly. We accomplish this by:
- Encouraging individuals to try different approaches and solutions in their projects. However, we must always aim to do no harm to customers and clients, while pursuing better or different outcomes.
- Sharing and discussing examples of creative approaches to problems in a dedicated Slack channel.
- Assessing the impact of creative solutions, and applying them to future projects.
In the legacy tech analysis we did for Indian Health Services, we were tasked with conducting a “tech assessment” of the agency’s legacy RPMS system. At first, the idea that we would evaluate how people interacted with RPMS — such as doctors, nurses, administrative staff, IT staff, and patients — and that we would analyze processes, such as how productivity and efficiency was impacted by a system that only allowed entries to be tracked by the specific user that input notes into the system, was not considered “tech.” The stakeholders meant software, hardware, and technology artifacts when they said technology assessment, but that is not how we work and we knew we could give them something better if we incorporated people and processes into our assessment.
We navigated this disconnect by developing a proprietary framework that allowed us to evaluate the legacy technology and give the agency the answers they were looking for while adding value to that answer and putting people at the center of our work. We couched this solution in the need for the analysis to be performed from a people, process, and technology lens.
This approach required some creative thinking that would resonate with stakeholders, and it simultaneously honored our core value of human-centered design.
Engage in Ethical Projects
We engage in ethical projects and practices as a rule. We work purposefully by establishing clear ethics and guidelines for what we do and what we don’t do.
To achieve this, we developed an intake framework for potential new partnerships and projects, which articulates our ideal partnerships as well as our deal breakers, and acts as a sieve through which only good work can flow toward our team. This framework scores a potential project before we pursue it. It must meet certain criteria that guarantee it isn’t a dealbreaker, and above and beyond that, it must meet other criteria based on our company’s ethics and values before we will move forward with a proposal. In addition to meeting those criteria and scoring highly, the company founders must agree unanimously that the project or partner is a good fit for our team and values.
As you can imagine, it is not always easy to tow this line. For example, we initially thought we could work with an organization that has a law enforcement component. We determined that that was a mistake, but not quickly enough. In response to that experience, we changed our standards. We won’t work with police forces. We won’t work with arms manufacturers. We won’t help any entities do things that hurt people or our environment.
Enable Mutual Accountability
Even though we each must have individual accountability as responsible workers, we operate in a wolf pack mentality. The team supports the individuals and creates a safety net around decision-making. In other words, we have each other’s backs when things are going well and when things are challenging.
Recently, we worked on a curriculum development project for a branch of the military. We entered the contract without clarity on the deliverables — what exactly the deliverables were, how they would be delivered, and what qualities would deem them “acceptable” for the successful delivery of the contract. That was a hard lesson to learn because the demands of the contract turned out to be outside of the scope of work we believed we were entering.
However, we were committed to completing the contract with a favorable outcome.
While it was difficult, we worked to truly understand what was necessary to complete the contract until the very last day of the project, and held one another to doing the right thing even though we knew we were operating under expectations that were out of scope.
We operated in a wolf pack mentality by protecting the team from bearing the weight of the substantially challenging contract circumstances, but we were critical and offered constructive criticism internally to one another in order to help each individual fulfill their commitment to the contract.
Work in Transparency
Transparency is a value we gleaned from the Agile manifesto. We’ve adapted it for our company and our needs. It is essential to trust among team members, and trust in the company.
Transparency is also essential to creative solutions, because you don’t know where the best idea or the best path forward is going to come from. When everyone is informed, everyone is a stakeholder, and everyone has a chance to contribute and collaborate on solutions and on ideas.
We achieve transparency in the following ways:
- Internally, there are hardly any conversations that people aren’t part of. Decisions are made in the open.
- We discuss who we want to work with and why.
- We discuss upcoming projects, as well as ones in progress.
- If there are challenges, we bring those out in the open.
- On a technical level, everyone has access to our sales pipeline and is encouraged to add cards and tasks and whatever elements are needed to make their jobs easier. They can also see the status of anything we’re working on in Asana.
- We also encourage communication to occur in channels that everyone has access to. This way everyone stays informed, and anyone can chime in and contribute.
“Like combining a fuel and an oxidizing agent in chemistry to create an explosive reaction, the bringing together of two subjective sensibilities can result in a third mind that will blow both parties away.” — Ravi Shankar
When you have transparency, you not only foster trust and knowledge, but you foster creativity.
Our team needed space and support to be able to achieve any challenges placed in front of them. Furthermore, those challenges, and the projects and products attached to them, needed to help make the world a better place, and they needed to do no harm. Creating the foundation to do the best possible work may vary from company to company. This is how we do it. These five pillars help us enact our core values in every aspect of our work. We believe that when you tell people they have to do things that matter, you also need to help them do those things. You need to provide support, and a framework for success. The only way for this ecosystem to function in a harmonious feedback cycle is to be deliberate and intentional about every decision and every process from the beginning.
This post was updated 9/27/2020 to reflect the company’s name change.
