Becoming the Future of Work | As Told By Our Team Members
Last month, our team at LTHJ Global came together for its first official company-wide meeting. It was the first time that many of the team members would meet each other face-to-(virtual)-face.
LTHJ Global intends to remove real and perceived barriers that prevent our clients from becoming leaders in the “future of work.” To accomplish this, LTHJ Global has researched strategies that foster more diverse, equitable, and inclusive cultures.
In addition to sharing these strategies with our clients, we at LTHJ have to practice what we preach. During our three-day company-wide seminar, our team discussed LTHJ Global’s mission and how we planned to execute that mission in our client work. We described our vision for “the future of work” and the guiding principles that we hoped to foster in our clients’ organizations.
Here are our key takeaways from our time together.
We are Doing This Work Together
On the first day of training, we watched a video recording of a performance by the Alvin Ailey dance company.
It was a beautiful performance, and it was lovely to watch the dancers move as one collaborative body. While they did not move in unison, with everyone following the same steps, they still moved together. The video ended, and we were asked two questions: 1) Who was “keeping time” in the group … aka who was their leader? and 2) Who made a mistake?
The answer, and the discussion that followed these questions, resonated with all of us:
“The conversation that resonated the most with me … is about the Alvin Ailey dance performance — how there are no ‘mistakes’ or ‘leaders’ in a collective effort; how every action in every moment can be ‘right’ because it is the communication or language of the collective that is important. In the case of LTHJ or the organizations we serve, forward movement comes from respecting whoever is the lead, ‘keeping time’ for everyone else.”
“For me, seeing new faces come on board to LTHJ with ice-breaker games was such a purposeful, human start. Loved that we started with our connections to each other first, and experienced relating ourselves to the work was my highlight! … we were HUMAN-first!”
The Macro and Micro of The “I/We/Us” Work
Our commitment to anti-racism and inclusive design in the workplace is a focal part of our mission. To guide this work, LTHJ Global plots out one’s Anti-Racism Journey in three stages: the “I,” “We,” and “Us” work.
As the names imply, the I focuses on what the individual can do, the We focuses on what the company — as a collaborative body — can do, and the Us expands beyond our organization, and into societies to dismantle systemic and institutionalized oppression.
“What was amazing to me was the collective spirit of the group … a diverse group of women seeking to unite and start to ‘right’ some of the ‘wrongs’ in our world. It is something that I never thought could occur in my lifetime and I feel as if the world aligned for this to be the right cause at the right moment. LTHJ Global is pioneering a change that will be felt by many!”
“I appreciated the thoughtful structure that brought us through sharing what we individually were bringing to the endeavor, the alignment to the culture and ethics of LTHJ, and then kicking off the next stage of work. It was deftly done, putting into action the framework of I, We, Us.”
We are the “Future of Work”
Be the change you want to see in the world, said Mahatma Gandhi. At LTHJ Global, we fully intend to be. We brought a diverse group of individuals together — each of them with their unique perspectives about current company norms — and discussed what was working and what changes we wanted to see. During these meetings, we could, for a moment, imagine what the “future of work” would look like.
“One of the things I’m learning to better own and accept is that I am a sensitive person. My emotions are on my sleeve. My rigid religious upbringing, my family (whom I love dearly) and my corporate experience have all ‘taught’ me that being emotional is ‘bad.’ I’m working hard to unlearn this. … what an amazing experience it was to be in a [virtual] ‘room’ with all of you where I felt like I could exhale a little bit, sink into myself, and recognize that my sensitivity is part of my power, not a weakness. I am so excited to be part of this team and this mission!”
“I resonated with the discussions about how we can take our learnings about the ‘I, We, Us’ work and underpin it as the scaffolding/armature for all of our work both internally and outward-facing.”
“My biggest takeaway was that I felt like we were the future of work. I truly felt like we were embodying the principles we are sharing with our clients … and it’s working! I am so excited to help this company grow.”
“I was impacted by what appeared to me to be the willingness from everyone to embrace the call to redefine the ‘future of work’ both internally at LTHJ and externally for our clients. It was my experience that we were all deeply considering what it meant to do the ‘I, We, Us/They’ work. I was having the out of body experience of feeling like ‘Hey, we are in the middle of doing something revolutionary…is anyone else seeing and feeling this?’”
In Summary
This time together provided an opportunity for us to further connect and re-commit to our purpose as an organization. During the past quarter, we have already seen our clients foster more welcoming working relationships, and we look forward to building upon those relationships this year.
