Can You Say What Your Principles Are?
Articulating your organization’s principles can help you foster a culture that empowers people to make better decisions in complex circumstances. Principles like those around equity, antiracism, justice, climate action must be stated in order to be solved for. In this post I’ll explain why to start with principles, and I’ll share Glidelane’s principles for our advisory and consulting work with clients.
As we near the end of the calendar year which is also the first year of Glidelane’s practice as an advisory and consulting shop, I’m thinking a lot about and experiencing a lot of firsts. This summer we engaged our first clients and delivered our first work around inclusive product, business development and talent strategy. We posted for the first time to let everyone know we’re open for business, and got our first client referrals. I did my first speaking engagements for Glidelane.
And now, this being Glidelane’s first blog post, I thought it would be appropriate to get down to first principles, and share what Glidelane’s principles are.
Why start with principles?
All good students of business know the Harvard Business Review’s Can You Say What Your Strategy Is? by Collins & Rukstad, which argued that individuals in most companies could not succinctly articulate their business’ strategy, and that the companies who focused their teams on knowing their strategy were more likely to succeed.
Yes, I do agree that every organization should know and help its people know their strategy. In fact, strategy solutions are explicitly part of Glidelane’s practice. But, if you’ll allow me to add another jam into this mix, recall Peter Drucker’s greatest hit, "culture eats strategy for breakfast." If an organization’s culture results in an uncountable number of micro-decisions made by its employees in a complex environment, strategy alone cannot guide what those decisions should be.
This is especially true in the complex space I have practiced in over my career at Google and now with Glidelane – the ESG and Impact space. If you are in this space – as an organization balancing profit with impact, or as a founder promising to deliver both – you are no doubt hearing questions about issues like equity, justice and climate action, and, once again (again, again) the question: “are these issues still important to driving our business?” And, as a black man practicing in this field, this question makes a challenging balancing act even more personal, and, complex.
When challenges get complex, knotted, we need simple rules to help us through. When competing priorities arise we need to remember what our first priorities are – those things that are non-negotiable.
Your organization needs a fundamental set of ideas, based on its mission and values, to help make hard decisions, and, increasingly, to help its people know what their organization stands for. Ideas to help people navigate. You need a map.
Principles are that map. They are the organization’s representation to the world of their character. If you know my principles, then you know what I stand for. And that extends to the organization.
This leads me to ask you: Can you say what your principles are? As a founder? As an employee of an organization? As an individual?
Sitting here towards the end of 2023 it feels pretty urgent to share what Glidelane’s Principles are, so you know exactly where we stand. These are the 9 Glidelane Principles that will help us determine who we most want to work with, and why. They will guide the creation and delivery of services to businesses, organizations – how we do the work. They will inform how we treat our clients and our team.
Glidelane commits to client engagement and business operations that foster:
Mutual benefit. We put our clients’ benefit first and foremost to create substantial client impact. We believe that clients’ profit and their contribution to people and our planet should be mutually beneficial, and will only engage in work that affirms this belief. We will also only engage in work that aligns to Glidelane’s principles;
Respect. We partner with respect for our clients’ teams and the Glidelane team, and the inclusion of each individual, their unique and diverse capabilities, perspectives, backgrounds and characteristics;
Equitable outcomes. We seek to ensure that our client solutions foster equitable access, economic opportunity and other beneficial outcomes for historically marginalized groups, including characteristics such as race, ethnicity, tribe, caste, gender, nationality, socio-economic status, sexual orientation, ability, and political or religious affiliation. We seek to engage clients focused on creating and investing in these equitable outcomes as most relevant to the outcomes they create through the course of business, including but not limited to their product users, customers, partners, suppliers, contractors and employees;
Antiracist action. Our practice will create, change, implement and follow business policy that is Antiracist, leading to equity between races, race-genders, race-sexualities and other intersections;
Sustainable impact. The protection of our global environment is our responsibility and one we share with our clients. Our work and operations will combat the root causes and effects of climate change including promoting the reduction of waste, emissions and use of natural resources, while seeking to do no additional harm to our planet;
Just impact. We aim to promote justice for people and communities everywhere we operate. This includes ensuring the health, safety, labor and human rights of all people impacted by our solutions and operations. We will promote equity and avoid adverse harm through our climate solutions. We will uphold ethical practice across our business operations;
Community-centered impact. When solutions impact communities we aim to create impact that is desired by those communities, and to avoid creating impact that conflicts with the community’s needs or principles. We seek to understand what success means to those communities and to align measures and methods of impact with our own;
Knowledge sharing. Since we are solving problems that are shared across industries globally, we aim to accelerate our impact by sharing our knowledge about impactful practice, programs and policy. We seek to translate local and industry-specific success to principles and practice that can be utilized globally;
Mutuality of principles. Principles above including respect, equity, sustainability and justice should be pursued mutually and synergistically, and never competitively. When impact trade offs must be considered we will apply a clear and transparent process, and will default to a principle of “do no harm.”
These Principles are derived from my years of practice in the Impact, Corporate Social Responsibility and nonprofit spaces where I aligned bottom-line value with value for communities and people who were typically marginalized from the economic and other benefits of industrial and technological progress. They are informed by my direct advisory to corporations and organizations dedicated to advancing racial equity, climate action and other impact issues through their business and products, and by my personal input into Google’s ESG and Responsible Procurement commitments. For Glidelane they will be a living document that will change as we grow.
Now, the best and really only way to know what anyone stands for is for them to show it. I would urge any organization or practicing individual to:
Write down you organization’s principles, or your individual principles,
Share them with your most important business collaborators, customers, clients or friends and incorporate their feedback,
Share your principles as broadly as you can,
Tag @Chris Genteel when you share on LinkedIn/social
Glidelane will be doing that showing with our clients, and you will know that every client we work with is showing us that they are committed to growing towards achieving our principles. We will be sharing the lessons we learn here, so come on back to glidelane.blog and join our subscriber list.
– Chris Genteel, Founder and Principal 😉