Our Principals

Below are our management’s distinctive operating principals:-

• Give people permission to trust their own intuition and wisdom. In the course of our work, we all run into situations where we have no prior experience to rely on, and yet, intuitively, most of us know what to do. Management will simply encourage our staff to trust their own intuition and the accumulated wisdom.
• Give people only as much information as they can handle. The Management will give staff some simple instructions and recommend internal and external resources, but will not overwhelm people with far more than they can process. Providing too much information leaves people feeling incompetent and unworthy.
• Don’t take people’s power away. When we take decision-making power out of people’s hands, we leave them feeling useless and incompetent. There may be sometimes when we need to step in and make hard decisions for other people (i.e.. when they’re dealing with an addiction and an intervention feels like the only thing that will save them), but in almost every other case, our staff need the autonomy to make their own choices. The Management will empower all staff to make their own decisions within their realm of responsibility for Company. Management offer support but never try to direct or control employees.
• Keep your own ego out of it. This is a big one. We all get caught in that trap now and then – when we begin to believe that someone else’s success is dependent on our intervention, or when we think that their failure reflects poorly on us, or when we’re convinced that whatever emotions they choose to unload on us are about us instead of them. Managers will remain alert to their own tendency to become more concerned about their own success (Do the staff like me? Do their results reflect on my ability to manage? Etc.) than about the success of our employees in meeting their key performance indicators (KPIs). To truly support our staff, we need to keep our own egos out of it and create the space where our people have the opportunity to grow and learn.
• Make people feel safe enough to fail. When people are learning, growing, or going through transition, they are bound to make some mistakes along the way. When Management, as their mentors and leaders, withhold judgement and shame, we offer them the opportunity to reach inside themselves to find the courage to take risks and the resilience to keep going even when they fail. When we let them know that failure is simply a part of the journey and not the end of the world, they’ll spend less time beating themselves up and more time learning from their mistakes.
• Give guidance and help with humility and thoughtfulness. A good manager knows when to withhold guidance (i.e.. when it makes a person feel foolish and inadequate) and when to offer it gently (i.e. when a person asks for it or is too lost to know what to ask for). Although Management will not take our staff’s power or autonomy away, he will offer to do some of the more challenging parts of their jobs when needed. This is a careful dance that we all must do when we manage other people. Management needs to recognize the areas in which our employees feel most vulnerable and incapable and we need to offer the right kind of help with humility and without shaming them.
• Create a container for complex emotions, fear, trauma, etc. Especially when the Company deploys people in non-permissive environments while when we follow the above practices, people may feel that they are held in a deeper way than they are typically used to. They feel safe enough to allow complex emotions to surface that might normally remain hidden. Management needs to be aware that this can happen and be prepared to accept the situation in a gentle, supportive, and nonjudgmental way. Management needs to be an example of a place where people feel safe enough to fall apart without fearing that this will leave them permanently broken or that they will be shamed by others on a project. Management must always be there to offer strength and courage. This is not easy work, and it is work that we all continue to learn about as we face increasingly more challenging situations. We cannot do it if we are overly emotional ourselves, if we haven’t done the hard work of dealing with our own selves, or if we don’t trust the people we are working with. In such situations, Managers will do their best to show all employees tenderness, compassion, and confidence.
• Allow them to make different decisions and to have different experiences than you would. In large part, managing effectively involves respecting each person’s differences and recognizing that those differences may lead to them making choices that we would not make. Sometimes, for example, they make choices based on cultural norms that we can’t understand from within our own experience. When we accept people’s diversity, we release control and we honor differences.