Empowering Global Leaders: A Transformative Values & Culture Workshop at the 2024 GLT Summit

6 minute read

When I was asked if I could deliver a workshop in Catania, Sicily for the 180 Degrees Consulting (180DC) Global Leadership Team Summit, my answer was an emphatic yes!

The Global Leadership Team (GLT) is the body that leads the work of 180DC around the world. To understand just how committed the GLT are,  it must be emphasised that each member is a volunteer. Outside of their day-jobs, this amazing group of individuals dedicate their time and energy to the 180DC mission because they believe in the power of social impact.

It's rewarding, but exhausting - which is why it's vital to create a culture they feel aligned with, safe within, and energised by. Having delivered remote workshops for the GLT on sustainable motivation, burnout prevention, and dealing with failure and rejection, I was excited for an opportunity to connect with the team in-person.

GLT team members were flying into Catania from Europe, Canada, Mexico, and even Peru to attend the Summit- so, I wanted to ensure the workshop would maximise value for all attendees.

In the month before the Summit, I met with the CEO, Nick Charinos, multiple times to discuss what outcomes we wanted from the workshop. Together, we identified 3 key goals:

1. To motivate, inspire, and align the GLT with the work they do at 180DC.
   
2. To actively create a culture within the 180DC GLT that enabled them to sustain high levels of performance.
   
3. To ensure that the attendees left with valuable skills that would help them perform in every facet of their life, not just their work with 180DC.
   

What emerged was a workshop that covered the following 4 areas:

1. Identifying Our Personal Values:

Becoming aware of our own personal values: the drivers behind the actions we take & decisions we make. This involved:

• Analysing our behaviours (how we spend our time), our emotions (what emotions we most wish to feel, and those we most wish to avoid), and our identity (the characteristics we most desire to embody, and those we least wish to be associated with) to identify what our current values are.
• Understanding the difference between ‘towards’ and ‘away-from’ values - those that move us ‘towards’ pleasure emotions when we act in line with that value, and those that move us ‘away-from’ painful emotions when we act in line with them.
• Understanding the difference between ‘operational’ and ‘aspirational’ values - the values that actually drive us, versus those that we wish drove us.

Clarifying our ‘rules’ that we set for knowing whether or not our values have been fulfilled. Values are often abstract words, and how we define them will differ from one person to another. If we don’t clearly define how we know when we’ve successfully fulfilled our values, we’ll be at the mercy of outdated, inauthentic definitions that were subconsciously learned during childhood or inherited from our environment.

2. Clarifying 180DCs Values:

Looking at the five 180DC GLT values - Social-Impact Driven, Take Care Of Ourselves & Each Other, Take Ownership, Inclusive, and Eager to Learn - with respect to:

• Understanding the importance of continuously engaging with and referring to 180DC’s values to ensure a common vocabulary across multiple functions.
• Using values to provide a unifying blueprint to account for geographical cultural differences in working styles, and to better align on the guiding principles that outline ‘how’ 180DC will achieve their mission.
• Identifying the extent to which the five 180DC values are currently honoured, discussing the behaviours which are consistent with each of these values - and just as importantly, the behaviours which would violate these values!

3. Aligning our Personal Values with 180DCs Values:

Having considered both our personal values and 180DCs values, we then looked at the degree of alignment between them. This included:

• Recognising that the more aligned we feel with the organisation, the more intrinsically motivated and resilient we feel in times of change.
• Acknowledging that we should not expect, nor enforce, perfect alignment between these two sets of values!

Exploring where our values don’t align with curiosity and openness. Given that our rules for defining our values may be outdated or externally-imposed, it is important to embrace the idea that we can experiment with different definitions of our values that also feel authentic and equally ‘true’, but perhaps lead to a greater sense of alignment.

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4. Creating a Team Culture Protocol:

Bringing everything together to put 180DCs values in action through a set of ‘culture-making’ behaviours, practices and systems. This involved:

• Beginning to create a Team Culture Protocol to clarify what day-to-day behaviours, team practices, and systems & processes would embody the 180DC values, and how these can be sustained.
• Acknowledging that culture needs to be revisited and re-evaluated frequently due to its dynamic nature. Inconsistency in culture can cause decreases in psychological safety and operational efficiency while too much stability can lead to stagnation and groupthink.
• Recognising that culture must also grow as 180DC grows - don’t just seek people and processes that fit with your culture, but also look for what can add to your culture.
• Remembering that in tough times, we don’t rise to the level of our mission; we fall to the level of our culture. 

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So, what was my highlight from the workshop?

After doing the personal values activity, I asked everyone to say one word to capture how they were feeling. I’ve done this in the past - and I don’t expect positive words! So, I expected words such as ‘uncomfortable’, ‘disoriented’, ‘pensive’, as well as a few ‘inspired’, ‘hopeful’, ‘clear’. But instead of one word, I got so much more. The first person I asked gave a 1-minute response filled with honesty and vulnerability. The second followed suit. And the third…and so on…

I immediately realised that I needed to make a choice…

Bring everyone back on track so we can stay on time or permit something organic and potentially transformative to unfold. My intuition told me to go with the latter - and I’m really glad I listened to it.

The result: every single attendee shared their heartfelt and authentic reflections on the values they had identified, the challenges they were facing, and even the hopes and dreams they had for themselves.

There were tears. There was laughter. There was clarity. But most of all, there was warmth, support, and appreciation.

To every member of the GLT - thank you for your openness and willingness to share your personal experiences as you bravely explored the disorienting, yet fertile space between discomfort and growth. It was one of the most beautiful experiences I've been privileged to be a part of in all my years as a facilitator.

I went to the Summit with an open mind - curious to get to know the volunteers that I’d briefly interacted with through my remote workshops. Over the course of the summit, we climbed Mt. Etna, explored Catania, and embraced team-building activities. We engaged with the brilliant story-telling & impact measurement workshop ran by the charismatic team of Ilona Sediha and Tara Hermez from Strategy& Middle East, and worked through a powerful activity on Community Management delivered by Chris Garner (incoming CEO), Florence Duval-Roberge (Global People & Culture Specialist), and Nikolaus Stern (Global Lead AMER & EMEA Operations).

The more time we spent together, the more I realised how special the 180DC organisation is, how important their mission is, and most of all, how extraordinary the GLT members are. For the duration of the summit, I truly was in the presence of the next-generation of world-changers, impact-makers, and thought-leaders in the field of social impact. And each and every one of them left me feeling more inspired than I could have ever imagined.

With deep gratitude,

Kam Taj

‍Kam Taj is a London-based performance coach, speaker, ex-strategy consultant, and author who runs his own performance & leadership coaching business and offers online courses and workshops to students. To learn more about Kam, visit his LinkedIn page here!