Lessons I Learned

Have you read Zappos’ Core Values? If you haven’t, then you probably also want to read a lot more about Zappos, one of the “best companies to work for” and a company known for fostering a fabulous culture.

After reading their Tony Hsieh’s book, Delivering Happiness, about creating Zappos and fostering their culture, we passed the book around to many of our management staff at PEPY. Not only did the process they went through and the value they put on culture resonate with us, but a lot of their values did as well. Our communications team has “WOW Idea Sessions” and being humble has become a mantra for some of our teams. We wanted these values to be our own, and through that realized that we already had a lot of great values, we just needed to write them down!

In these last weeks wrapping up my time in Cambodia before I head off to a graduate program, we have been putting a lot of time into strategic planning and we realized that we needed our own documentation of our core values to help act as a guiding tool for our ongoing decision making. I read up on Zappos work as well as on the CultureSync website, a website which seems to be connected with the book Tribal Leadership, and asked some friends who work in HR for their advice.

What resonated with me most through this research was the idea that core values shouldn’t be something etched in stone on the front of a building, as buildings don’t have values (must like they don’t “teach kids”). Instead, PEOPLE have values, and the core values of an organization are only as strong as the core values of those people who make up the team. So rather than carving values into a wall, we asked our staff to identify THEIR core values and then identify the values at PEPY which connected them to this work. Each person did this on their own and then each manager compiled this list of words/phrases into their top 30 and then all of those were compiled and edited down into a list of 50+ concepts which we brought with us to our strategic planning retreat.

There we spent a few hours defining the terms to make sure we all had a shared definition of the concepts and then we spread the words out into different categories and taped the all over the room. We each had 10 stickers which we could use to vote on a specific word or a cluster of words as our top choices for the most important components of PEPY’s core values. We then found which choices got the most votes and allowed a time for people to champion a word which was not included. We argued over whether we should include core values we didn’t feel we yet excelled at exhibiting and decided that we needed to be honest about how we defined them, but if they were indeed things we all valued and were working towards, we should include them.

We then took our list of “top” value words and our team’s wordsmiths put them together into short statements. Like the Zappos values, we wanted ours to be action statements, which not only state what we value, but how we want to live, traits we are looking for in those we hire, and how we plan to evaluate our individual and collective actions. We then reviewed these with the whole PEPY crew of 50+ people at two staff meetings to make sure we made the right word choices and ensure everyone had a feeling of ownership over these ideas. From there, we wrote short paragraphs to outline what that values mean to us and how we interpret the quirky statements we wrote so we can have a shared meaning with all those outside of PEPY who want to learn more about what drives us.

I was editing the paragraphs and thought I would share them. Actually, I added two sections which haven’t been edited much, and those two still need a lot of work (I’ll let you guess which ones they are!). There were still a few words/concepts from our top list which we hadn’t previously found a way to add into our statements and I tried to fit them in.  In otherwords, this is still a rough draft, still needs more buy-in, and I’m putting these up here to:

a) gather thoughts from those of you who know about PEPY and might want to add your two cents

b) share the process we are going through in creating these value statements in case that is of value to anyone else (sorry about the attempt at a word pun, core value editing will do that to you!)

Share your thoughts if you have time!

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A DRAFT of PEPY’s Core Values

1) Commit to our unending potential for improvement

We have to improve ourselves in order to improve the world.

We believe that everyday provides new opportunities to learn and the journey to perfect has no finish line. We have found that the best way to grow is to start by identifying areas where we are failing to reach our dreams. We place great emphasis for our team, and our organization as a whole, on being self-critical. We constantly analyze and reflect on our programs, our activities, our collaborations, and our philosophies and work towards better. When we reflect on our journey as an organization, we identify being flexible to adapt to new learning as keys to our growth which often came from making difficult decisions to change how we worked. Investing in the life-long learning of each of our staff and fostering a culture of self-development are the PEPY basics. We know we can ALWAYS be better, and we’re committed to working towards that!

2) Think unreasonably. Dream BIG

“There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.” -Douglas Everett

At PEPY, “outside the box” thinking is not only encouraged, but expected. We celebrate “WOW ideas”: those that are unusual – unreasonable even – and that have the power to shift our mindset towards new solutions for old problems. We try to foster an environment where people know that it is ok to be off the wall as we want our team to take calculated risks at challenging the conventional, the everyday, the acceptable. We want to push the boundaries of what we can achieve and to do that we need big and powerful dreams that we can work towards. Continue Reading

I am about to do a presentation to students from Yonsei University about leadership as it relates to humanitarian work and my experience at PEPY/PEPY Tours. This is a part of the presentation, adapted in part from my 20 Lessons I Learned post.

Thought I would share it in a pretty format! Also, it’s a good reminder for ME to use these lessons. I am a better “teacher” than I am “doer” of some of these, and I need to remember to practice what I preach! It goes to show, just because we know a better way, does not mean we do! But, as with anything, I think the more we try and the more talk about it, the more we adapt these improvements to our own actions.

Next week we have strategic planning sessions in Cambodia for our board and management team at PEPY… we’ll try to keep these lessons (and more!) in mind as we set priorities for our future!

Thanks to @jenrikay who did a lot of this design work and has been teaching me how to make my slides less boring!

Guest Post By Allie Hoffman of The Pari Project

Lately I have been exploring the difference between ‘managers’ and ‘leaders’, wondering what ingredients go into making someone effective as one but not the other, and whether or not you can nurture both.

The reason for the exploration is intensely personal; I’m supposed to step aside and hand over the social enterprise I created to a Leadership Team in the near future. (‘Near’ is relative; it might be another year or more, so bear with me.)

Despite the long-winded and self-directed timeline, thinking about handing over can be panic-inducing; my entire identity is wrapped up in being an unwitting founder, and to think my current challenge is to develop traits in others I barely understand in myself, is daunting.

Pari has worked with 35 NGOs in its lifetime; that’s 35 leaders and/or managers to study. When I think about the effective leaders, I think about their common traits: humble, patient, confident, fearless, audacious, original. I think about how their work has become an intrinsic part of who they are, and their devotion is unshakable. With this devotion comes vision, that constant desire to be springing forth something new and transformative.

Pari has also worked with a lot of great managers. Getting people to do things they would otherwise not want to do is an art form; great managers know how to get things done. Managers think in linear ways; they communicate clearly and effectively; they are often meticulously organized. Managers see problems, and immediately set to work solving said problem. Their solutions are innovative and incisive.

What do I have – managers or leaders? I don’t know. Which one am I? I don’t know either.

What I have learned is that if I leave behind a space where people are questioning, challenging, innovating and taking risks; an approach that begets flexibility, adaptability and patience, and a core ideology that implores the team and its leaders to ‘believe in better’, then I leave having done my job.

What do you think great leadership entails? What does it mean to be a great manager? Please leave your thoughts below.

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This is a guest post by Allie Hoffman of The Parivartan Project. Pari is a social enterprise whose purpose is to empower the citizen sector; to do this, they provide fundraising, marketing and organizational development services. To learn more: www.thepariproject.com

When I first saw “Changing the World on Vacation“, I had to cover my eyes for half of the film. Did I REALLY say that, do that, THINK that? Ugh….

Watching the first year of our work at PEPY is like watching someone act out the exact opposite of what I now believe in terms of responsible tourism, development work, and “volunteering”. It’s PAINFUL to watch…

But, it’s a good reminder that my opinions and beliefs were formed, and that I too acted in the ways I am trying to see changed. It makes me hopeful that others can change too, and that ideally they can learn from my mistakes rather than repeating them themselves.

I just recently got to see some footage Daniela Kon, the film maker, had taken in late 2008 or early 2009 when she returned to Cambodia. It is great to see the progress of my own learning, and interesting to note that it took me three years to realize that “orphanage tourism was wrong” but I still hadn’t realized that some orphanages are not only exploiting children through forced dance shows, but through so much more including taking them from parents and corruption so deep that it involves bribing police to be allowed to drag “orphans” through the streets to advertise “free orphanage tours” to tourists. (I had written some of my reactions here.)

I went from naive to enraged with a rest stop at shocked along the way.  Here is a look at my reaction to the film from nearly three years ago:

Daniela Papi INTERVIEW (2009) from DEEDA PRODUCTIONS on Vimeo.

A friend just sent me this photo…

Like with hero-worshiping in the social sector, when the media and then general public praises and supports a model which sounds like a quick fix to big problems, we get copy cats. Now we’re not only “giving things away” once, we’re giving DOUBLE things….. oh goodness.

It will be great if we can harness these great intentions all of the purchasers have and use these popular brands to steer us towards support which is about BUILDING markets and skills rather than increasing dependencies on aid. I recently wrote a piece about how we might be able to use the popularity of a brand like TOMS (the company BOBS above is copying) to help steer people away from giving things and towards investing time in people.

Did anyone see that TOMS recently launched an eyewear line where each pair “helps give sight to a person in need”? What do you think about this new eyewear line which is partnering with an NGO rather than giving shoes away? Share your thoughts!

In many parts of Asia, it’s rude to brag about your kids. Actually, in Cambodia, you can’t even brag about other people’s kids, especially when they are small, as bad spirits might take them away for being too fabulous.  But moms…. can you brag about your mom? I guess, with countries that respect age hierarchies, I’d have to ask my mom if I could brag about her…. but she’d say no. (Actually, when she knew that I saw this article online she threatened to kill me if I wrote any form of cheesy comment on the comment chain.)

So, out of respect for my elders, and fear for my life, I will refrain from commenting on the site. Instead, I will post the link here.

Here’s an article about my mom, who just retired. She rocks, no matter if I am allowed to say it or not!

http://www.newcastlenow.org/index.php/article/new_a_tribute_to_mrs._pat_papi_first_grade_teacher_extraordinaire_retiring

When it comes to “investing time in people”, there is no better way to do that than as an educator, and my mom continues to model that for me, and so many others. If every person just invested in their own kids, and a few others around them, with as much love and time as she does with each student, we’d all believe we could be anything great in the world and then go out and do that….  So, go tell a kid you think they are BRILLIANT today (maybe no need to remind little girls that they are beautiful) – and help them open up to their own possibility of greatness!

This past week, Alexia Nestora of the blog Voluntourism Gal, hosted a voluntourism conference. I did a presentation about “Learning Service”, rather than “Service Learning”, and was specifically vocal about my disdain for Orphanage Tourism. I was afraid I would get tomatoes thrown at me…. but instead a lot of people agreed with the experiences and opinions I shared, which I was grateful for! Here is a video Alexia compiled from the event.