How we build team culture
Last week was our three year anniversary! How did we make it?!
Three years ago, we (John and Lindsey) met for the first time. One of our trustees had recommended that we connect and see if we had an appetite for launching something new. Four weeks later, Gather was born!
But launching, building and sustaining Gather was not a foregone conclusion.
It has been three years of hard work. We also learned early on that we were very different people (emphasis on the very!). We came from different backgrounds and had different political opinions and worldviews. (Fortunately we bonded over a mutual love of pizza, power ballads and schadenfreude!)
So how have we made it work?
Unity on vision and values became the essential foundation for us as a team.
As we have mentioned in previous posts, this was aided by several large pieces of paper and brightly coloured pens, towers of post-it notes and endless cups of coffee (for John) and tea (for Lindsey). To celebrate our anniversary, we thought we would share some reflections on how we have built our team culture.
Vision
We will be completely honest: when we launched Gather we were not entirely set on our vision. We knew we would be focused on toilets; toilets change everything. We both see the sanitation crisis as a justice issue: we believe that access to a safe clean toilet is a human right. In our lifetimes, there has been no real change in the number of people without access to proper sanitation.
Our challenge was deciding what we would do about it. Would we launch a social enterprise to build toilets and provide waste management services? Would we raise investment for local sanitation enterprises? Would we do something completely out of the box? We were unsure. This was slightly daunting, but to guide us we agreed that: a) it was OK for our vision to evolve as we learned more about the sanitation crisis; and b) whatever our vision was to become, we had to be leveraging significant impact from our limited resources.
Early on, one of our founding trustees encouraged us to write a one pager about Gather. As a new organisation, this exercise can seem excruciatingly tiresome. There is still a lot of unknown! This exercise has proved invaluable for us. As standard practice, we now review our one pager every three months. This helps us to review and refine our vision. This keeps us motivated and helps us communicate clearly with people who want to join us.
Values
We have four key values that permeate through all of our decisions and ways of working. These are collaboration, gratitude, honesty and celebration. These values create an environment where we can be creative, work hard and keep Gather moving forward.
Collaboration
Everything we do at Gather is catalysed by collaboration. This is evident in the partnerships we build with sanitation providers, where we seek to accelerate and learn from their work wherever we can. We also collaborate with our expert advisor panel, drawing on the knowledge and experiences of experts from a range of fields. And we collaborate with private sector organisations to test our theories and fill gaps in our skillsets.
Gratitude
We cannot claim sole credit for Gather’s successes. We have been fueled by the energy and expertise of more than 40 volunteers, 13 partner organisations and a growing group of private philanthropists. In start-up life, there can be a lot to be frustrated about. We have found it helpful to practice gratitude as regularly as possible. One of the key ways we do this is to send out monthly updates, where each update celebrates what we have been able to achieve together.
Honesty
Accountancy and transparency has never been so important. We push ourselves to be honest in absolutely everything. Honesty does not stop with compliance and regulations. We hold weekly ‘kill list’ meetings and daily stand up meetings. These allow us to plan for the day, week and month ahead but also provides an opportunity to be honest about workload and share constructive feedback on each other’s work.
We also took the decision early on to be open and honest about our successes, failures, challenges and the lessons we are learning. We report these to our board, to our donors and in everything we publish. We have found that this level of honesty has built confidence and trust and allowed us to clearly articulate when and why we need to pivot our work or strategy.
Celebration
We keep a document that lists everything that’s worthy of being celebrated. This ranges from obvious wins — such as registering with the Charity Commission, raising funds for projects and having papers accepted to conferences — to less obvious, but equally important achievements — such as fixing a broken laptop or finding a venue for a meeting you had forgotten about. We will let you guess which ones we share with our board and donors!
We would love to hear from other start-ups about how they have built their team culture. And if you want to join us, get in touch!
