By Manley Hopkinson.
If we’ve met, you will probably know that I am passionate about, and committed to, compassionate leadership.
Before one can successfully take on leadership positions or lead with purpose, I strongly feel you need to heighten your own awareness, emotional intelligence and understanding.
Empathy and compassion can have a significant impact on your team and the wider business, leading to better understanding, conscious positive action, and a more efficient business and team environment.
And showcasing and living compassionate leadership values can be instrumental in an organisation’s growth trajectory.
Since formally joining Sweet Projects in summer 2022, I’ve worked hard to embed this compassion into our culture of effective empowerment throughout our business.
For me, a group of individuals – at any level – gaining mutual commitment through self-awareness and empowered decision-making, and alignment of personal and organisational values, leads to more effective relationships.
Be that relationships within a company, with a client, across a supply chain, through management levels or a first-time meeting on one of our project sites.
Following on from my previous piece about building a culture of commitment and how we hire for the right cultural fit at Sweet Projects, I’ve been leading a team behind the scenes, working closely with a swathe of colleagues to ensure that the behaviours and values we live and breathe everyday are accurate, authentic and absolute.
Our six core values have been with us, in some form or another, since we started out – yet evolution is key and we’re pleased to see the feedback loop at work, with comments and suggestions coming from teams across our business, following 1:1 and group sessions.
Mostly, humanity wants to work under the same set of shared values because there’s the greatest synergies. You could place 1,000 companies next to each other and a great deal of them would have overlapping areas. That’s not a surprise. Being good and kind people should be shared values.
The more interesting part is how you have produced a set of principles and values – the head scratching, why you’ve done it, and crucially how people embody it. It’s about the journey rather than any ‘end result’.
Our core values are:
- Create Confidence – we stick together throughout
- Add Value – we add values in everything we do
- Go Beyond – We’re on a restless search for new opportunities in design, approach, and solutions
- Be Respectful – We don’t do ordinary. We do exceptional
- Do Exceptional – Building long-term relationships through integrity and honesty
- Focus on the Mission – the mission bonds us and the project at hand
In real life, and in construction, these are tangible and applicable. We build around long-term relationships – whether with our partners, our supply chain or our clients – ensuring that we’re creative and innovative in solutions on site. We’re not afraid to challenge where we feel we can add value to a project, and whatever may happen, we stick together as a team to overcome issues and deliver for our client.
A great deal of the application comes from the top. As a leadership team, if we are displaying and showing these values in our day-to-day work, then that can be the foundation for fundamental change.
Over the coming weeks, we’re going to be highlighting best practice behaviours and showcasing our values across our business. The intent of our compassionate leadership principles is what it’s all about. From the supply chain to Health & Safety, in office and on site, leadership and boots on the ground.
If we’re going to define our culture then it must come from everyone, from across our teams, and from Board-level out.
We need to ensure that our actions are aligned to our values, which is why I felt our purpose – to create the built environment that enables our client partners to thrive – has to be central, and outward facing.
Because the key thing for me in our culture is how we deal with everybody. It’s not just an internal thing, it’s an external thing too. Our relationships with our clients and how we deal with them should echo how we engage with other stakeholders, specialist contractors we bring in, supply chain partners and so forth.
We want to share our colleagues’ stories to explain, with real-life examples, how our culture is being applied, defined and reinforced by the people we are working alongside every single day.
