Case Study: Creating a culture manifesto for Leap
Working with Leap design agency earlier this year was an absolute pleasure. Here's an overview of the work we did together along with some feedback from their wonderful team.
I recently shared the following to LinkedIN about the work Treeka have been doing with Leap. As you read I invite you to consider whether putting some attention on building culture in your team could be a worthy investment.
“Hats off to Simon Thomason and Matt Hocking for their leadership of one of the UK’s pioneering agencies with an important voice in ethical design and cutting edge BCorp oriented thinking and working.
The Team at Leap have been an absolute pleasure to work with recently. Not only was our location awesome (the village hall at Malpas, Cornwall) the work was useful, and we all had fun (the most important piece).
I’m grateful to learn from their willing participation and for showing up fully and vulnerably.”
Here’s a bit more detail on the work that we did together…
Why were we called in?
The team at Leap wanted to create a more collaborative approach to leadership.
Over the past years Matt Hocking - Leap’s visionary founder - has been spending more and more time speaking, traveling, networking and sharing his love for ecologically conscious design work throughout the UK and beyond. With new kinds of demands on his time there was a need to rebalance leadership within the Leap team so that Simon, as their MD, and others within the team in positions of leadership, could rise well into their roles.
This shift would liberate Matt to play his role as visionary founder in a good way, while the organisation would continue to thrive as new kinds of leadership emerged from the team.
Together we defined a few goals; values oriented decision making, psychological safety, and improving empathy within the team dynamics.
What did we do to address these goals?
After consultation with Simon, and other core team members, we decided upon a 3hr culture manifesto writing workshop. The session brings the team together around their core values, explores what those values mean to them, and then creates a short piece of text - the culture manifesto. In doing so we hope to improve trust, empathy and decision making.
Setting off from their offices in Truro, Cornwall, SW UK, we walked 25 mins through a park towards Malpas village hall. During the walk we asked that people, in pairs, would check-in with each other around how they felt work at Leap was going, what challenges they were facing, and what highlights they’d recently experienced. This helped prepare for the upcoming session.
Once in the room together (after a cup of tea) we settled into the workshop dynamic. Starting with the Leap values we asked what those words mean for this team. Our model for working with values takes people through three steps: Values and their meaning, beliefs associated with those values, and then behaviours that result from holding these beliefs.
Having workshopped the Leap values (Thoughtful, Curious, Sustainable and Optimistic) we then asked the team to lie on the floor - which they seemed happy to do! - for a short visioning exercise wondering about what Leap might look like to work at in 10 years time.
With these future oriented thoughts in our minds, and the fresh exploration of current values, we pulled our thoughts together into a rough draft of their culture manifesto v.1. You can see an example of the Wholegrain Digital manifesto here. It’s meant to serve as a ‘North Star’ in conversations around culture and should be written in quite clear and practical language.
What were the outcomes?
At the end of the day we shared a survey with the team to gather their feedback. You can see some of the results from that below.
What three words would you use to describe the workshop?
Impactful, reassuring, refreshing
Open, Insightful, Productive
Insightful, valuable, useful
We also gathered comments via email and through LinkedIN recommendations which give a sense of the impact of the work.
“Chris is one of those people who has gentle gravitas in a room, and he facilitated the session so that it was fun and enjoyable but also had real substance and felt extremely worthwhile. We're a close team with a lot of shared beliefs but the workshop provided a safe space for us to learn more about each other and brought us even closer together.
As a result it feels like we're more mindful of the individual needs, challenges, and expectations across the team and has strengthened our collective sense of who we are, why we do what we do, and where we want to head in the future.”
Hellen Johnston, May 21st 2022, Head of Client Services. Leap
"It’s really important that we invest time in our culture. Chris delivered a very tailored experience for us here at Leap. The output of the manifesto is still in progress but more importantly the outcomes (values aligned, honest conversations, team unity, clear vision) were the things that helped make the day a really important highlight in our year.”
Simon Thomason, 8th August 2022, Managing Director, Leap
“It was a joy-filled session, good to share time and opening up the values and I am interested to see what evolves.”
Matt Hocking, 5th May 2022, Founder and CEO, Leap
Of course the real outcomes are the ways that conversations change within the Leap team. The ways that people feel more trusted, more acknowledged in their leadership roles, and more empathetic towards other team members. These things are shared to quantify but we’ve got a good sense of the impact through the comments received.
How might this work for you?
We feel addressing culture is a high priority for agency leaders. Working together to write a culture manifesto is a great start. It helps you think through your current company values while enabling alignment around a shared vision of the future.
The workshop itself is fun and informative and develops a sense of trust and psychological safety - crucial factors in any high-performing team.
If you’re curious to run this kind of workshop in your organisation then reach out. We’re always curious to hear from people in business who recognise the importance of good culture.