Vision, Mission, Values, and Commitments

Our Vision

We envision our lives grounded in human connection and partnership. We believe work is one part of our humanity, not our essence or entirety. We believe we can have what we need to be our full selves, live our full lives, and do our best work. This is the future of equitable work.

Our Mission

To create the future of equitable work, Leverage to Lead’s mission is to build a coalition of organizations across all industries invested in creating systems and practices that center humanity.

Our Leadership Commitment

In support of our mission, Leverage to Lead’s leadership team endeavors to create stability for our team, clients, and partners so they can take risks, disrupt, explore, innovate, imagine, and create.

Leverage To Lead

Our Values and Commitments

Connection is the essence of our humanity, which we all need and deserve. Partnership is the vehicle for practicing equity and inclusion in connection. In service of connection and partnership, we hold the values of relationship building, collaboration, and co-creation in our work together and with our clients.

We commit to these values by embodying:

  • Vulnerability
  • Boundaries
  • Inner agility
  • Deep regard
  • Compassion
  • Agency
  • Perseverance
  • Communication
  • Disruption of urgency
  • Curiosity
  • Integrity
  • Trust
  • Risk-taking
  • Shared purpose
  • Imagination
  • Rest

Our organization’s values and commitments are the foundation for prizing our humanity and our inherent connection across all our differences. We are partners with each other and our clients in co-creating the future of equitable work.

Read more about each of our values:

Relationship Building

We hold the value of relationship building because partnership means we can respect our individual perspectives and beliefs as we work together with shared values toward a shared purpose. We strive to understand others the way they wish to be understood so that all of us can feel seen, heard, and supported.

To build relationships in support of partnership and connection, we commit to:

 

  • Leading with vulnerability by sharing what we need and how we feel.
  • Extending deep regard and compassion for ourselves and each other as we take risks, practice, make mistakes, and celebrate our growth.
  • Setting and communicating boundaries that allow us to meet others where we can do our best work.
  • Practicing the inner agility of being aware of our emotions and making intentional decisions about how we navigate the conflicts and tensions that naturally arise when we encounter difference.
  • Exercising our agency and holding accountability for the impact of our decisions.

Collaboration

We hold the value of collaboration as foundational to how we define partnership. Because our differences are not a problem to be solved, collaboration means we grapple together to create a way forward together.

To collaborate as partners and in connection, we commit to:

 

  • The ongoing practice of perseverance, which supports leaning into tension, discomfort, uncertainty, and conflict with the desire to strengthen our relationships.
  • Open and responsive communication, deep listening, and discussions that aim for illumination rather than resolution.
  • Disrupting urgency and giving our work the necessary time, space, and flexibility.
  • Exhibiting curiosity to interrogate the assumptions, biases, or judgments that difference may surface.

Co-Creation

We value co-creation because it requires equity in relationships, multiple perspectives, and the willingness to imagine without constraints. Co-creating a path forward that does not yet exist, into a future that does not yet exist, asks us to value the process alongside the outcome.

In co-creating the future of equitable work, we commit to:

 

  • Upholding the integrity of our work with high standards for behaving in alignment with our values.
  • Demonstrating trust in the process of transformation through relationship, collaboration, and partnership.
  • Inviting the risk-taking necessary to shape a new path.
  • Our shared purpose of building nurturing and supportive structures that allow us to thrive and be whole.
  • The imagination and hope to build what’s never been built before.
  • Caring for ourselves by asking for and taking the rest we need to restore, connect with ourselves, and do our work sustainably.

Read Our Articles about Values

The Six Tenets of a Safe Company Culture

This is the second in a series of four articles about taking steps to build audacity. Read my first article, The Unfiltered Life, in which I described how women of color filter out their difference in unsafe company cultures. High Achievement in Unsafe Spaces This is...

The Power of Shifting Power Dynamics

You’ve had to out think your colleagues to obtain the success you currently enjoy. But the truth is, the mental acrobatics it takes to stay one step ahead is anything but enjoyable. Contorting to stay ahead is stressful and it requires you to be on constant guard. As...

Network for Success

Opportunity doesn’t come from hard work, going to the right school or having a great resume. Opportunity comes from other people. That’s right. You might have resources or skills that make you qualified for a great job or client but the only way to truly access that...

Give Voice to Your Value

“I don’t know what to say.” That is the biggest challenge when it comes to articulating your value and speaking your truth. One of the reasons its so hard to know what to say is that we listen to the opinions of other people. Whether they are friends or colleague,...

Relationship TO or Relationship WITH?

A few months ago, we wrote about how COVID-19 is revealing the depth of our interconnectedness, and how we’re refusing to acknowledge those connections. Today, we’re returning to the topic of relationships, which at this moment are complicated, to say the least. We’re...

Walking the Walk: Inside Our Team’s Values Excavation

This is the first in a 2-part series on the Leverage to Lead team undergoing our own values excavation. Read about why we needed to do it, how it went, and what’s changed for us since. Since 2020, Leverage to Lead has tripled in size. Our team now includes Jennifer...

Walking the Walk: Inside Our Team’s Values Excavation – Part 2 of 2

This is the second in a 2-part series on what happened when the Leverage to Lead team underwent our own values excavation. Read about why we needed to do it, how it went, and what's changed for us since. Between Sessions Our first values excavation meeting with Alison...

Breaking the Rules of DEI

In any culture, the rules of behavior get coded into daily life via reward or punishment. We’ve been learning the unwritten rules of life this way ever since we figured out the “rule” about what the cool kids wear. We’re still learning them when we discover that our...

Is Your Organization Ready to Support Employee Resource Groups?

There may be a group of exhausted employees within your organization.  They may have begun gathering on their own time to offer each other support, networking, and a space for their shared identity. We’ve seen these groups form because employees need a space to be...

Reframing Boundaries

Read more from our Reframing Series: Reframing Burnout, Reframing Nice, Reframing Uncertainty In our Reframing Series, we examine commonplaces that, upon closer look, reveal a toxic belief or harmful behavior. In this newsletter, we’re taking on boundaries. There’s...