This past Friday I was fortunate to have been able to attend an amazing day-long workshop put on Realized Worth and The Acacia Group. I wrote about the morning with Chris Jarvis from Realized Worth over the weekend, but would be remiss if I didn’t share about the afternoon with Dave and Christine from The Acacia Group.
The Acacia Group is a Kelowna-based organization with an international reach that includes countries such as Kenya, Guatemala and Mexico. In speaking with one of their principals, Dave Harrhy, I learned that the founders’ experiences span high-level leadership roles in BC’s public healthcare sector as well as with socially responsible leadership makes The Acacia Group a unique organization to say the least. These leaders with backgrounds in one of the largest bureaucracies in the province decided to get their hands dirty and bring the best of leadership in a large organization directly to people and companies around the world.
In the afternoon with them, we actually did several exercises that I’d never experienced before that exhibited a lot of power. The one that stands out the most is a self-assessment whereby we rated ourselves in terms of our passion for inspiring commitment, mobilizing resources and influencing outcomes. We then combined that assessment with where we’d like to see ourselves go in addition to having discussions about how we’d plan to get there in our own organizations. We achieved in half an hour what some workshops would spend a day on – the impact this exercise had was great.
For me, as a consultant, I found it challenging to reflect upon how I can get where I’d like to go given that I have an independent practice and any resources at Yupana are typically as-needed contractors since it’s still in a start-up phase. In the exploration exercise, I was coincidentally paired with another consultant as well as Angela from Realized Worth and we discussed how we need to work with our clients in order to grow our own abilities as leaders. That exercise will stick with me for some time.
In a final exercise, we were asked to think about a leader that influenced us in our work in some capacity and tell a story about how that influence came about. Yupana would not have been possible without Lloyd Kinney, formerly of WPCG, where I worked with him. In 2007, when I said that I felt I needed to branch out from WPCG, a place I’d spent 4 years growing my career as an accountant, to work in sustainability and the kind of business where we do good things through action – not by writing a cheque after the damage is done. He said “Why don’t you do it here?” We talked about the values of the company, its direction and how this kind of program could be a fit. That is the moment that Yupana began even though it wasn’t founded until a little over 3 years later. That program didn’t continue past 2009 in its original form (though it’s still doing great things such as raising several thousand dollars for aid after the Japan earthquake), but at that moment where the program was born leadership, values, initiative and faith came together in a way that made me believe in the company I had just suggested leaving.
Like the work I do with the Business Model Canvas where processes, assets and intangibles are tied directly to the dollars and cents, The Acacia Group did that for leadership and values in that afternoon. An excellent workshop.
For more on how this works with the Business Model Canvas, check out this post on how a restauranteur changed his business model and slashed his revenues without knowing what he was up to.
