Our Secret Sauce Revealed
As previously announced, LeaderWise has recently shifted away from a co-director model of leadership. Mary Kay DuChene and Mark Sundby have both stepped back from director roles to focus on their respective areas of expertise. Both Mark and Mary Kay remain employed by LeaderWise, Mark as a staff psychologist and Mary Kay as a staff consultant.
A LeaderWise board member looked at me and the rest of our leadership team and asked, “When are you going to share your secret sauce with the world?” We were two hours into a long-range planning meeting, and the group was discussing what makes LeaderWise unique as an organization and what we can contribute to the world.
What is our secret sauce? It’s best summed up by a term that a staff member coined a dozen years ago. In a conversation about what we’d like more of at work, she identified “a greater sense of team and unity,” and then said, “Us-ness.” Another staff member quickly picked up on it and began articulating her desire for more “us-ness” as well. I loved it! As the executive director at the time, I started using the term “us-ness” to describe how we aspire to be and do our work at LeaderWise. I found that in interviews with potential staff members, explaining the concept of “us-ness” as a core value resonated with many of them. They wanted to be part of an organization where they belonged and felt fully invested, and to know that others, including the organization itself, were invested in them as well. The beauty of us-ness is that it’s a made-up term, so we can craft it into what we want to be and imbue it with our own meaning. At the same time, the term has depth and touches us at our deepest, most existential level: We all want to belong.
Unbeknownst to us, social science research has found that loneliness, which is rampant in our culture, has also infiltrated the workplace. In 2023, one survey found that about 4 in 10 workers reported feeling “somewhat lonely” or “very lonely” at work, with the highest rates occurring in younger generations. A 2024 study by the American Psychological Association (APA) also found high rates of loneliness and disconnection in the workplace and that 67% of workers had experienced at least one marker of burnout (i.e., low motivation, low energy, feeling lonely or isolated) in the past month. (Mary Kay DuChene and I did a deep dive into the epidemic of loneliness in The Path to Belonging.) As an antidote, Arthur Evans, the chief executive officer of the APA, pointed a way forward, stating, “Our survey findings underscore the need for employers to create psychologically safe work environments for their employees. We know from research that psychological safety not only enhances individual employee well-being but strengthens the organization by fostering a culture of creativity, innovation and effective teamwork, which ultimately helps to improve the bottom line.” We believe that our secret sauce fosters that psychological safety, which is characterized by a workplace in which all staff, independent of title and role, can, according to the research: 1) admit and discuss mistakes, 2) openly address problems and tough issues, 3) seek help and feedback, 4) trust that no one on the team is out to get them, and 5) trust that they are a valued member of the team.
About ten years ago, two staff members invited me to the backroom of a local coffee shop for “an important conversation” to share a concern about work with me. This was an unusual request because, typically, we’re an organization where we casually stop by each other’s offices to say hi, check in, or have a conversation. They began by affirming their love of the work, but then shared that the workload was unsustainable. They were burning out. As the executive director, I valued their honesty and thanked them, while also wondering how we could ease their workload by hiring additional staff and still meet the bottom line. However, in the spirit of us-ness, the priority was clear: We’d need to hire more staff. Since that time, our staff has increased fivefold, and our yearly revenue quadrupled. When we listen and value each other’s well-being, good things happen.
Now it’s us-ness that grounds me during a time of transition. Following several years of unprecedented growth, our income plateaued this past year, and the leadership team, the board of directors, and I knew we had to make difficult decisions. As a leadership team, we began our fall retreat by identifying the values that would guide our conversations, and at the top of the list was “compassionate decision making.” It was another way of naming us-ness. We had to consider the bottom line, making decisions that would help our organization and the people who use our services thrive, while also remaining fully aware of how our decisions might impact our cherished colleagues. We knew that our choices would affect some of our staff members more than others, and we wanted to remain both cognitively and emotionally attuned to that reality. No decisions were made lightly. Psychological safety was high as we decided to eliminate the co-director model, which resulted in Mary Kay DuChene and me stepping back as co-directors, elevating Drew Benson to executive director, and Drew selecting emilie boggis and Kelly Jordan as team leaders of leadership development and assessment, respectively. Heather Koshiol would continue as director of operations. At no point did I feel anything but compassion for Mary Kay, me, and several other colleagues who were also significantly affected. None of this was easy. However, as the new leadership team and the former leadership team met the other night for dinner, Mary Kay and I shared that we always felt that our colleagues cared for us, as well as other affected staff, during these emotional discussions, even as sacrifices were asked of us for the benefit of the larger organization and our clients.
Us-ness has carried our team and staff through the good times and hard times in years past, and, as the new and former leadership team members laughed, told stories, and enjoyed time with one another at dinner, it was clear to see that us-ness will guide the organization as our secret sauce far into the future. I’ll forever be grateful for my colleagues who coined the term, and the good work our entire LeaderWise team has done to make a culture of us-ness our reality.
