Since 2023, our organisation has been undergoing a major organisational strategy redevelopment project to align our work with the unique and complex social challenges faced by communities across the UK today.
Through this work, we identified a need to define and establish a new working culture and set of values to help shape and support our mission: empowering economically and socially excluded people, and supporting those in adversity to thrive. But how do the culture and values of a social impact organisation uphold its mission and support the delivery of its work? And how does a funder like The Henry Smith Charity decide what its values should be?
We spoke to Nicola Taylor, our Strategy Change Manager, and Nicola Pye, our Leadership & Culture Consultant, about the adventures, challenges and opportunities that lie in creating and establishing a set of organisational values, and establishing a new culture.
Why are a clear culture and values so important for The Henry Smith Charity?
Nicola Pye: Culture and values are essential to any organisation to perform well. But for The Henry Smith Charity, this is arguably even more important as we have a mission and responsibility to deliver support and services to socially and economically disadvantaged communities. What we do really matters. Culture and values enable us to perform and hold ourselves to account, and ensure we are delivering the best service for the organisations and communities we support.
Nicola Taylor: It’s important to be integrated, isn’t it? And to have alignment. People don’t tend to work in this sector or do this type of work unless they are purpose driven. But this alone is not enough: we need values to ensure that staff are aligned and our efforts are all pulling in the same direction to deliver our mission. Knowing that the organisation you work for, or the funder that supports your organisation, also shares your values makes people feel motivated and engaged to deliver the best.
Nicola Pye: Having a disconnect between the mission and the organisational values can lead to disjointed working and ultimately reduce its effectiveness or impact.
“…developing a new culture and values felt like a key part of reshaping…to achieve our mission: empowering people who are economically or socially excluded and supporting those in adversity to thrive.”
What prompted the organisation to reassess and redefine its values, and how do they align with the new strategic goals?
Nicola Pye: The decision to create a new culture and set of values for the organisation came from the need that was identified to bring the organisation forward and help it become more modern and outward looking. We had started looking at reviewing our strategic priorities, and along the way we realised that we couldn’t implement our ambitious new approach without a culture and values that upheld it. It couldn’t happen in isolation! I feel if we had not looked at our strategy first, we might not have been as bold and brave with our values – we have a real sense that, yes, this is about transformation.
How will the new values drive the achievement of our new strategic goals?
Nicola Taylor: There were some ways of working we felt were holding the organisation back – developing a new culture and values felt like a key part of reshaping that to enable us to achieve our mission: empowering people who are economically or socially excluded and supporting those in adversity to thrive. Our new strategy, to be announced in 2025, is really exciting – and we want our culture and values to reflect that ambition and energy. We want to be much less process-driven, and more people-focused. It has given us real optimism and clarity on where our people can put their energy to deliver the best work and impact for our stakeholders.
Our values
How did The Henry Smith Charity identify the core values that are now central to its culture?
Nicola Pye: The Henry Smith Charity is a really purpose-driven organisation. But prior to developing our new culture and values, we lacked a cohesiveness and clear values to underpin our work and enable us to create a bigger impact. With values being so crucial to our culture and strategy, we asked Dr. Jackie LeFevre to bring in her expertise to help us articulate them. Having recently completed a PhD in the benefits of being consciously connecting to values, there was no one better to help us do just that, capturing the essence of what our values are and what they mean for organisations. The values we ultimately came up with are drawn from mix of existing practices and our ambitions for where we want The Henry Smith Charity to be in the future. Our Chief Executive, Anand Shukla, worked with Jackie to create a methodology that captured what’s great about our existing culture, whilst also bringing in our aspirations about where we could be. The workshop Jackie led for all our staff involved both data and storytelling, which was used to inform the development of the values.
How did we ensure employees’ and other stakeholders’ voices played a part in shaping the new culture and values? Why was this important?
Nicola Pye: From my perspective, you cannot expect people to live by values they have not been a part of shaping them. As an organisation, if we are committing to certain values that guide our decision making and govern where we put our passion, energy and time, then we need people to have an opportunity to contribute to that. The engagement we’ve done with staff through our numerous culture and values workshops has also represented a chance to focus our cultural shift and provide a turning point as we move towards implementing our new strategy in 2025.
Nicola Taylor: We wanted people to take responsibility and be empowered to define the culture, taking ownership for it and creating the environment they wanted to be a part of.
How will The Henry Smith Charity integrate these new values into daily operations and decision-making processes, as well as upholding and reinforcing them?
Nicola Pye: So, in its simplest terms, this is about empowering people to live those values through all the change the organisation is about to go through. In order to make sure we all uphold the values, we need to help people understand what they really mean and what they look like in a more specific, practical sense.
Nicola Taylor: We will need to ensure that collectively, we define clear expectations, behaviours or qualities we expect from staff that uphold our values. We need to equip team leaders and managers with the skills they need to start having conversations about our values, thinking about what they look like in action and how they can help guide our decision making. We’ll be reflecting our values in how we approach recruitment and onboarding processes, as well as performance management – our values will lie at the heart of every aspect of our People and Culture work. We’ll be ensuring our leaders role model those values, thereby creating a culture of open and honest feedback. We will be designing training sessions to make sure this happens.
Author: Ellen Rowland, Communications Manager
Contributors: Nicola Taylor, Strategy Change Manager and Nicola Pye, Leadership coach and Talent Strategy Consultant