Green WEEE
Everyone knew GreenWEEE was different. Nobody could say why.
GreenWEEE reached the goals it was founded on faster than anyone had planned. We ran its leadership team through the sessions that turned fifteen years of shared instinct into a purpose, a mission, a vision, six values and one page of focus.
The process, in order
The real question
To choose its next horizon, GreenWEEE first had to put into words what made it different. The harder question is how a leadership team writes down what it has only ever practised.
Starting point
They had arrived early, and none of it was written down
The founding goals were met faster than the people who set them expected, and the CEO wanted a direction for the next fifteen years. Each department ran on standards its own leader had set. Nobody had tested whether all of it stood under one umbrella.
Green Group is a company that's doing well, that's growing nicely. And I think we had a bit of that arrogance about us. We needed to see whether there was actually something underneath it.
Mihaela Sofronea
How we thought about it
Values hold when they describe what a company already does
So nobody was asked what the values should be. With Tudor, our behavioural science lead, we ran an exercise that surfaced behaviour already there: what these people do under pressure, what they reward, what they refuse. The values were recognised, not chosen.
The decision
A recycler whose purpose is about everyone else's industry
To transform the way industries produce, recover and use resources, so that the circular economy becomes a reality.
Not a description of recycling. A claim about what has to change in the industries around them. The team voted on it, in front of each other, after three half days of arguing, which is what separates a commitment from a document.
Evidence · the work
The thinking came from the room. The wording was our job
We wrote the articulations with the top management team, each one drafted as a full route with its own posture. The thinking was theirs. How it sounded was ours to argue for, and we argued, line by line, until every word earned its place.
The mission
We challenge the status quo of recycling, to revolutionise the way industries integrate secondary raw materials into finished products.
The vision
A future in which recycling has become a MODUS VIVENDI, shaping industries and communities.
The vision
A future in which recycling has become a MODUS VIVENDI, shaping industries and communities.
The values
Personal contribution · Exceptional effort · Collaboration, cooperation, communication · Empathy · Responsibility · Resilience
The purpose never changes, the mission is the fight, the vision is the world where the fight has been won. Statements swapped levels as we drafted: what began as the purpose became the mission, once a reason and a fight could be told apart.
"Something that was always there all along. It just needed to be said."
Refinement ran on with the CEO and the CMO, acting as Purpose Champion, the two people who would carry the words after we left. Every round tightened the language. None of it loosened the meaning the team had agreed on in the room.
The values, named after the behaviour
Three years later, the framework is still on the wall and the values never made it there
Six of them, none invented in the room. They came out of three half days in which this team described, mostly without meaning to, what it had been protecting since its first year. Even the people who arrived sceptical could not file them under marketing.
Personal contribution · Exceptional effort · Collaboration, cooperation, communication · Empathy · Responsibility · Resilience
Naming the obstacles out loud
The last half day turned the articulation into a plan: a two-year vision, the methods, the obstacles and the measures. Naming the obstacles is the part that matters. A team that can say capital, workforce, technology and rigid mindsets has stopped performing alignment.
One page they would actually use
All of it went onto the Focus Model. Purpose at the apex, mission and vision beneath, the whole V2MOM as the base it stands on. The values were never turned into a poster. That page is still in the CMO's office.
And then the whole company heard it
The articulation was never circulated as a document. The leadership team presented it live, to everyone, in the voice they had built it in, and closed with the story of how it was made, in their own words:
- We came together.
- We worked together.
- We took time to think and feel.
- We dreamed, we dared.
- We planned.
A dozen people agreeing on a purpose is an offsite. The same dozen saying it to everybody else makes it the company's.
Afterglow
You know what I realised? That after the workshop, I think we needed someone to tell us that we're good and that we do things well. To give us a bit of confidence in ourselves. But when someone came and said: this is what you do, with your own strength, look, this is who you are, you can carry this company. It's like someone gave you a well done.
Mihaela Sofronea
Green Group
The Outcome
A leadership team pulling in one direction
Managers found that, for all their differences, they share the same values.
Doubt turned into drive
Those who expected wasted time left ready to push it forward.
Values lived, not hung on walls
Nothing was printed. The values now shape projects and team initiatives.
The confidence to carry the company forward
An outside view named their strengths. The team started trusting them.
Time together, built on the values
Team buildings and shared activities are now planned around the values.
Closing
It was already there. It had never been said out loud
Nothing about GreenWEEE was invented in that room. The standards, the instinct, the way these people work were fifteen years old before we arrived. What is new is that the company can say it, teach it to a new hire, and point the next fifteen years at it.
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