Make your Implicit, Explicit

It’s no secret that your company’s biggest asset is its team members. The team you build up is critical to your success. But how do you find the right fit as your team grows, and how do you know they have the right vision and values? Do they know what it means to be a member of your team? While you as the leader may implicitly know, have you sat down and formalized it, to make it explicit?

“As we were growing our company, and as more people started coming on board, we implicitly knew what it meant to be Advoco,” explains Steve Brindle, a partner at Advoco.

Steve explains that when the Advoco team started seeing major growth, the partners knew it was time to sit down and solidify what they were looking for. “When we got to that mark, people started asking, ‘What does it mean to be Advoco?’ It was a great exercise for us to crystallize it and make it known what we’ve known implicitly in our gut for so long.”

From this exercise, the Advoco Mission, Vision, and Values were born—making explicit what had long been implicit. The entire Advoco team signed the Mission, Vision, and Values and they now live in Advoco offices across the country. Defining who we are meant stating that we are trusted advisers and highlighting some characteristics that are highly valued at our company, including being courageous, driven, and innovative, to name a few.

“The fact that we can put it on the wall and have people see it, live it, and understand it, that is key,” says Steve.

As your company grows, taking the time to explicitly state what it means to be a member of your team will allow you to easily show prospective employees what you’re looking for, and reiterate to current employees what is expected.

Until next time…We are Advoco, make every minute count.

About Steve: In addition to being a founder and partner, Steve is Advoco’s resident math whiz—he has a PhD in Mathematics from the University of California, San Diego (his thesis was on the Total Curvature of 4-Dimensional Manifolds in 7-Dimensional Space), and a first class honors Bachelor of Arts degree in Mathematics from St. Catherine’s College, Oxford University, U.K. Steve is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) from the Project Management Institute and heads up our consulting practice. With over 20 years of technical project and program management, Steve consults with clients to solve the challenges that arise within complex systems. He is especially good at bringing together systems from multiple vendors within highly regulated environments. Have a question for Steve? Send him an email!