Generosity and Kindness

At Chorus One, we have had two values on our websites for a while.

These are:

Radical Truth & Transparency

We are committed to understanding reality as it really is.We seek feedback and conflicting views to eliminate the biases within ourselves that distort our view of the world. We are aware that we need to be radically open - minded to succeed in our pursuit of truth.We see honesty and transparency as key prerequisites to find truth.

Excellence & Continuous Improvement

We seek to improve continually as individuals and build an organization that maximizes its speed of evolution and learning. In a rapidly changing world, only by embracing change can we hope to build something of lasting value.

We created these in one of our team retreats. Every once in a while we looked at them to check if they still felt right. But besides very minor tweaks, left them unchanged. I think overall we have done a decent job at living up to these values.

But this year, we grew a lot and most of the team had not been part of our earlier discussions. It felt necessary to discuss these values again and see if we should modify them.

We discussed them in the team retreat and while the paragraphs above still resonated, what came up repeatedly was that something is missing. That it sounded a bit cold and mechanical and was missing an essential part of Chorus One. After discussing this, we did decide to add a third value:

Generosity & Kindness

We seek to recognize the positive qualities in others and treat each other with kindness, generosity and empathy. We strive to create an inclusive, collaborative and supportive environment. In this way we empower people to do their best work and make our greatest contribution as an organization.

Values can be a description of who we are and what we value about that. But just as much they can reflect an aspiration of how we want to appear in the world. In myself, I think qualities like truthfulness, open-mindedness and generosity are quite developed. But kindness and empathy less so.

I'm happy with the decision we made. I do agree that this adds an important value that was missing before. I'm convinced this will allow us to build a place that allows people to thrive more fully and increase our impact. And I'm committed to cultivating these qualities in myself.