Gretchen Alkema, Wolf Eagle Enterprises, LLC, contributed to this post. Additionally, I am thankful to the entire Archstone Foundation staff – Carly Roman, Chris Langston, Connie Peña, Gerson Galdamez, Jasmine Lacsamana, Kimberly Williams, and Tanisha Davis – for their participation, contributions, insights, and dedication to our mission.
At Archstone Foundation, we are committed to improving the health and well-being of older Californians and their caregivers through philanthropic investment in three elements critical to achieving equitable, coordinated care: promoting teams, enhancing training, and improving technology. To make lasting change and solve complex, persistent, and systemic problems in care delivery, we rely on solid, innovative, and strategic partnerships inside and outside our organization.
Effective partnership with grantees, consultants, other funders, state and federal agencies, and others is essential for this success. We also understand that true partnership is a two-way street. With grantees, we often ask about and nurture their quality improvement processes toward our “Three Ts” work. To help us be better partners, we initiated a quality improvement effort of our own: uncovering and leveraging our strengths.
Discovering Our Strengths
This fall, we had the pleasure of partnering with Gretchen Alkema of Wolf Eagle Enterprises for a day-long team building workshop to illuminate staff leadership talent and discover how our unique strengths work together to maximize our work.
We began by each taking the CliftonStrengths assessment and reviewing the resulting personalized talent profile that ranked what we naturally do best in our work. The CliftonStrengths assessment lists 34 individual talents within four domains:
- Executing – The tireless implementers who catch ideas and get things done.
- Influencing – Those who take charge, speak up, and make sure issues and people are heard.
- Relationship Building – Those who serve as the glue that holds a group together.
- Strategic Thinking – Those who constantly absorb and analyze information, helping teams to make better decisions.
Gretchen met with our staff one-on-one before the workshop so each person could appreciate his/her unique talent profile, consider ways to implement the “top” strengths, and recognize potential blind spots to navigate. At the workshop, Gretchen helped us deepen awareness of both our individual and team strengths to foster team inclusion and belonging and facilitate our collective best to enhance performance across the organization. We then talked through specific areas where we are lacking and where we can draw upon talents within the team.
Gretchen closed the workshop by sharing a reflection from the late Curt Liesveld: “None of us can be it all, know it all, or do it all.” This is true of organizations as well. No organization can be, do, or know everything. Appreciating and drawing on the strengths of others to fill our shortcomings is our most powerful way to work together with you, our community partners, in bringing forward meaningful change to improve the lives of older adults.
Partnering for Success
Throughout the workshop, we continued to bring our Strengths discovery experience back to our daily work and pondered: What is the purpose of philanthropy? We noted the aim of making the lives of people better and improving the world around us, directly connecting with the etymology of the word “philanthropy”: the Greek “philos” meaning “love” and “anthropos” meaning “humanity,” taken together as the “love of humanity.” Leveraging our staff’s strengths with this ideal in mind can help us work inside and outside the organization toward this common, deeply held sense of purpose.
At Archstone Foundation, we believe effective, strengths-based partnering is the only way to accomplish our goals and achieve true collective impact. We act by listening intently to our grantees and the community, striving to reduce health disparities across the lifespan, and providing equitable access to programs, services, and health care for older Californians and their caregivers.
If our mission and success vision spark ideas for partnership, please reach out to us so we can make great progress together.
