Lacey Lake’s Mission, Vision, and Values

The conversation about the changing workplace over the past few years has usually focused on the needs of Fortune 500 companies. But smaller, founder-led businesses are an important part of the story.

Small businesses are important catalysts for innovation, and they need to build strong cultures to prepare themselves for growth. And yet, they are often not well supported to do that. Many lack a proper human resources department. They might lack processes for performance reviews and employee engagement surveys, which they’ll need if they’re to achieve sustained growth over the long run.

That’s why I’m proud to share that Lacey Lake Leadership has unveiled a new mission, vision, and values to align ourselves with the needs of founder-led businesses.

We’ve always been focused on helping founder-led companies build high-performance cultures centered on their people. Our mission, vision, and values make our purpose even more clear.

Mission and Vision

Our mission is to be the premier human capital partner for organizations seeking growth. Our vision is to unlock the human potential to accelerate business value.

So, what does that mean?

Well, long before COVID-19 hit, more and more companies were realizing that their employee value proposition and experience are vital to their growth. The pandemic and associated disruption of the labor force underlined just how vital. Whether supporting the mental health of employees or seeking closer alignment between corporate and employee values, businesses have sought more ways to do a better job supporting their people. Not because these are nice things to do, but because employee empowerment, when connected to business goals, improves business performance.

But founder-led organizations often lack the formal tools and processes to align human performance with business performance. That’s where we come in. Through talent strategy, executive/professional search, and human capital consulting, we strive to be the premier human capital partner for organizations seeking growth.

Data fuels our mission. We now have access to understanding human performance data in ways that even larger companies with well-established HR practices don’t do.

We can create a dashboard that shares compensation and retention, but the key is to make connections with that data that businesses often overlook. How do retention rates from one department to the next relate to performance? To leadership performance? We can cut data in more ways to provide more depth and insight into how those factors relate. If you lack this complete view, you don’t really understand your blind spots and vulnerabilities.

The way we deliver our mission is to unlock human potential to accelerate value. Our vision is that people can deliver value if they are better equipped to do so – through outcomes like getting the best leaders via executive search or improving the employee experience via human capital consulting.

For example, we might help a business create a learning and development program that is connected to the business goals of the organization; or establish a total rewards program that treats the needs of the whole person; or help a founder-led business develop a diverse leadership team that reflects the values of the business and improves business performance, as diversity invariably does.

Smaller, founder-led and fast-growing organizations are well-positioned to enact these programs. They are at the right point in their growth trajectory where they can enact cultural change faster and more effectively – not too big, but big enough to start having a real impact.  

Here again, data is core to our vision. For example, how might data make learning and development better? Data, when analyzed properly, can reveal why a certain business unit is underperforming, which we can use to design the right learning and development program. Or data might tell us the types of specific skills someone needs to develop to be a better leader. But you need to get at the data and analyze it.

As part of our mission and vision, we design instruments to find and analyze that data, such as employee engagement surveys.  We help our clients pull all of that together so that data is not examined in a vacuum, without consideration of the big picture. We link compensation data to high performers and external benchmarks to protect top people from getting poached. You can only do that if you study data holistically. If a business consistently views compensation data solely through the lens of setting budgets,their narrow view limits them from extracting true value from that data.  

What outcomes do we ultimately want companies to achieve? Most importantly, a profitable and growing business with a people-centric approach. Taking care of your people ensures that the right people will stay with you. As a result, you’ll enjoy accelerated business value.

We can help our clients take incremental steps to get there by digging into the data that offers clues about how to unlock human potential. Most places have the data (a lot of which is legally mandated). They just need help connecting the dots.

Our Values

We redefined our values at the same time, alongside our mission and vision. This is essential because all three together – mission, vision, and values – define the culture of a business. We found that we continue to commit ourselves to the following values:

• Transparency. We are open and honest with everyone – including each other, our clients, and job seekers. For example, we give each other open and honest performance feedback, and we are transparent to job candidates about our compensation. We are also transparent when we assist clients with executive searches. We let candidates know how exactly we honor confidentiality. 
• Empathy. This is incredibly important because we’re often in a position of working with people who need to major re-adjustments to their lives – say an executive search candidate who might need to relocate as part of their career growth. Empathy means we put ourselves in the shoes of the other person and consider their career needs (and the needs of the employer) in context of the whole person. (For more insights on empathy in the workplace, you can take a look at this article, co-authored by my colleagues Daina Gjemre and Domenica French).
• Flexibility. We seek to be flexible about the needs of our clients, their employees, and our people. We believe in meeting business growth objectives, while also meeting our employees where they are – and more specifically, we don’t find the two ideas mutually exclusive.
• Diversity. We believe that prioritizing diversity and inclusion efforts across organizations drives long-term success. Unlocking the human potential (which drives organizational growth) requires welcoming diversity in experiences, backgrounds, and perspectives.

In our human capital consulting work, we help our clients define (and redefine) their mission, vision, and values. Our clients across all offerings will continue to see the above values embedded in our work.

Looking to define or redefine your own mission, vision, and values? Wondering how your own values would look in action? We’d love to help – contact me to learn more.