This past week at Besa has been full of meetings and working really hard on projects I am very interested in. This week, our remote team member, Bryan, was in town from Florida. We used this opportunity, having everyone in the same room, to have some very big conversations.

Tuesday morning we had a 4 hour meeting blocked off in a beautiful meeting space downtown. We had life/executive coach, Regan Walsh, come to facilitate a meeting with us exploring our personal mission for Besa. This was not a typical personal mission/vision search, nor was it finding a common goal for the future of Besa. The objective was to define your mission and vision for what you hope to contribute during your time at the organization. We also were able to share some of our favorite Besa moments and stories and really recenter as a team.

As a facilitator by trade, I was deeply engaged in Regan’s facilitation style and unique take on more traditional group theories. I learned so much from those few short hours. I have only worked with developing and facilitating activities for students and individual development, but this helped me to gain insight into what team/organizational facilitation could look like.

Thursday morning, we had another 4-hour meeting blocked off in a different inspiring space downtown. This time not for team coaching but for strategic planning. I was very excited about this meeting. It started with a prompt from our founder, Matthew: “If Besa gained $250 million in capital what would we do with it?”. We quickly started talking about extremely important topics like how to grow while keeping our heart and the things that make us unique. The conversation might have felt like it was not progressing for a while, but these conversations were critically important for defining our motives and goals for the next few years. We talked product, impact evaluation, and partnerships. We talked huge scale and minute software updates.

Eventually, we got to a place where it was apparent that not everyone had the same idea of what the “dream state” of Besa (a term we often referenced) actually meant. This was not bad by any means, but after identifying it, I asked to propose an idea. I suggested that everyone takes a few minutes in silence to themselves and wrote down what their dream state of Besa would be, so everyone would have equal space to share and we could find uniform themes. I am so grateful for my team’s willingness to trust me – because that is what we did. After a long hour or so of deep talking in circles about intention and value and organizational structure, we took a break to recenter. We were able to share our visions one by one, and notice both the differences in approach to this prompt, but also the similarity of intentions. Though no two people said the same thing, no one was radically far off from another. This conversation was able to serve one of the original intentions of the meeting, to give Matthew the perspective of the team on what strategy should look like.

After this conversation, I am humbled to again be grateful to my team for trusting me when I spoke up about something I identified. We had been talking often about the difference between the “value of Besa” and the “values of Besa”. I suggested that we might need to talk through our non-negotiable values and what our stakeholders believe our non-negotiable value-contributions to be so we know where our strategic planning needs to fall between. We agreed to focus on identifying values, and I was able to use skills and an exercise from a previous facilitation position to help start leading us down the path of identifying Besa’s core values to apply holistically to everything we do and everyone we interact with.

These conversations were so incredibly enriching. To be in a workplace where we can have conversations about our values and our visions so candidly and with such buy-in from everyone in the room is so incredibly important to me. To be able to be trusted, even as the most junior and most temporary member of the team in critical long-term strategy conversations like this is invaluable.

Thanks for an awesome week, team Besa. On top of incredible meetings, I am also working on projects that I am SO excited about, and also hope to be pair-programming with one of our developers, Zack later this week. ALSO – I was able to attend Dress for Success’s annual fundraiser, which was incredible. I am so sad that this is week 6 for me and I only have a few more weeks before I head back to campus, but I can’t wait to see how much I can learn and accomplish before then.

Thanks for reading! -Emily