OMNI's New Core Value: Accountability
By: Jean Denious
CEO, OMNI Institute
In 2018, as part of a dramatic restructuring and revisioning for OMNI, we established four core values for the company that reflected what we believed both to be authentic to us and essential to supporting our clients and communities with high-quality, impactful services. These values were Inquiry, Agility, Excellence, and Connection. We centered our core values as a critical guiding component of our organization and use them in a myriad of ways—from informing hiring decisions, to guiding feedback and reflections on our individual performance and growth, to helping us understand our project successes and challenges. These core values also help our clients and communities understand what is most important to us in how we approach our work and partnerships.
The ultimate test of core values, however (far beyond the words on the page) is if they are understood and experienced in a positive way that helps us learn and thrive both organizationally and personally. Here at OMNI, we are a team of unique individuals united by a common passion for applying our skills in service of positive social change. We deeply depend on each other to deliver for our clients but also to create and sustain a positive work culture that allows each of us to get up every day and look forward not just to having impact, but feeling empowered and valued while doing it.
Given these considerations, we eventually found that Excellence did not ultimately drive learning and thriving for us here at OMNI, and we officially removed it as one of our core values. We believed strongly in the underlying principles of Excellence (specifically, that accurate results matter for our clients and their communities, and that high standards are a central tenet of our work as social scientists). Nonetheless, an unintended consequence was that Excellence manifested instead as perfectionism, perpetuating a sense of 'one right way’ and undermining inclusivity and opportunities for innovation and learning. Not only was this at odds with our values of Inquiry and Agility, let’s be honest: perfectionism can leave one feeling defeated and depleted, rather than driven and inspired. It doesn’t actually facilitate doing our best work. Despite the honorable intentions of the Excellence value, the impact of the word was net negative.
And so, with a firm gut-level realization of the need for change, we set out to find a new fourth core value. It began with a team-wide town hall brainstorming session and thereafter included multiple rounds of discussions among multiple groups including teams tasked with advancing our EDI efforts, affinity groups, and our Executive Management Team. This stretch of time also provided a natural opportunity to continue observing how we talk about our work, and to consciously reflect on what is most important in our professional relationships with each other, and in OMNI’s relationship with our communities and clients. In these times of social and business climates rife with disparities, power imbalances, corruption, and differential consequences, but also an increasing recognition of the need to come together to solve systemic issues and the power of science to inform solutions, what is important to stand for and speak out on as an organization?
We worked through all of this to finalize a new value for the organization that we believe captures many of the priorities and insights that emerged throughout those processes, and will better serve our organization.
We’re excited to share that OMNI’s new fourth core value is Accountability.
We are accountable to ourselves, each other, our clients, & their communities.
We are committed to getting things right for our clients and the communities they serve, with services & deliverables that accurately illuminate and contextualize systemic issues, advance equitable solutions, and accelerate client impact.
We approach social science methods and ethics with rigor; We strive to lead in and contribute to the knowledge and standards of our fields.
A few additional aspects of Accountability that we believe are important to highlight:
Accountability focuses more meaningfully on the ultimate purpose of doing our work well and on the impact of our work. It communicates a commitment to equity with a focus on the responsibilities we hold for our actions as a company, teammates, individuals, and community members. Being accountable means we have a responsibility to do our work in a way that advances equity and ensures no harm to the communities our work serves.
Accountability is multi-directional and captures the inter-dependencies that must be balanced across our work, our organization, teams, and clients. It means that we are all accountable to each other, and to our clients and their communities. It also means that OMNI itself, particularly our leadership team, is accountable to our staff to create a fair, sustainable, and positive work environment.
Accountability reinforces the need for rigor in our work and standards and for striving to represent the best in our field while ensuring our approaches to research, evaluation, and capacity-building services are open to learning and improvement.
I am excited for us to begin working as a team to explicitly integrate Accountability into the fabric of OMNI as a whole, and to move forward with four core values—Inquiry, Agility, Accountability, and Connection—that support and inspire us.