Date: Friday, July 11, 2025
Hi. We are Robin Horner, Principal and owner of Radiance, and Michael Arnold, Partner and Co-Executive Director of Informing Change. Radiance and Informing Change are strategic learning and evaluation firms that support leaders in social justice, equity, and systems change efforts. Like other firms, we have been creating space for learning and holding transparency as key features of the values shaping our workplace cultures. Recently, we discussed how these show up for us. We’re sharing some of our reflections to add to new and continuing conversations around values-based leadership.
As organizations that center learning in our work, we want to model this within our workplace cultures. However, as many readers of this post know, time, competing priorities, and diverse interests can pose challenges in busy consulting environments. Our firms have worked to bake in learning opportunities to tackle these challenges.
Transparency is a necessary, rewarding, and challenging part of bringing learning into leadership. It is a core value at the heart of our leadership. How much transparency is too much or too little? And how do you balance the fears and strengths that come with vulnerability? These questions are always in front of us, but our commitments to integrity, equity, and changing systems for the better compel us to keep running toward, not away from, transparency. We do this by:
We will likely never get the balance 100% right for everyone and will never be ‘perfect’ in our leadership. However, this is secondary to the benefit to our company culture that comes from not giving up on our own growth and continual learning. We encourage others to keep at it and share their lessons openly. In a world that continues to harm through obfuscation, shining your light and putting your values into practice is more important than ever.
We like talks given by Corey Newhouse of Public Profit and Komani Lundquist Cedano of Via Evaluation about upholding human-centered workplace principles. They gave us this workbook to share here and help folks think through how to keep aligning practices with values.
We’re listening to Liberated AF: A Workplace Revolution, where Sangita Kumar and Fong Marcolongo of Be The Change lead conversations about “what it really takes to build inclusive workplaces.”
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