Corporations & Philanthropy

Corporations and philanthropists often wonder where they should invest time and resources to better realize their vision and mission. ThirdWay helps leadership teams tackle everything from lack of diversity in executive teams to incrementalism in organizational culture.  We are particularly interested in projects and organizations dedicated to realizing equity, specifically those focused on increasing the organization’s capacity to be anti-biased and anti-racist.

• The EQUITY Framework — Our research and evidence-based framework is a tool that organizations can use to examine their culture and climate. We’ve taken what we know from research about anti-biased and anti-racist work, achievement motivation, and the optimal conditions for productivity and put it into one comprehensive and practical tool. We find the EQUITY Framework helpful in focusing our work with clients.
• The Organizational Audit and Action Planning Process
  • First we work to get the right people at the table to understand the tenants of the framework — and get to know the context of the organization by conducting interviews, looking at data, and steeping ourselves in the context
  • Next we help stakeholders engage in an audit using the EQUITY Framework
  • A summary is prepared and socialized among stakeholders identified by the client that focuses on the organizations strengths and areas in need of improvement
  • Then we use our Six-P Framework to create an initial plan for change — and eventually build that into a full blow implementation plan
  • Often, we stay on to build capacity of the team to work the implementation plan, provide executive coaching, and help teams overcome real obstacles to progress
• The Six-P Framework — Every organization has a finite number of levers for change. We have identified the levers in our Six-P Framework.
  • Performance — how you measure progress and what key metrics tell you about how you are doing.
  • People — who you recruit, hire, retain, and promote and how aligned that is to your vision and values.
  • Practices — your norms and rituals, what your celebrate, how you develop folks from within, people’s day-to-day experience in your organization.
  • Policy — what guardrails you set, what if enabled by policy, what is forbidden, and what implicit messages your policies send
  • Partners — who you work with outside of your immediate organization and how aligned they are to your mission and values.
  • Power-dynamics — who is at power tables, who will experience change as loss, how current power dynamics might be holding back collective progress.