Kharkov Leadership Summit took place on November 2-3 at a beautiful camp near Saltov Lake. 42 leading employees got together to discuss important work-related matters. During the two November days, we spent about 12 hours in the meeting room. After intensive honest discussions about our Values and Ambitions, we kicked off the process of creation an organization-wide Career Model. We agreed on the basic Career Model concepts and set the firm January 1, 2008 deadline for the Career Model launch.
That Summit is really something for us to be proud of. It proved us being a mature group of ambitious leaders. It was an evidence of us being an integral part of the big international business. Let us share the spirit of the Summit with you.
First Day
The goal of the first meeting was to agree on our team Values. By Values we mean things that we like to have or would like to have in our organization. Things that make us special. Things that we explain to and expect from every newbie. Alex S started the day by introducing to the audience four Value candidates offered by Summit preparation committee.
The first one was being Lawful. We are lawful in everything we do. We hire employees on full-time employment basis. We pay taxes – big taxes. We don’t use any pirate software. And we stand on that. Being lawful makes us free. What are practical benefits of being lawful? According to Yeugen P, he had a perfect position negotiating his mortgage loan with the bank. According to Kostya L, a person receiving illegal payments is at a real risk of going to jail. According to Alex S, our lawfulness allows us working for a big international business.
The second candidate was being Civilized. We all agreed that being civilized is one of the important parts of our team culture. We try hard to be polite and tolerant with each other. We understand a person can be free only if he/she respects freedom of other people. Anna K said she was sorry for not turning her cell phone off when leaving the room. Yeugen P said he newer gives orders to his team members. He only asks to do something and says thank you when the task is completed. Dmitry S said if a person made a mistake, we should help him/her to fix it and learn the lesson so nobody in the team would repeat the mistake again. An absolutely wrong approach would be blaming the person who made the mistake instead. Alex S pointed out that our lawfulness helps us a lot in our efforts to be civilized. The legal employment model gives our employees the highest possible level of protection by law. Nobody has a right to fire our downgrade an employee without a valid reason. We stand for equality and mutual respect. Nobody has a right to scream on or insult other person. People’s positions mostly define scope of their responsibilities not their “importance” or “power”. We agreed that we still have a lot to learn from our fellow U.S. team members.
Maturity was another important topic. Some people outside the organization try to make a point of us being a “one-big-project” or “one-big-customer” company. The only valid world in those definitions is “big”. We are a big team working for a big business. As a matter of fact, we have a big number of customers. There are about 400 of them. Leonid N stressed on the fact that there were no separate teams in Ukraine and U.S. We are one big organization working to satisfy our customers in the U.S.A. We are working on big enterprise-level solutions. All that means we are mature.
The next keyword of the Summit was Ambition. On the Day 2, we talked a lot about what ambitions we have as a business and an organization, what are ambitions of each specific team and of each specific team member.
As for the Day 1, we continued our Values discussion in order to work out a list of the most important ones. That list would describe our team identity. Those Values would help us getting new people on board. They would also help us get right people as by sharing our Values with them we’ll make sure they share our culture. It was also very interesting to compare the list of Values with the one that had been worked out by our fellow team members in Wyoming and then put those lists together to make a single organization-wide Vision.
The team members were asked to put together their preferable Values and put them on paper. Then during the lunch time, a group of volunteers (Alex S, Olga S, Nataly Koz, Elena D and Yulia L) processed the papers and worked out a big list of about 20 Value candidates. We discussed each of them to make sure everyone had a chance to share his/her thoughts and defend his/her viewpoint. Then the voting started. Of course we had to listen to Christian W but you know we never do that. So we tried our way that was people putting marks directly on board to vote. Yakov was near with his video camera to make sure there was no felony in the voting process (you know, in Ukraine, we have a lot of experience about that). When the counting board finished, protests arose about people putting some marks because of confusion. Okay, it was Christian W’s triumph. We had start over with bulletins for secret voting. And that attempt was successful. The five winner Values were:
- Lawfulness
- Accountability
- Professional Growth
- Team Spirit
- Innovation
The abbreviation of all 5 made… LAPTI! That was hilarious! We often jokingly say that our American buddies think of us as some mysterious guys wearing lapti. And – here we are!
The Homeric laugh is the room reminded us of another important Value that was our sense of humor! And that was the great conclusion of the first working day of the Summit!
Crazy Night →