Hustle PHX helps individuals in disadvantaged urban communities discover their innate gifts, find purpose, and achieve self-sufficiency through entrepreneurship. Participants receive skills training and business education, gain access to capital, and make connections with knowledgeable mentors who can support them as they launch and grow their businesses. In this two part conversation, you’ll hear Crys Waddell (COO), Oye Waddell (Founder), and Ricky Winne (Director of Operations) reflect on their experience in the Catalyst Program and the process of developing clear guiding principles for their organization.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and was facilitated by Grant Mankin, Partnership Development Manager.
Grant
It’s hard sometimes to find that balance between the principles informing the way that you impact your community and falling down that slippery slope of weaponizing your principles in a way that can make your culture unhealthy. Give us an example of one of those principles that you’re talking about and how it shows up in the work that you’re doing.
Oye
So it’s H-U-S-T-L-E-R: Humility, Unstoppable, Service-oriented, Team, Learner, Entrepreneurial, and then being Restorative. That’s our HUSTLER acronym, if you will. And those are our principles. And with Entrepreneurial, everyone has a sphere, or a responsibility. Part of Entrepreneurial is “don’t be afraid to make mistakes, go hard, figure it out.”
We want you to think like an entrepreneur. How can we launch this new program or whatever you’re doing, whatever your space is? Because we have many different areas of what we do. We want you to be entrepreneurial about that. And not in the sense that you don’t need help, but we want you to think, “how can I launch this and not be afraid to make mistakes and take chances so that we could be more successful?”
Crys
For me, it’s Team. Everybody knows the acronym for TEAM – Together Everyone Achieves More. But I feel like during the pandemic, everybody was working from home and a lot of people didn’t even go back to work after. I feel like things had shifted. And so it’s important for us to stay strong as a team. With Team we are all about contributing ideas, using your gifts, your skills, your talents – we keep reiterating Team because we’re not always working together in the same office. We want to make sure that everyone is strong and contributing. So that’s one of my favorites, Teamwork.
Oye
Crys, can you talk about events that we have in terms of building Team?
Crys
Yes, absolutely. So we do a lot of team-building activities. And we make sure we have a team-building activity that would bring us together monthly, and also give us skills in a particular field. We bring people in to work with us and do fun things. And then we also do events. We believe the team should have fun. So we go to Top Golf and do vision parties and just keep our team happy, which is super important to us. And I feel like that’s why we have such a good team, because they feel so secure and taken care of.
Ricky
The example I was going to give with Entrepreneurship was with our hiring. I think that was one of the principles that some of our employees didn’t live up to. It’s easy to punch the clock, get your work done, and that’s kind of the extent of it. But there’s a degree of entrepreneurship – of creativity, of ownership – that we want you to go and be creative with a program, let’s say.
And one other anecdote: we had a workshop for one of our programs and the volunteer started to talk about Hustle’s guiding operating principles. And the volunteer was the one who said, “I know these principles because I’ve been trained on them over the last year or so, and this is how Hustle holds me accountable.” It was a cool moment to actually see it in action and told by a volunteer. It’s one thing for us to say at a staff meeting or as an executive team, but it’s another thing when it’s the volunteers that start to exemplify it, too.
Grant
I’d like for you to talk a little bit about how you immediately identified that these guiding principles were going to change the way that you hired and brought on talent. And then some of the challenges that you started to experience.
Ricky
It was kind of like the framework in which we were having a discussion with a prospect. And we would just look for ways that they might exemplify that work. Then for those that we did hire, we would have those conversations, 30, 60, or 90 days out, as well as annual evaluations, things like that.
Oye
The struggle now is we have two full time positions that we’ve been trying to hire for. And honestly, we’ve had great candidates, but they don’t fit. We needed them to work like two months ago, but because they don’t fit our culture we have something to evaluate them against. We could make the hire. It would be a short-term fix, but we’re going to have long-term problems. So we are still hiring and trying to shake the trees to make sure that we can find the right fit for these two positions.
Crys
I just don’t want to come across that we have everything together. Like Oye said, it’s still a process, but it did open up another door for us to get our hiring process together. And now that we know we want to be aligned and we have a process, we want to get the right people on the team.
Oye
We started MBM in September. So it has been two years. It’s taken us a while to try to work all this stuff out, and we’re still working it out. It’s like, ‘oh man, we’ve done a lot of work, but we still have a long way to go.’
Grant
I think this is an extremely important one to keep in mind here. That these are guiding principles for a reason. These are cultural aspects. These are not things that you can read in a book, go and type up, put on the wall and expect everything to be okay. These are things that we struggle with, we wrestle with. Often times these things are counterintuitive to the ways and the cultures that we are used to being in, but that’s why they’re so important.
I’ve been in the community in an MBM culture for over a decade and I’m still learning every day, but that’s what is so beautiful about it because we evolve. And that’s an important part of the process. That’s such a fun thing to hear from you guys from today’s message.
Oye
Grant, I want to acknowledge Mollie Dougherty too, because over the last year and a half, two years, we’ve been bugging her, like “Mollie, we need to meet with you, we got questions, we need help.”
Crys
We love Mollie.
Oye
Again, I don’t want to paint a picture like we have it all together. This process took us months and we had help. We sought help to implement our principles with our hiring process.
Grant
Let me just say thank you to Ricky and Crys and Oye for spending their time with us, sharing their struggles and their successes. And for giving us some really, really good insight into their process and the things that they are working on specifically around the codification of the guiding principles and their culture.
