This week we\’re celebrating Outside Angle’s one-year anniversary! We started this company with the hypothesis that organizations of all types and sizes need support navigating complex change. We believed that we could bring our experience working on policy, technology, education reform, strategy, and equity together into an approach that could help early-stage start-ups chart out a course, growth-stage companies accelerate, and hundred-year-old organizations modernize and pivot.
In our first year we\’ve had the opportunity to work with teams and leaders navigating the challenges of scale, evolution, team alignment, capacity building, and more. We\’ve worked with for-profit startups, public sector bureaucracies, and non-profits of various shapes and sizes. Every one of our clients has a social-impact mission, and all are committed to making positive change happen.
We\’ve had a chance to learn, learn, learn alongside some tremendous teams and leaders, and collaborate with some awesome contractors and entrepreneurs in their own right including Olamide, Meredith, Chris, Aminata and more. There are plenty of tough questions to figure out as we grow—and inevitable bumps ahead of us—but we\’re so glad we set off on this journey together. Not a stretch to say that much of the time it has hardly felt like work.
In recent weeks, we’ve seen explosive growth in our leader and manager development practice, which is finding its stride in supporting leaders to cultivate key skills they need to lead change, and giving managers the tools that can help them overcome some of the common challenges that get in the way of great management. We’ve written previously about the fundamental role of relational trust in healthy organizations, and we’re putting that idea to work in teaching managers how to conceptualize and cultivate a sense of trust—and even repair broken trust—as the first step in leveling up their management capacity. We can’t wait to see where this practice goes next.
We could not have done any of this without the trust and support of our early clients and advisors. A huge thank you to everyone who has helped us get off the ground, and especially to our fantastic clients including Zoobean, DICK\’S Sporting Good Foundation, California Community Colleges Chancellor\’s Office, Altitude Learning, AdventHealth, ASCD, HCM Strategists, Black Women for a Better Education, and others! It has been a true honor to lift up the important work you are doing.