Lumen Impact Group
Lumen Impact Group

Building Our Team Based on Values

Published: April 2, 2025

At Lumen, we work with many teams that are growing and changing, and we see time after time the importance of strong organizational values that guide who is hired and how the team works together. 

Stephanie and Lisa sat down to have a conversation about the process of building a strong team and organizational values at Lumen Impact Group. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of hiring based on values and how to keep company culture strong as a team grows. We share why documenting core values helps maintain consistency and integrity, ensuring the work Lumen does remains strong with every new member of the team. Plus, we share about creating our handbook, and why it was important for us to create some concrete boundaries for how we do our work. 

Check out the video below or on YouTube.

Testimonials

"“They don’t tell you what you want to hear. They tell you what you need to hear. That makes a huge difference. We needed to understand our weaknesses in order to make the organization work right, and I was overwhelmed by how they really got it and they helped us to get it too. They were able to do it in a way that really made me want to understand the goals we needed to focus on. I believe Lumen was absolutely the best we could have found.”"
Barbara Sellinger
Cresthaven Academy
"“I’ve been in nonprofits for 30+ years and have used the services of many consultants, but I have never been so comfortable with their commitment to helping us. It was as if the Lumen team shared our need to have a successful outcome and they were committed to the notion that they would indeed bring value to what we were doing.“ "
Caroline Novak
Alabama School Readiness Alliance
"“The Lumen team did a really good job sharing the hard truths with us. Their findings were different from what we were expecting, but they used the information to push us farther than we originally planned. They were candid and didn’t hide anything from us. We’re now on the path to developing products that are very different from what we’ve done before but are hopefully much more useful for the people we serve.” "
Drew Jacobs
National Alliance of Public Charter Schools
"“The management of a federal CSP grant is a really niche area that requires a tremendous depth of expertise and technical know-how. You need to have a microscopic attention to detail when it comes to compliance and reporting timeliness. The Lumen team is excellent at all of the above." "
Tyler Barnett
New Schools for Alabama
"“In my coaching, we make really strong, specific plans for next steps and then we follow up on them in our next conversation. We try to keep those next steps really manageable. When I’m busy, I can’t layer a ton of personal growth on top of my other responsibilities, so we make plans for growth that are baked into the work I’m already doing. That has been really helpful for me.” "
Kristen Forbriger
City Fund