Working on the best version of ourselves
COMPANY BLOGS are a tricky thing. We’ve always extended an open invitation to our team to contribute to the Kitestring blog within certain parameters, but to me, it seemed a bit manufactured and separate from the personalities I see in our workplace. After years of experimenting, we recently rethought the whole thing.
What if we just let the team write about what’s important to them? What an opportunity to learn more about the people who make up our company — for our colleagues, clients and anyone else who wants to know the people who work on their advertising and digital projects.
The new blog rules: nothing forced and no predetermined topics. When someone is inspired or has something to talk about, let’s just let them write.
With these new guidelines in place, our front-end developer Colleen came to me with an idea but feared that it might not fit on our blog. I assured her that her story was exactly what we thought belonged on our website.
When Colleen’s piece was published, I was taken aback by the impressive response it garnered. In “My Hair is Wild,” she shares her experience with mental health and some of the struggles she faces — especially related to her career. (You can find it on our website at kitestring.ca/blog/). It’s personal and emotional — exactly what we want on our company blog because that’s the culture of humanness we work hard to protect.
“As someone with mental illness, I can tell you my mornings are not usually a routine. Sometimes I wake up with a weight on my chest like I have a boulder just lying on top of me, and I don’t have the stamina to lift it up just yet,” Colleen wrote, going on to say that some days, all of her energy goes into removing that boulder rather than focusing on doing her hair.
Every morning, “be the best version of yourself” runs through my head. It’s a reminder that I’m a work in progress, and so is everyone else I will interact with that day. Colleen’s honesty and the subject matter in her post are not something we likely would have shared publicly in years past. But as our business and my partners and I grow as entrepreneurs, we’ve recognized that what we’ve been trying to build all along is an agency where people care about each other beyond the 9 to 5.
This culture lives in our tag line, “We understand humans.” It guides how we work with our clients and each other, and now it extends to our blog. Based on the response to the post, it seems other people are hungry for that type of humanity in the business world as well. At Kitestring, we have no interest in you fitting in; we want you to belong — wild hair and all.
Not every business owner will agree with our approach to corporate culture. But at the end of my career, if I can look back and see that Kitestring was a place where peers were supported on rough days, cheered on through challenging days and celebrated on awesome days, I will know I have succeeded.