The Belonging Sesions 007: James Heaton from Tronvig Group

Tronvig Group is a full service marketing agency in the business of helping museums, arts organizations, non-profits, service and retail businesses do better at doing good.

I sat down with James Heaton, Creative Director, and posed three crucial questions about belonging:

1. Good brands are bought, but great brands are joined. Why do you think your employees join yours?

Everyone
has a voice. We always ask why, not just what and how. I think people crave
responsibility when they are also given agency, when they can see the effect of
their work on their destiny, and can see how their personal contribution plays
a role in serving a larger vision that they help create and sustain. Years ago
I fell in love with the ideas of Ricardo Semler. Taking some cues from him, we
focus on values, honesty, openness and we add to this doing good in the world
by helping our clients do better in their own efforts to do good. 

2.    The great workplaces of the
world have soul. What do you do to
humanize your culture?

We ask
the questions: Why do we exist and why do we matter? We ask our clients this.
We ask ourselves. I think everyone understands that we are each working to
achieve personal mastery and collective excellence. We don’t have a gimmick for
this. Working hard to achieve something greater than ourselves is motivating
enough and this is intensely human.

3.    Belonging
is a basic human craving. How do you
remind employees that they’ve found a home?

In a
healthy home anyone can say anything. Home is where your mind is free and
failure is met with understanding. Good ideas are good regardless of who came
up with them. Each member of the organization understands that it’s a place
where one can intentionally expose the weaknesses or insecurities within your
own ideas so that its strongest version can be brought out. And that’s incorporated
with the ideas of others, all of whom share a vision and an ultimate goal: To
make the world better.

Thanks James! Learn more about the Tronvig Group philosophy here.