The Zanda Culture Code

Towards the end of 2022, we reflected on the growth Zanda had experienced, alongside the evolution of our proposition to our clients & candidates. We decided we needed to reevaluate the values and the culture at the core of the business, to align with where we are now and what we want to strive for, in the coming years. So, we selected an external firm to assess what we could do regarding our behaviors and actions, to develop a culture code that would be fit for purpose.  

As a team, we reflected on what we stand for, what we do and don’t do well, and the behaviours we wanted to keep or tweak. From a Founder’s perspective, this 360 review process was quite painful at times, but also necessary and super educational for us. 

After a few months and lots of internal and external conversations, we decided on some really specific values that we could attribute our behaviours to and also strive to operate with internally as a business, but also externally with our candidates and our clients. 

Unleash Ambition. This was the first and most obvious value we felt clearly reflected the characteristics of our team and also the individuals that we support at the core of Zanda’s offerings. 

We feel we are already going above and beyond to try and amaze our customers, whether that be with our learning & development offering or the new services we are developing for early-stage ventures. 

However, we want to continue pushing this growth mindset internally, as well as externally with our candidates and clients, in the years to come!  

Execute with Purpose. One of the hurdles we faced last year was running too many projects and trying to deliver on too many things at once. It was challenging for the team and meant that many projects didn’t get concluded. So, we knew heading into the new year we needed to plan and execute everything with purpose.  

This internally meant that we needed to establish and maintain more direction on the key objectives we wanted to work on as a team and as individuals. We then split these objectives into quarterly projects to be delivered within an OKR framework, that aligns with where the business trajectory needs to go. 

This value is vital to how we work with our clients as well, we understand how time is the most valuable resource, so every interaction with a Founder, CFO, CPO needs to be driven by a purpose. It's also incredibly important that if we are retained to deliver on an assignment, we must execute and deliver the best shortlist possible and support candidates in a purpose driven way. 

So with all of that in mind, it seemed like a very sensible second value that will benefit all parties and will help us to stay focused on the business goals and ensure every interaction internally and externally is purpose-driven.  

Ignite Connections. As Co-founders and connectors in the Startup world, this value is in our DNA. We want to help people, we want to inspire and introduce useful connections, whether that be a VC to a founder, a chair to a founder or a mentor to an up and coming CFO. For us, being so well connected in the Seed-Series D startup space means that there is always a meaningful connection that we can help our community with. We listen deeply to what our clients and candidates want and we feel we can be the people to ignite those meaningful connections to help them on their journey. 

And likewise, internally we are always collaborating, whether that be sharing networks, expertise or advice. We trust one another to deliver and support each other’s personal development, whether that be through connecting them to new communities or a personal coach that can help them get to where they need to get to.  

We are thrilled to share our three new values with you, unleash ambition, execute with purpose and ignite connections, which once we decided upon, we felt passionately represents the core of our business and how we strive to communicate on a day to day basis.  

As Zanda evolves, we understand these exact values may not continue with us but we think they will always be represented in some sort of way. We are excited to head into this coming year, aligned on the behaviours and actions to nail these values, for ourselves and our community.  

Thanks for reading!

Andrew & Dav | Zanda Co-Founders

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