Lara Pharand, product manager of wealth essentials, at Purpose Unlimited.Provided
At Purpose Unlimited, creating leadership development opportunities for employees has long been a key priority. The Toronto-based financial services company’s new full-time performance coach is just the latest example of that.
Purpose staff members have the opportunity to do an assessment with the company’s newest team member, Cyndie Flett, a former national team coach whose work is rooted in behavioural science. She focuses on helping team members use their natural strengths in their work and showing teams how those “superpowers” can complement each other and propel performance.
The coach has initially started working closely with leaders, but the company plans to expand her scope to all employees, says Kim Parkinson, chief people officer.
“We loved the idea of someone getting to know our ecosystem and the skillsets of what leadership looks like here, and driving us forward,” says Parkinson. “It’s one of those things where a lot of it is about self-awareness. We’re building self-awareness in ourselves and learning about others to be able to develop our abilities and use those strengths to actually reach our goals.”
Parkinson says the move was a big investment, but leaders didn’t take much convincing – something she chalks up to Purpose’s agility as a medium-size business and the senior team’s openness to new ideas.
“We’re at the size where we can be innovative, we can bring ideas to the table and people are hungry for it,” she says. “You never come to a Purpose meeting and hear, ‘Oh, these are the best practices, we should stick with that.’ It’s more like, ‘How can we do this differently? How can we innovate and make the employee experience that much better?’”
Lara Pharand, product manager of wealth essentials for Purpose Unlimited, is an active participant in the company’s leadership development program for people managers, which also involves periodic day-long training sessions and guest speakers.
Pharand says she’s seen a culture of openness to new ideas in her three and a half years at the company in the “amount of support, trust and respect you’re given by the leadership team and the peers you work with.”
She joined Purpose in 2019 to develop an onboarding process for its advisor clients who want to use the company’s platform. In the intervening years, Pharand says she took on progressively more responsibility for strategic planning and had the opportunity to work with different business lines and directly with Purpose’s engineering team to build new features into a product.
She notes there was “no script or manual” to her role, but she has always felt supported when making choices about what clients would value.
“I was always given the opportunity to showcase my skills and what I’m able to bring to the table,” she says. “When there’s something we needed in a product because our clients really needed it, or I thought it would bring growth or value, they trusted I was making the right call.”
While Pharand says the perks the company offers – like unlimited vacation time, a welcome package for new hires and great benefits – may be part of why people join Purpose, it isn’t the main reason why they stay.
“It’s the leadership team, the respect that we’re given and the trust, and your ability to put your foot into different areas and get exposure in different ways,” she says. “At bigger companies, most people are usually in their area and that’s the area they stick with for a while. So I’m very fortunate for the opportunities that Purpose has provided to me.”
More from Canada’s Top Small and Medium-Sized Employers
Advertising feature produced by Canada’s Top 100 Employers, a division of Mediacorp Canada Inc. The Globe and Mail’s editorial department was not involved.