A few years ago I stumbled across the Japanese concept of ikigai and realized it was the perfect representation of what I was lucky to find with TransPro. For the past 5+ years, I’ve had the privilege to live in alignment with my WHY to help public sector organizations work better for the communities they serve alongside a team of other passionate Transprovians.
Ikigai is achieved at the intersection of doing what you love, what you are good at, what you can be paid for, and what the world needs. With a mission of transforming leaders and organizations to produce results, every day at TransPro is an opportunity to make an impact – whether it’s helping a team to use performance metrics to continuously improve, using case studies and best practices to inform strategic actions, or engaging the voice of customers to identify priorities.
I still vividly remember my early days with TransPro, sitting in awe of the team in our weekly Friday morning meeting as they engaged in rapid fire conversation about all of the active projects and proposals in progress. Everyone was incredibly engaged and speaking a language of success outcomes and performance scorecards that I didn’t quite grasp, but knew I wanted to learn. And learn I did.
Our first value at TransPro is to commit to continuous learning to bring insights and values to our clients and teammates, and it truly is embodied by the whole team. One of the things I learned from our founder and CEO, Mark Aesch, is to be humble and courageous enough to recognize when change is necessary as a result of new information and matured thinking. A good example is the maturation of our strategic planning process, which now incorporates the WHY into our WHAT, HOW, WHO framework. I’ve seen first-hand how this shift has been central to enabling leaders in organizations from Charlotte to Sacramento to connect their personal passions to the work they do – to see how each of their whys intersect and overlap with those of their colleagues – and ultimately brings greater clarity to their organizational mission, vision, and values. I like to think it has helped them to realize their own feeling of ikigai.
As TransPro embarks on its next 10 years, I’m certain that our clients, partners, and employees will continue to teach us new ways of thinking and approaching challenging strategic topics — and that we’ll be the better for it.
