Inside The Shift: Our Team, Our Values, Our Movement (Issue 1)

By Andrew Vidales

The Shift | Issue 1 – Building Youth Power 

At LeadersUp, Shared Power begins with the young people we serve and our broader community; it’s about expanding economic opportunities and voices to people who have historically been left behind. For young people, Shared Power means having the power to shape their future, access equal opportunities, and create a life embodying their purpose and potential. This outside-in lens informs how we design our culture and how we show up every day. 

By the same token, Shared Power means fostering an environment where our team members have a voice in decision-making, communicate openly, and see their contributions make an impact. By modeling this in our organization, we immediately influence a younger generation by demonstrating what inclusive leadership looks like in practice.

Reflecting on our collective journey in People & Culture, we have found that empowerment is contagious. When one person grows, we enable the potential for others to grow as well. Shared Power is not simply a value at LeadersUp; it’s how we empower our team by providing them with the trust, tools, and opportunities to lead their own development.

Over the past year, we have engaged all team members in developing Action-Based Development Plans (ABDPs). These aren’t development checklists but shared agreements between People Leaders and team members that connect organizational goals to individual career aspirations. Today, every team member has an ABDP that has established a roadmap bolstering growth and our shared mission. That’s Shared Power in practice: no one needs to sacrifice their own growth to advance the work of LeadersUp.

We also successfully launched LinkedIn Learning, and the team has embraced the tool. 100% of our team activated accounts upon release, and over 60% took at least one course in the first two quarters. These numbers tell a bigger story: our team members are eager to learn, want to invest in their development, and strive for growth as a regular part of their work.

However, as we know, growth brings its own challenges. Aligning goals with investments triggered tough but essential conversations. These moments served as a reminder that Shared Power is about leaning into each other, listening, and aligning our efforts. It may be uncomfortable, but the outcome is powerful, leading to stronger relationships, deeper trust, and a more resilient team.

And these internal shifts are already significantly shaping our external work. As we strengthen our culture of Shared Power, we are more collaborative in our projects with partners, more inclusive in our programs, and our outcomes are more sustainable. In decolonizing our own culture, we become a model for what it looks like to redistribute power outside ourselves. In turn, we demonstrate how young adults have a voice in co-creating pathways and stakeholders experience us as trusted partners in transformation.

In the last year, we found that Shared Power is far more than collective responsibility. It’s about sharing responsibility and voice. When team members are encouraged to map out their learning journey and People Leaders support that journey with resources and genuine care, we demonstrate to our communities the inclusive and equitable future we want across the workplace.

To our stakeholders, we are undertaking this initiative because of your ongoing support for our mission. Investing in our mission enables us to demonstrate what a future-fit, people-first organization can look like. Together, we can prove that Shared Power is more than an ideal; it is a movement that transforms organizations and communities, building a more equitable economic landscape for all.

Discover the impact of your support. Stay connected with us on our website and LinkedIn to see the stories of our team and the young people we serve.

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Andrew Vidales is the Head of People & Culture at LeadersUp, driving organizational development and building inclusive, future-fit leaders.