How We Work

A 20hr Work Week

The 40-hour work week was a byproduct of the labor rights movement during the industrial revolution. Workers were often expected to work up to 16 hours a day, six days a week. Labor unions fought for a 40-hour workweek standard.

The 20-hour workweek is an extension of ongoing debates about how to unlock productivity, reduce burnout, promote a better work-life balance, and provide more time for personal development.

Working with Kapwa Leadership means committing to this experiment. Here are some assumptions we make about our work with clients to make this possible.

Quality Over Quantity

We prioritize the value of our interactions over their frequency. You understand that each session, while less frequent, is more intentional, present, focused, and value-packed.

Self-Guided Learning

You are willing to undertake some degree of self-guided learning and implementation. Your ability and willingness to work independently and as a team between sessions and apply the knowledge, strategies, and practices increases the probability of success.

Collaboration by Design

You are comfortable with co-creating schedules and norms for communication, meaning you don't expect instant responses to inquiries or issues outside of previously agreed windows and understand the need to respect each other’s work boundaries. You appreciate what becomes possible from gatherings (virtual or IRL) that are intentionally facilitated and purposefully structured.

Collaboration-On-Our-Own-Time

You are willing to embrace flexible teamwork, where we creatively use pacing rather than artificially time-pressured decisions that “need” to be made in live, real-time meetings. This means that we can use platforms to source different perspectives, post updates, share files, and provide feedback that can be accessed and responded to at a time most aligned with the design of each of our work days.

Efficiency and Automation

You see efficient systems that automate scheduling, billing, note-taking, and other time-intensive, repetitive, and administrative tasks as assets to our collaboration. Increasing time and cognitive load to be spent on high-value, high-impact work

What Becomes Possible With This Approach?

Deeper Understanding: The slower pace allows us more time to absorb and process information, leading to a deeper understanding of the terrain we cover.

Improved Implementation: With more time to understand and navigate new concepts, implementation strategies get rolled out more effectively.

Less Overwhelm: A slower pace reduces cognitive load and feelings of overwhelm, making the process more enjoyable and less stressful.

Greater Autonomy & Growth: With more room to process and reflect, you can take more responsibility for your learning and growth, fostering a greater sense of autonomy, self-efficacy, and integration.

Effortless Creativity: More space, less pressure, and more room to wander creates the conditions for effortless creativity, giving you the space to step outside the dominant way of thinking and acting.

Improved Wellbeing: We choose our pacing to honor collective needs for work-life balance, challenge, and renewal.

Our Code of Ethics

We believe in proactive commitments to doing good rather than merely avoiding harm.

These commitments describe the practical decisions and behaviors we apply in real-world relationships.

Our hope is for this to be a living set of standards that evolves as we learn new ways we can be better stewards of the communities we belong to.

  • We are committed to treating all people with dignity and respect. All individuals have inherent worth. We will not partner with individuals, groups, or technologies that are not willing to explicitly address bias, discrimination, exploitation, or any form of harm toward any group of people that may be occurring in their ecosystem.

  • We are committed to supporting organizations and leaders who are genuinely committed to transitioning to more sustainable, equitable, and less harmful practices. Kapwa Leadership is here to serve as a catalyst and guide for organizational transformations with clear plans and shifts in culture, behavior, and business models. Performative practices such as greenwashing, diversity washing, and jumping on socially progressive causes or issues (like Black Lives Matter or climate change) to earn public approval without making substantial contributions or changes to their practices is counterproductive to this work and not the form of partnership that we are seeking.

    We commit to pursuing life-affirming, regenerative, and sustainable practices. We will not work with industries that significantly contribute to environmental degradation or social harm unless the purpose of our engagement is to support their transition towards less harmful products or practices.

    Examples of industries where we are deliberately diligent:
    - Fossil Fuels
    - Mining and Extraction
    - Tobacco
    - Fast Fashion
    - Industrial Agriculture
    - Weapons Manufacturing
    - Gambling and Predatory Lending Industries

  • We want to put paradigm-challenging, and evidence-based perspectives, scholarship, and tools in the hands of people everywhere in a practical and applied way. We believe organizational life for people everywhere will be radically transformed the more people with access to the mindsets and experiences that shift culture, repair trust, and establish progressive ways of working. We encourage anyone to view, use, remix, and distribute our curated resources within the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. We aim to reduce as many practical barriers to this information and quality training as possible without trading off our team’s ability to maintain reasonable standards of living.

  • Operating with honesty, openness, and fairness unlocks powerful possibilities in relationships with clients, collaborators, and team members. We practice transparency in the decisions we make, and the ways we operate when doing so would reduce confusion, overwhelm, or fear and increase collaboration, fairness, and mutual understanding. This means sharing information while protecting the rights individuals have to privacy. We will not participate in organizational dynamics that control the flow of information in order to maintain unproductive or unfair power dynamics. And at the same time, we are committed to protecting all sensitive information shared with us that is consistent with this standard.

  • We support our clients in the process of acknowledging and amending past and present harm or injustices that they may have directly or indirectly caused or contributed to. To do this, Kapwa Leadership must also take accountability for the lineage of consulting that this business model comes from. This includes a commitment to practices like focusing on building capacities and transferring skills to clients rather than providing short-term solutions that may foster dependency and finding ways to keep dollars rooted in the local communities we are operating in.

  • We aspire to excellence and seek to provide high-quality in every interaction we have with our community. We believe truth is subjective and multifaceted, influenced by individual experiences and context. In addition to traditional standards of knowledge (e.g., credentialed “experts” or well-known institutions) we weave in as well equally valid wisdom sources that come from personal experiences, diverse narratives, embodied knowing and indigenous knowledge systems. We will not compromise this standard for quality in exchange for profit or arbitrary urgency.