Growing A Culture of Mattering
Spring 2025 | WATMEC approved opportunities for training and facilitation build inclusive thinking and mattering principles into daily operations and client interactions.
Mattering Is Your Strategic Advantage
Successful organizations know that connection drives results. When team members feel truly seen and valued, engagement rises, innovation flourishes, and client relationships deepen. This isn’t just about checking boxes—it’s about creating an environment where diverse perspectives are actively sought and meaningfully incorporated.
We’ve designed this program to help your team build both the mindset and practical skills needed to foster genuine connections across differences. Whether you’re just beginning your equity journey or looking to take established practices to the next level, our approach will help you translate good intentions into tangible impact.
Project Goals
This program will help your organization transition from traditional includion approaches to a mattering framework that drives engagement, innovation, and meaningful results. Together, we’ll define what mattering means specifically for your organization and develop practical strategies that transform how team members connect with each other and enhance client relationships. Our aim is to elevate your workplace culture from compliance-focused diversity initiatives to creating an environment where everyone not only fits in, but truly matters.
Training That Works
We have facilitated thousands of meaningful training processes (which have been as short as hours and as long as months) and meetings (which have ranged from 30 minutes to multiple days). Regardless of what your success looks like, we will make sure your time, energy and resources stay focused on your team goals.
Focused on Outcomes
Lasting training and facilitation require two powerful tools. The first is clarity on the ‘why’ people coming together and what success looks like. The second trait of great facilitation is listening. As professional listeners, we create spaces where individuals and communities are comfortable and ready to hear one another.
Building On Your Journey
We recognize your team members come to this work with rich and varied experiences. Some will bring decades of lived experience and professional DEI training. Others are earlier in their journey and equally committed to growth. Regardless of where your team is on its learning journey, we will ground ourselves in the wisdom of leadership innovator Dr John Dewey, who reminds us that we don’t learn from experience; we learn by reflecting on our experiences.
Our sessions honour this spectrum of knowledge and create a space for reflection and shared learning. We use facilitated discussions and peer learning to help the team develop a common language and shared understanding of how your organization specifically approaches mattering. The goal isn’t to start from scratch but to weave together your collective wisdom into a stronger, more intentional approach to mattering that serves your team and clients.
Mattering For Your Business
We hear you saying
You started or manage this business because you care about and believe in the value you bring clients. Profit and efficiency is are important ways to can measure and point to that value.
You want to be an employer for whom people are proud to work. You care about your growing team and know that many of them look different than you and arrive at work with unique life experiences. That is both exciting and scary.
Mattering is equal parts important and overwhelming, which means you feel stuck about where to start and don’t want to do this wrong. It would be easier to avoid these conversations altogether.
Let us reflect back
The either-or perception between mattering and profit is a false premise. This is an AND conversation. We believe in the power of business to be a force of good. Nothing is wrong with making money as long as you bring your team along on the journey.
Stepping into DEI with intentionality and humility is a sign you are committed to the team’s wellness and your collective growth. Your team wants to succeed…with you. They are ready and willing to do what it takes to grow.
For the record, mattering conversions are not easy nor are they ever ‘solved’. You can also do this. Equally important, cultures that embrace authentic inclusion have a competitive edge that is very, very hard to match.
Conversations About Mattering
Our four-session mattering journey is designed specifically for organizations looking to grow their top line and strengthen their culture. Recognizing that your team brings varied experiences and perspectives to this work, each 60-minute virtual session builds on your collective wisdom and will allow your team to define, embrace and expand your culture of mattering.
Session 1: Learn
Starting your equity learning.
Recognizing Patterns That Matter
A 60-minute exploration of how barriers show up in organizations and what we can do about them. Through our Circle of Trust exercise, we’ll explore pattern recognition in philanthropy and how these patterns impact both your team and clients. This session helps establish a foundation for authentic conversations about inclusion and belonging.
Conversations can include: personal reflections on mattering, the circle of trust and a deep dive into the definition of equity.
Session 2: See
Better understand those around you.
Interrupting Practices That Marginalize
Building on our pattern recognition work, this 60-minute session explores who we center and who we silence in our work. Through facilitated discussion and reflection, we’ll examine accountability in philanthropic practice and how small changes can create big impacts for team members and donors.
Conversations can include: the circle of power, blind spots and exploring which voices are being centred and whose voices are being silenced.
Session 3: Become
Understand the power of mattering.
Cultivating Everyone’s Strengths
This 60-minute session uses our Power Wheel exercise to help identify blind spots in how we work with each other and serve clients. We’ll explore how recognizing and leveraging diverse strengths creates better outcomes for everyone.
Conversations can include: allyship, moving from shame and blame to responsibility and accountability and annual equity goal-setting.
Session 4: Grow
Take action on your equity next steps
Creating Your Culture of Mattering
Our final 60-minute session brings together key learnings to help define what mattering means for your organization. We’ll work together to identify specific actions and commitments to bring this culture to life.
Conversations can include: the power of proximity, courageous conversations and inviting others into our learning journey.
Customized Session Follow Up
Reinforce the learnings and conversations from each session
Continue The Learning
After each session, participants receive a custom newsletter that includes:
- Key concepts explored in the session
- Team reflections and learning moments
- Practical tools for working with clients
- Curated resources for continued learning
- A “mattering moment” challenge to apply concepts before next session
Each newsletter serves as both session documentation and ongoing learning support. These newsletters are specific to your team and the conversations we have with you and will help team members stay connected to the learning. The newsletters will include practical tools and real-world examples that your team can apply immediately, moving these conversations from 1-and-done to a learn-and-return model. Equally importantly, these touchpoints create a time of personal and team reflection between our sessions.
Each session is delivered virtually for 60 – 75 minutes. Sessions must be booked as a suite of training, not individually. The client is responsible for arranging meeting technology and scheduling. We recommend sessions be no more than 6 weeks apart.
Amplify Your Learning With DiSC
The foundation of effective mattering work begins with self-awareness and appreciation of differences. DiSC® on Catalyst™ provides your team with a powerful, interactive platform that makes this journey accessible and engaging.
DiSC Enhances Mattering | DiSC assessment delivers personalized insights about individual work styles and preferences, creating a common language for discussing differences constructively. When team members understand their own DiSC styles they develop:
- Enhanced self-awareness: Understanding your natural tendencies and blind spots
- Improved communication: Adapting your approach based on others’ preferences
- Greater empathy: Appreciating why colleagues might approach situations differently
- Reduced conflict: Reframing differences as complementary strengths rather than obstacles
By combining DiSC with our mattering framework, your team will develop both the personal awareness and practical skills needed to create an environment where everyone can bring their authentic selves to work and truly matter.
Investing In Your Growth
The team at Four Simple Words are facilitation and training professionals who have managed budgets of all sizes. Our commitment: no money surprises. Just a job well done. Session fees include a 30 min pre-meeting check-in, virtual facilitation with two facilitators, a customized newsletter after each session and one total hour of prep or debrief.
Team Four Simple Words
Lakhdeep Singh Dhaliwal
For 20 years Lakhdeep Singh Dhaliwal has been building his leadership and experiences as a DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) professional. He has worked in large and small organizations across North America opening minds and hearts in classrooms, shop floors and board rooms. He is gifted in his ability to invite large and small groups into hard conversations about inclusion with grace, joy and humour. His big beautiful brain is filled with knowledge, a passion for learning and curiosity. Lakhdeep’s focus is always to help organizations understand and reimagine power.
Curt Hammond
For the same time (ok, maybe a little longer) Curt Hammond has been on a journey to help organizations find mission clarity through effective strategy and communication plans that don’t suck. He has facilitated thousands of meetings, created and led a lot of initiatives (some of them a success!) and has helped organizations share their story. Curt’s training skills have been described as everything from meh to average. While he didn’t recognize it early on, throughout his career Curt has tried to model, understand and share his passion for being in service.
Similar Projects
Wellington Catholic District School Board
Lakhdeep helped to design and implement a training program for over 50 staff at the board including librarians, educational assistants, teachers, administrators, and child-and-youth workers as they prepared to go back to school in fall of 2022. The sessions were themed with an equity lens and focused on 1) dismantling and discussing the COVID-19 context, 2) considering the equity concerns September would bring 3) envisioning a post-pandemic world. Learn more here (scroll to page 20).
Township of Centre Wellington
Four Simple Words was asked by the township to plan, build and facilitate a year-long process to support and empower a new committee of council focused on DEI. This is the township’s first formal effort to step into DEI work. Our team listened to the needs of the township and the individual citizens on the committee to build a training and engagement process that took 10 months to complete and resulted in a committee that is ready to continue its work without us! Learn more here.
Custom Leather
The leadership team at Custom Leather asked Four Simple Words to help them build, execute and monitor a training program for their administrative team of over 25 people. Working with a diverse team of leaders, we helped identify the internal cultural barriers that were hindering collaboration, clear communications and a commitment to results. Using DiSC as a tool to increase self-awareness and (honestly) talk about team culture, we created in-person and virtual spaces for senior leadership and staff to listen to one another, clarify needs and create new processes to improve the flow of communication.
Thank You
We appreciate the opportunity to share these ideas with WATMEC customers as a starting point for your organization’s mattering journey. Please reach out to Dale with any questions or to schedule your first session.
