Dear friends,
If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll remember that I spent the first part of my professional career at Hallmark Cards, Inc. As a creative there, I fell in love with the Sankofa symbol—a beautiful bird flying forward with its head tuned backward and a delicate egg in its mouth. It represents a West African concept that encourages reflecting on the past to build a successful future. Each year at this time, I think of Sankofa and what reflecting on our past efforts means for the future of waymaking, Waymakers, and the equitable cultures we all deserve.
Like the Sankofa bird, we are always in flight—doing what we can to clear a path toward more equitable environments. And like the bird, my team at The Waymakers Change Group and I look back and gather valuable inputs to both inform and ensure our successful path forward. In 2025, we focused on three Waymaking concepts with all our clients: embracing realism, taking responsibility, and building relationships.
Embrace Realism
We helped clients internalize data and acknowledge that data as reality. Our Employee Experience Diagnostic Tool provided clients with a clear, nuanced understanding of their employees’ experiences. The outputs weren’t always pretty. In many cases, employees were having vastly different experiences in the same organization—at times even on the same team. But before answering the whys and hows of those outputs, we helped leaders accept the data as their truth, their reality.
Take Responsibility
After helping clients accept the truth of their data, we identified the specific leadership choices and behaviors that were causing the “dis-ease” in their organizations. Looking into a mirror is hard but necessary work. And our clients who took the leap with us and implemented the solutions we created to specifically address their needs saw positive movement in both culture and business outcomes.
Build Relationships
Finally, we ensured our clients were equipped to successfully build the systems and relationships that would sustain systemic, positive change for all employees. Yes, RELATIONSHIPS. Mutually beneficial, cross-boundary relationships support the processes and systems foundational to organizational wellness. Our clients understood that without the competence and confidence to build relationships across differences, long-term success was not achievable. We helped them lean into Waymaker principles of empathy, fairness, courage, ownership, and integrity and not only did employee experience improve, but business metrics like innovation and productivity improved as well.
2025 was a banner year for The Waymakers Change Group, with evidence of the success of our methodology.
Waymaking works. Our Employee Experience Diagnostic Tool works. The Way to Workplace Wellness works. Across industries. In-person. Virtually. For all our clients and all their people. And they’ll work for even more people, more organizations, and more cultures in 2026.
Deciding to work with us takes just a few minutes. Committing to that collaborative, iterative work takes intention, investment, and vulnerability. It takes the discipline associated with Sankofa—being always aware of the past to continually inform the successful path forward.
Here’s to us helping you and others do more of that in 2026 and the successful outcomes we will generate… TOGETHER.
Together in Waymaking,
Tara Jaye
& The Waymakers Change Group