Responsible businesses are reshaping how they operate and interact with the world. Companies that acknowledge their interdependence with the environment and society are redefining success, ensuring their legacy extends beyond financial metrics. Companies today are responsible for generating profits and addressing pressing global challenges many of them contribute to like the climate crisis and systemic inequality.
Why? Because people are their most valuable asset and organizations do not exist apart from the environment – in addition to value creation, many businesses draw on natural resources, contribute to pollution, and fuel climate change. Beyond regulatory compliance and risk management, operating as a responsible business also offers a competitive advantage – cultivating resilience, enhancing reputation, and improving financial performance.
Mica Crouse, Founder of Big Mountain Impact, is driving this shift with a vision centered on purposeful leadership and responsible business practices. She helps organizations define not just what they stand for, but how they ignite their purpose – coalescing teams around a shared vision, creating a culture where employees can bring their whole selves to work, and telling their stories in ways that resonate with people’s core values.
Once purpose is defined, Mica coaches’ leaders to build alignment and empowers teams to bring it to life. Together, they cultivate self-awareness, identify blind spots, and redefine “success” holistically. Mica incorporates as much adventure-based team-building and experiential learning as possible to foster connection, cohesion and resilience. With a focus on balancing purpose and performance, Big Mountain Impact is helping redefine what it means to be a responsible and successful business in today’s world.
Let’s explore Mica’s purpose-driven leadership for redefining business success:
Doing Well by Doing Good
Mica believes people are driven by purpose. And they want to support, buy from, and work for leaders and organizations that share their values. That’s the driving force behind Big Mountain Impact. Mica founded this consultancy to empower leaders and organizations to discover their purpose and live it every day.
She has dedicated her career to fostering a cleaner, healthier, and more equitable world – the future our children deserve. Working with organizations to reduce waste, capitalize on clean energy opportunities, manage critical climate risks, and create upward mobility for their employees has solidified her belief that sustainability isn’t a niche and fleeting trend; it’s a fundamental transformation reshaping the business sector overall.
While the current U.S. administration is testing this belief, Mica believes most companies will stay the course because they know it’s not just ethical; it’s smart business – building resilience, meeting consumer expectations, attracting talent, and driving financial performance.
Fostering Cohesive, Thriving Teams
Building and nurturing cohesive, high-functioning teams is more than just a professional passion for Mica – it’s vital to an organization’s success. We all know dysfunctional, disengaged teams can weaken even the most promising company. Two decades of experience have taught Mica that team development isn’t one-size-fits-all. It demands understanding unique team dynamics and adapting strategies accordingly.
Mica works with teams at every level, recognizing that each member plays a key role in the ecosystem. The goal is to develop a culture of open communication, mutual trust, and genuine respect. Together, they embrace conflict as a growth opportunity, equipping teams to overcome challenges and celebrate wins. Ultimately, Mica helps team members discover their unique strengths, contribute authentically, and sometimes find—but often reconnect—with a sense of purpose and fulfillment in their work.
Leading with Clarity and Intention
According to Mica, nature is the ultimate teacher. It grounds us, deepens our connections, and profoundly impacts our well-being – enhancing cognitive function, boosting creativity, and building resilience. Just as healthy soil is essential for a thriving ecosystem, organizations need a robust, diverse, and symbiotic culture to flourish in today’s dynamic world. Research shows a deeper connection with nature can catalyze team growth, ignite creativity, cultivate cohesion, and build resilience.
Global organizations and their leaders and teams are interconnected – much like an ecosystem’s intricate web of life. Mica’s holistic, systems-based approach to consulting takes this interconnectedness to heart, helping organizations consider all stakeholders, explore diverse perspectives, and engage relevant channels when defining and activating their social purpose. By cultivating a deeper connection with nature, her coaching approach facilitates mindfulness, cultivates curiosity, and helps clients gain self-awareness to lead with clarity and intention.
Prioritizing Well-Being for Impact
Before launching Big Mountain Impact, Mica left corporate America to escape its crushing weight. While honored to collaborate with communities, policymakers, advocates, and companies to drive positive change, unsustainable work expectations—both internal and external—left her mentally, physically, and emotionally depleted. Before venturing out independently, Mica recognized the need to prioritize well-being, sought coaching support and took a much-needed career pause to recenter, rejuvenate, and recalibrate.
This journey toward balance is an ongoing process, a continuous evolution rather than a destination reached. Emerging from that period of burnout has become a driving force in her work. Addressing systemic challenges like the climate crisis and structural racism demands everyone bring their whole selves to the table for the long haul. One of Mica’s core goals is to empower others to live out their purpose in a way that fuels their fire rather than extinguishing it. Ultimately, sustainable impact requires sustainable practices – not just in work but in life.
She and Farrell Calabrese, co-founders of REBOOT bringing this to life by facilitating leadership development experiences designed to help impact leaders reconnect with nature, their work, and themselves.
Staying the Course
According to Mica, sustainable leadership is “under a microscope” in today’s political climate. Leaders must directly link their sustainability strategy to core business activities and fiduciary responsibility, continuously demonstrating how it attracts top talent, builds customer loyalty, and drives long-term shareholder value.
She urges leaders to stay the course and take the long-term view instead of being swayed by tunnel vision and naysayers with a political agenda because the majority of Americans to especially young adults, want companies prioritize sustainability. It’s not “either/or.” Addressing issues like supply chain resilience, operational efficiency, workforce diversity, and climate risk are both ethical and strategic business imperatives.
Getting Off Screens and Into Nature
Creating “big mountain impact” reflects Mica’s commitment to bringing the power of nature into everything she does. Beyond hosting retreats in natural settings, she facilitates experiential, outdoor adventure-based team building. In the increasingly digital world, people are losing touch with nature and each other. Mica aims to get people off screens and into the natural world, building connections and helping people enjoy what many of them are working so hard to protect. This human connection, grounded in nature will become even more essential as technology increasingly shapes our lives.
