Values matter. They inform a sense of
organizational identity, help set behavioral standards, and infuse the customer
experience. According to an authoritative Right Management survey of
28,000 employees across 15 countries, commitment to an organization’s core
values is the primary driver of employee engagement.
Whether or not they are written down, your
organization has a set of values. They influence a large amount of what gets
done and why, from overall strategy to day-to-day management. The challenge is
that they can feel difficult to capture. This can lead to declared values pulling
apart from actual values, which undermines both the credibility of leaders and
the organization’s ability to develop.
Workshops rarely help solve this problem, for
the simple reason that the meeting mode is more suited to creative thinking
than deep reflection. Outsourcing the issue to an agency or consultancy
divorces it from cultural reality: third parties simply aren’t close enough to
a business to intuit those kinds of fundamentals.
The answers always lie within. Finding them is
just a matter of digging in the right ways with the right tools. Here are three
little-known hacks that will help you get the job done—fast.
Check the exits
Outside of gross misconduct, organizations
tend to fire people primarily for one thing: values violations. A business that
parts company with someone for being rude to customers might value courtesy. A
business that releases an employee for being insufficient skilled at handling a
client’s politics might value emotional intelligence. And so on.
Ask “what were the main reasons that we let
people go last year?” You might be surprised at what this question reveals. For
example, if you value teamwork, your organization might be in the habit of parting
company with lone wolves—even the highly capable ones. The challenge is to look
beyond the surface reasons for severance and spot the values-related patterns.
When that’s done, you can turn the answers
into positive values statements. (You should also feed them back into your
recruitment process, and watch your success rate soar.)
Count the cost
By definition, your values are worth something
to you. Pushing this point to its logical conclusion, if your values have never
cost your organization anything, it may be worth questioning if they are in
fact your values at all. You do not care that much for a state of being that
you have expended zero time, energy or money to enhance.
So a useful way of determining your
organization’s true values is to ask “what have we invested in achieving?” To
put it another way: “what did we sacrifice to get here?” If the answer was,
say, walking away from a quick buck, you might value integrity or the long-term
view. If the answer was setting aside another business idea or route to market,
you might value focus or simplicity.
Do opposites attract?
A useful way of checking if your values
genuinely reflect your organization’s unique qualities is to analyze whether
any organization could credibly lay claim to their opposites. If the answer is
no, you might have fallen into the trap of identifying the lowest common
denominator rather than your own unique, powerful behavioral drivers. This is
the hurdle at which magnolia values such as “trustworthiness” and “reliability”
tend to fall.
To revisit some of the examples above, it is
possible for a firm to value the opposite of team-work (individualism), focus
(diversity), integrity (profiteering) and the long-term view (opportunism).
As you undertake these exercises, you might be
challenged as to whether the values that your organization has embraced are
healthy or advisable. An uncomfortable aspect of this kind of work is that it
can reveal values that are true but also counterproductive for your business,
unsustainable for your people—and even ethically questionable.
How you choose to deal with any such
discoveries will reflect your own values as a leader—your honesty, courage and
integrity. That, you might say, is the ultimate challenge with values: like
death or taxes, they always catch up with us. But, unlike those other
inevitabilities, they also represent an amazing opportunity to shine.
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