I don’t think I am alone in becoming increasingly underwhelmed by organisational values. This isn’t because I don’t agree with them, it’s easy to be in full agreement with the need for inclusion, teamwork, respect and achievement.
But if we are to get behind organisational values, they need to tick a few more boxes.
Our organisation’s values need to:
- be highly important to us personally (i.e. they actually need to be aligned to our own values)
- align to what our organisation is trying to achieve
- be real, genuinely part of the organisational DNA, resulting in observable behaviours, obvious to employees, customers and all organisational stakeholders – either now or to be in the future
I see too many organisations laying out the company values and expecting employees to take them on. It doesn’t work that way. We each have our own personal values and it’s these personal values that dictate our behaviour, not the organisational ones. All you can do as a leader is hire and retain values-aligned people, you can’t change their values.
When personal values, organisational values, culture, strategy and purpose align, then there is a palpable energy and momentum across the organisation. It’s rare, but you know it when you feel it.
In search of that holy grail of full organisational values alignment there are a few things to take into account in your values-clarification work, and these are often skipped over or overlooked, but I think they are critical:
- Ask the whole organisation what values are important to them. This enables you to see what matters to your people. You get to see what bonds them together as a group. It’s really important here to remember you are not asking them what they think the organisational values should be, you are asking them what their personal values are.
- Think about the values the company was founded on, the core organisational DNA. Are they still relevant and important? Are they how your customers and key stakeholders see the company?
- Clarify: what are the most important values for achieving your strategy?
You now have 3 lists of values.
The easiest next step is to pick the ones in the middle that overlap all 3 segments, this is where you have true value alignment.
Don’t be tempted to wordsmith, or change the values so that they spell a word. If the only way your values are memorable is because they spell a word, then you have more work to do to make your values meaningful.
But don’t overlook the rich questions and insights that come from discussing the values that overlap just 2 segments, and the outliers that are only in 1 segment. I’ll write more about the insights to be gained from this in part 2 of this blog post. For now, you have a high-level values map of your organisation, which is a great starting point from which to fish out the values that matter most to your organisation.
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