Element 5. Values

Leaders with a strong set of values built on honesty and openness and respect for other people are often seen as the most inspirational. Shared values enable trust and liberate employees to be leaders; they can then take action within a framework that enables speed, creativity and agility. Values that are truly lived can also create competitive differentiation. The way your people act with the ‘customers’, whoever they are, says more about you than all the words you ever utter.

Take care to define, and live, the values that you want – delivered in the daily behaviours of your team. These intangible values – often dismissed as ‘soft and fluffy’ – translate into actions on the ground, which then translate into hard numbers in the books.

For this reason values must be measured for impact; and leaders should ensure that people who don’t live up to them should shape up or ship out.

However, defining your values must start with understanding your behaviours. Your behaviours – the ways you do things around here – are your culture. Your culture is driven by your beliefs and values. My suggestion is that you start with behaviours, in order to define the values that you hold important. For example, if people in your team regularly arrive late for work, then you clearly do not value timeliness. Otherwise, you would have made it clear to them that this was unacceptable behaviour. Equally, if all of your staff regularly display behaviours that demonstrate care and consideration for customers, above and beyond normally defined duties, then you clearly have a deep value about delivering best service to customers. If members from different teams often work together on new and different projects, then collaboration is a deep-rooted value.

Most companies I have worked with limit their core values to between four and six. Each of those values, however, may contain four or more desired behaviours. So, start first with the behaviours section of the framework, and capture what those behaviours really mean about your belief system in your values.

Element 6. Behaviours (beliefs in action)

The key questions to ask here are very simple: what things do we do around here that we absolutely must not stop doing, because they are essential to our success? What do we do around here only sometimes that we should be doing a lot more, and why don’t we? What do we never do around here that would make a huge difference to our success, and why don’t we do it? What do we do really badly around here that we should stop as soon as we can, and why don’t we stop it?

If you asked these questions in every part of your organization, you would be doing a behaviours audit, and you’d be uncovering a lot of actionable information about behaviours that either help or hinder your success. If you have a new strategy, then you will most likely need to encourage some new behaviours, while retaining some of the old ones that have underpinned your success. Why? Because a new strategy inevitably requires new and different behaviours, and those new behaviours will be driven by new beliefs and values.

Beware of embarking on a new strategy without revisiting your values! The behaviours that are driven by your values will determine whether you achieve your objectives, and ultimately your vision. So it is worth spending time thinking about these behaviours and making sure that you are happy with the ones that prevail at the moment. When you talk with your people about current and desired behaviours, you will usually find that these fit into three camps (see Figure 5.3).

Figure 5.3: Behaviours audit

· Ideal – what people would like them to be in an ideal culture.

· Real – those that are exhibited now, good, bad and indifferent.

· Needed – the behaviours you need to instil in order to achieve new objectives.

The sweet spot is where these three circles overlap. This is how you bring together ‘a nice place to work’ with a ‘high-performance culture’. You need to have a mix of all three.

Of course if you are not committed to your values and the behaviours that derive from those values, then you will quickly render your values empty words, alive only on posters on the wall. Very often employees are simply not aware of the values of the organization. Sometimes they are aware of them, but nobody reinforces them or measures them against those values. Most of all, little thought has been given to incentivizing people to the right behaviours. Finally, many values exercises are rendered impotent when staff see hypocrisy at work in the values. The blame here is often laid on senior managers who, staff claim, have one rule for themselves and one rule for others.

Organizational values provide a template for the behaviours of the organization, and leaders should put in place minimal acceptable standards of behaviour. Values must be lived by people at all levels, from the board to the front line. Failure to behave in accordance with the values should always have real consequences. Values stem from your beliefs, and your beliefs drive your actions. Your behaviours are your beliefs in action.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-23