Recently, I was working with a client who had taken over as CEO for an organization that was largely dysfunctional.
There had been no common drumbeat around values, mission, or vision, and she was running around trying to course-correct everybody and get them moving in the right direction. She was frustrated, fatigued, and felt like she was not making the kind of progress that she was hired to achieve.
This is a common culture problem, and the key is, sooner or later your organization will grow too big to course-correct every individual.
At that point (or a little before), it’s time to get culture out of your head.
Here’s how to get started.
Where are you today, and where do you want to be?
Even when a CEO has a strong vision for the culture she wants to create, they are rarely implementing culture effectively, and the culture is rarely clearly defined. Most of the time, you will have to do work to clearly define what you are trying to create.
If you aren’t clear about placing your flag in the sand, your culture will take on a life of its own. You have to be explicit, and this requires clarity.
Step 1: Get Clear on Your Own Values as CEO
Figuring out what’s important to you, and what your values are as the CEO, is important to do before you bring the conversation around culture to the leadership team.
You’re ultimately asking the organization to become values-driven, or values-guided, so if you’re not clear on – and upholding – the values yourself, then you can’t really expect your team to be able to do it. If you are not all-in for yourself on what your values are, and if you’re not burning your ships so that there is no plan B, then it becomes much more difficult to lead an organization.
Your personal values and your company values will probably not be identical, but this whole process only works if you’re all in. Being all in means that you are clear on what you believe in, and are guided 100% by your own values.
Step 2: Define the Current Culture
Where are you today? What do you inherently already value? What is already present?
Once you have a clear conviction around your own values, then it’s time to get clear on your starting point.
Get your leadership team and employees together and explore what values and culture you already have in place.
Step 3: Define Your Desired Culture
If you don’t know where you are going, any path will get you there.
– Lewis Carroll
Who do you aspire to be? How do you aspire to be different?
Now is the time to get clear on the flag you want to place in the sand. Develop the vision for the culture you want your organization to have and the values that will guide you to get the results you want to see.
Once complete, you should have clarity on exactly where you are at, and exactly where you want to be.
Step 4: Develop a Roadmap
Most people don’t go the full distance when it comes to values—i.e. knowing what they look like in action, what behaviors are associated with them, etc.—and therefore, they don’t have a clear roadmap for what it’s going to look like in application or practice.
This is where things go awry, so make sure you bring it down to the granular level.
The road map is just a fancy term for the action plan for the entire organization. Once complete, you should know who will do what, by when things will get done, and exactly what the outcome will look like.
Step 5: The Roll-out
This is where you start to get the entire company on-board with what is being done and who you are going to be. It’s also an opportunity for people to opt-out if they are not on board.
This is the part of the process where you need to be firm in your convictions about who you are as a company and what is needed in each role.
Most organizations I’ve observed tend to think that once they get clear on their values, all they have to do is announce them to everyone and they will just get on board. But that’s not how values get embedded in a culture. The goal of the roll-out is to move the values from being the “leader’s values” to being “our company’s values,” and to have every single team member fully bought-in.
Step 6: Track and measure
This one is also very important and a step most ignore doing. As we live the values, we need to measure how we’re doing against those every 6 – 12 months. Apply very tangible measures, not just to culture, but also to what success looks like. If you have a successful culture and people are giving all their discretionary resources then define what your business scorecard will be. I don’t want to be prescriptive about what to measure, but define what’s important and make sure you measure it, including things like the correlation between culture and profit, speed and quality.
A deeper invitation
Most CEOs will treat this exercise as an external process. This is not bad, but it is a missed opportunity because CEOs will often find themselves unfulfilled by this.
There’s a path to much deeper fulfillment and joy in your work when you treat values and culture as a deeper invitation into a heart-based path of self-discovery. It’s more fulfilling for you, and it’s more fulfilling for your organization as well.
Making culture and values concrete is a huge job. It’s not for the faint of heart. So don’t feel that you need to go this alone, especially with how much you already have on your plate.
If you’re interested in diving deeper into values for yourself and your organization, reach out to me here: https://brilliancewithincoaching.com/