There are two incredibly important types of conversations leaders must continually have within the organization: the What, and the How conversations.
When organizations are stretched thin, and when leaders are feeling stressed, out of control, or unclear about the way forward, they tend to start focusing more on the What conversations. They zoom in on the projects being worked on and the technical skills being utilized across teams, and they lose sight of any qualitative discussion around how work is being done. Conversations around habits, behaviors, and other soft things in the workplace get disregarded in favor of those about hard skills, strengths, and delivering quantitative results.
One of the most common deciding factors in why an employee would choose one organization over another is the culture around work. Teamwork, collaboration, good communication, transparency, and mutual respect amongst all employees is central to an individual employee’s happiness at that company.
When we lose sight of the How conversations, we disregard the efforts, focus, and wellbeing of those who produce the most, which ultimately leads to lower quality output. One way to keep focus on these important conversations is to make upholding the company’s values and culture a vital part of everyday operations.
Values aren’t just words on a plaque
In order to cultivate a strong culture of leadership, communication, and quality work, everything in your company must be centred around your values as a leader. And what these values are is incredibly important.
Nick Dyer once said something that really stuck with me about the importance of giving deep thought to your values as a company. He said, “At the end of the day, values aren’t just words–they’re truly deeply-held beliefs about what is actually important within a company.”
This is true; as a leader, you are responsible for making sure your company values aren’t just words you’ve stuck on a poster and hung on the wall. Your values can’t be chosen abstractedly–they’re things that you believe, as a leader or a group of leaders, are deeply important for both the employee and customer experience, and are therefore intrinsically important to how you operate as a company.
This matters because people are looking for you to uphold the values you’ve told them are important. Even when it doesn’t directly benefit you or the company–especially if it has an actively negative effect on performance or profit–you will both publicly and privately uphold those values, because they’re your core beliefs.
Authenticity is the key to strong company values
Think about your personal values. Why are they your values? How did you develop them? Do you share them with your family? Are they written anywhere? How often do your values influence decisions and actions you take in your life?
Now, think about your company’s values. How important are they to you, personally, as a leader? Do they differ from your personal values? In which ways are they similar?
Finally, think back to the leaders who have most inspired you. What were the qualities that made them so inspiring?
It’s likely that authenticity is high on that list.
When it comes to determining values, which are the ideas that you hold as core beliefs about what is important and how the world should work, the critical point is that they must be authentic. This means they actually are your values, not just what you think what others want to hear. To take it a step further, the values you espouse and the values of the company you lead must be aligned (a.k.a. authentic).
The brains of the people you lead are constantly trolling through millions of bytes of data, mostly unconsciously, and analyzing that data for inconsistencies. Inconsistency or inauthenticity can come from small visual cues, or in the case of values, from a leader saying they believe in one thing but make a decision that says they value something else. This raises suspicion or skepticism, both of which, at minimum, distract your people. At worst, they foster mistrust and introduce a loss of credibility.
When one of your primary jobs is to recruit, hire, and retain the smartest people, this mistrust completely undermines that.
The first step in your desire to create an authentic culture where your values and the company values are in alignment is to get really clear on your own values.
You need to become clearer than you’ve ever been clear about them in your life. To do this, follow these steps – and take it slow.
- Identify your top three values. Here’s a worksheet to help you through that.
- Why do you feel each of these values is important to you?
- Recall a moment in your life when you really lived this value. What behaviors did you exhibit that support this value?
- How might you react if this value was not being honored by others? Describe your feelings, thoughts and actions.
If energy, passion or emotion aren’t evoked in some way as you answer questions 2-4, you might not have selected a value that truly deserves to be in your top 3.
This is a critical step to establishing authenticity, first in yourself and then ultimately with your company values and culture.
Even if it’s detrimental to your business success, your values are your bottom line.
This might sound controversial, but if you’re a leader then you need to know, in your gut, that you would sacrifice something in business in order to uphold your values because that’s how important they are to you. They are a fundamental piece of you, and they cannot be compromised even if it means turning a bigger profit, improving productivity, or increasing output.
At one fast-growing life science company I worked with in the past, their primary core value was chosen to be “people first.” This has been in place since the company’s conception, and has remained even as they quadrupled in size over the last three years. It’s the true heartbeat of the organization.
In the last year, one of this company’s clients requested significant new work to support a new therapy. It meant a seven figure positive impact to the P&L. It also required resources the company didn’t currently have. Meeting the demanding deadline put a tremendous amount of pressure on the current resource pool, and the company ultimately passed on the proposal. However, the CEO reported that although this was a financial sacrifice, it wasn’t as big a sacrifice as it could have been, given their enduring value of “people first.”
What makes this work is when your values are fully integrated into every inch of your business’ daily operations, history, and people. When that’s the case, you will dramatically limit the situations where hard decisions feel like a big sacrifice.