Does your organization have a set of values you truly live by?
A friend sent me this video a few weeks ago. I’ll put a link in the comments if I can find it, but here’s a synopsis:
A reporter is asking an older gentleman:
“What are your biggest regrets?”
He responds:
“Well I’m sorry to say I didn’t fully align with corporate values.”
Hilarious. Sarcastic, of course, but also VERY TRUE (most funny things are).
Having worked with all my clients on their values, and their role in recruiting and retention, this hit home hard. Imagine, spending perhaps decades in a company (given that gentleman’s age, that is not unreasonable to assume) whose values did not align with yours? What a wasted, miserable life! Something to truly regret. Perhaps, I would just re-phrase his sentence: “I didn’t work at a company whose values fully aligned with mine.”
How can you assure the alignment is there? Here are a couple of rules:
- Your values need to be defined clearly, in plain language. Here’s an example, one of mine: Learning: “There’s more you don’t know than what you do know. Keep closing the gap.”
- You shouldn’t have more than five. Three is great.
- They have to be known to your team. The only way to achieve that is to repeat them, endlessly, and celebrate living them day-in-day-out.
- Failure to live the values leads to parting ways with the team member.
- You have to believe in them and live them yourself, otherwise it’s just a farce (and your team will see straight through it).
In your screening call for new hires, your team needs to be on the lookout for alignment. Once the values are clear and your team has a language around them, this becomes quite easy. You can spot culture fit from miles away.
When having an issue with an existing team member, ask yourself – is this a value or performance issue? If performance, you may be able to find a way – training, a different role/expectations, etc. If it is a value thing, you had better have a succession plan in place for the role in question.
When doing a team assessment, we always measure along two axes – performance AND values. A-players can be found in the top right corner.
Jon Stewart said: “If you don’t live your values when they are being tested, they’re not values, they’re hobbies.”
It is hard to have a meaningful life without meaningful work. And one’s work cannot be meaningful without a culture fit – alignment with the values, and the purpose of the organization.
Help to provide a meaningful life to your team by ensuring the values are there and lived. If not, do them (and yourself) a favor, and free up their future for something better.
How do you ensure your company’s values are clear and lived by everyone?
