Bringing value to your values
For a lot of companies values are a lofty set of words that sit in a dusty folder. Or on a poster on the wall. But to really get your company singing, values are the essential glue that stitch everything else together. Here we explore how you can maximise your values.
So today I want to talk about how we can all bring value back to values. So in many companies, this has just become a jargon word. Having values might be on a poster, on the wall or it might be in a folder somewhere and everyone’s pretty much forgotten about it. But values are the essential glue that stitches everything together in an organisation – if they’re done properly. So what does ‘properly’ actually mean?
So first of all, the values need to be really meaningful to your organisation. They can’t just be permission to play, generic terms that you could just pick up and stick on any company and they would still work. It’s also really good if you can move from having a single word into an actual statement. So for example, at Tiny Hunter one of our values is creativity and the statement that we use to talk about that is ‘creative at heart’. And for us that applies to everybody in the business not just the creatives. It’s how you can problem solve in any aspect of your job and see the art in everything. The next thing that you need to do is make values a regular part of the conversation. So for us, every week in our team meeting we nominate stories from the week before so we all get to hear little anecdotes of what’s going on in the business and how people are living and breathing the values. And because we’re having this regular conversation, it means that people start self-assessing and talking about themselves in relation to the values. And that’s when you know that it’s really taken hold.
You also need to think about how the values are woven through the operations of the business. So in terms of recruitment, job ads, actual interview conversations, coaching, staff, all of these conversations need to be value driven. And you need to think about whether you’re leading by example because having these amazing values if you’re not living and breathing them as a leader does not work. So think about your organisation. Are you getting the maximum value out of your values?
That’s it from me. It’s time for brekkie.
Written by: Jodie de Vries
Published: June 13, 2019