Scott McInnes explains why most organizational values fail: they're decorative wall-posters. Real values get co-created with staff, expressed in concrete action-oriented language, and reinforced through stories and performance metrics until they shape everyday behavior.
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Hi there, Scott McInnes here from Inspiring Change. In this episode, I wanted to talk a bit about values because for me, they are one of the key things alongside purpose that underpins the culture in an organization. Your values are effectively the signposts that say to people, whether they be people in the organization or joining the organization, this is how we do things around here. We've been in organizations, all of us, where they are up on the wall. In reception and in meeting rooms and at coffee bars, but actually it's how they're lived that really, really can make the difference. And how they're lived starts with where they came from, how they were created. So how have you created yours? Were yours created by your MD or your senior leadership team in an offsite and then just simply foisted upon the people that work in your organization? Or were they created by the people themselves? Because that's where the best values come from. They come from staff. They come from going out and getting your staff in rooms and asking them questions like, you know, describe your best colleague. What does that look like? What are your team's superpowers? What are you great at? And what's important when it comes to how we act at work? And from that, we can turn that content, those words, those thoughts, those feelings into really, really active values that everybody can get hold of because they've come from within. But all too often, we see values on the wall. We see innovation, integrity, honesty, hard work, customer first, but people don't know what to do with those words. They are simply just words. So we need to make them more action-oriented for people in your organization. It needs to not be innovation, but maybe we think differently. It needs to not be integrity, but maybe we do the right thing. Because with words like that, People know what it is, of course, that's expected of them. How do you embed them? That's the key thing, because as I said at the top, words on a wall are worth absolutely nothing at all unless they're lived in an organization. And in order to be lived, they have to be understood. So, first of all, for me, the big thing is making sure you communicate them so that people know what they are. And you keep communicating them, and you keep communicating them, and you keep communicating them until people get them into their heads, until they become part of everyday common parlance, until they really become just the way we do things around here. Of course, asking teams to take those values on board, because organizationally we have a view as to what they mean, but for each team, they're gonna mean different things. So what does we think differently mean to your HR team versus a tech team versus a team that works in risk? Ask them to work out what they mean for them and then start to live them in their own way that suits the work that they do, the personalities of the people within their team. Living them is really important and being seen to live them, and of course, calling people out when they don't live them. You know, we could have probably done that better had we have got a couple of people in a room, maybe to have a chat about that, to think a little bit differently about the problem. So next time, ask us. So being able to call people out in a positive, constructive way is really powerful. Of course, until they are fully embedded, making sure they're really obviously linked and labeled in your communications, Here's a story about a staff member who went above and beyond to do the right thing for a customer. Here's a story about a team that thought differently in line with our values in order to get to something even better for the customer than where they started. And finally, and these are probably the big chunks, start to help people understand what the values mean by maybe rolling them into a recognition program, rewarding people who exhibit those values, who live those values, and ultimately, I had a conversation about this only this morning with a client. Think about how you can roll them into your performance management system, because there is no point in having values if they are not lived and unless people are measured against them. So start thinking about, well, just because somebody scored 200% of their sales target in a year, if they left a trail of dead bodies and detritus behind them, is that the kind of organization that we want to have? Is that the kind of culture that we want to have? Because ultimately, that's what culture is all about, the output of how we do things around here. So definitely want to have a little ponder over whether you have values or whether you don't. Want to think about maybe this week.
