Core values: be careful what you don’t wish for

You know your values are working for you when they help you make hard choices.

For example:

• ‘Mucking in’ means taking a deep breath and going beyond the call of your job description to help a colleague in need, even though your to do list keeps regenerating itself faster than a Willy Wonka everlasting gobstopper.
• ‘Have backbone’ means taking that important but difficult debate with an entrenched colleague, knowing that it’s going to suck up time you don’t have, possibly make you want to bang your head against a brick wall, and all without any guarantee of resolution.
• ‘Curiosity’ means having the discipline to research, question and challenge, despite the ever-present pressure to deliver on your targets.

But to truly gauge their benefit, let’s now subject them to the test of inspecting them from the opposite end of that lens: i.e. what does the organisation look like and feel like without having those values in place?

• When people aren’t encouraged to ‘muck in’, they stick to their job descriptions. Nobody’s doing anything wrong, and it’s unlikely that any cultural audit or observation would note any poor behaviour. And yet the bonds between people are weaker because of it. What people are thinking is ‘that’s not my job, that’s their problem’. And a team that isn’t prepared to go the extra mile for each other won’t go far.
• When there's no mandate to ‘have backbone’, most people will take the line of least resistance. Which also tends to be the line of least success. When people see those around them ‘getting away with’ taking the easy option, they follow suit. After all, what’s the point of exposing yourself to conflict and difficulty when no-one else is?
• And without the expectation to ‘be curious’, no leader is ever going to do anything but praise and reward those who just use what knowledge they already have to keep on doing what they’ve always done. It feels effective and efficient, but is in fact just facile. Because in the long term – well, there won’t be a long term.

Your values say a lot about your organisation. But the values you don’t choose are just as important, because they give legitimacy to behaviours that you don’t want. So choose them carefully.

Rich Alderton from High Performance Change is an Adaptability Intelligence specialist, so why not contact Rich for an initial discussion?