Many business leaders have declared their organizations values. Their hope is that by publishing those values, people will treat each other better at work.
The reality is that a purposeful, positive, productive work culture won’t happen by simply “announcing” your values. It happens only when every leader demonstrates your desired values and behaviors in every interaction — and then praise aligned behavior and redirect mis-aligned behavior in team leaders and team members, every day.
This is a huge challenge when the only emphasis in businesses is on results — delivering promised performance and generating more revenues than expenses.
Only when senior leaders spend equal time and energy measuring, monitoring and rewarding respect and results will their desired culture take hold.
One client’s leadership team figured out how to integrate values into their daily focus.
They have two leadership team meetings a month: one to monitor and improve results, the second to monitor and improve values.
In today’s three-minute video episode just for SmartBrief readers, I describe how these executives invest time and energy daily to demonstrate their valued behaviors, celebrate others doing so, redirecting others when they don’t model those behaviors, and formally measure values alignment throughout the year.
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