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Moving from values awareness to values demonstration in your organization

Here's an exercise for publicly stating your company's values and seeing how everyone is living them day to day.

2 min read

Management

Moving from values awareness to values demonstration in your organization

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Are your company’s values modeled by everyone in your company each day?

The only way desired values and behaviors can be demonstrated throughout your workplace is if leaders model them, coach them, and hold themselves and others accountable for them. Only then will team members embrace those valued behaviors for themselves.

Here’s how one client embeds the expectation of and demonstration of their valued behaviors in every interaction.

First, values are a part of the agenda for every department’s weekly huddle. Everyone attends via video.

The agenda is sent out in advance. Besides business updates, the team discusses one valued behavior at each meeting. For example, recent meetings focused on one of their service valued behaviors: “I listen objectively to others without interruption.”

In advance of the meeting, staff are asked to write down responses to these two questions:

  1. Recognition. Which of your team leaders or team members have demonstrated this valued behavior in the last few weeks, with customers or with peers? Be prepared to share examples of this week’s valued behavior, what you observed or heard and what the positive impact was.
  2. Opportunity. The second question is about opportunity. Our teams’ customers — internal and external customers — how might all of us do a better job of demonstrating this week’s valued behavior? Where do we fall short in modeling this behavior? What gets in the way of us modeling this behavior consistently?

In today’s 3.5-minute episode of my Culture Leadership Charge video for SmartBrief, I describe the second pre-meeting question for attendees and outline how the manager can lead an effective values discussion with her/his team.

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