Culture
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by Alan Williams and Dr. Alison Whybrow

 

Bringing values to life in your organization.

Bringing your organizational values to life requires more than simply stating the values on the boardroom wall. They need to be lived in the fabric of the organization every day.

 

 

This might seem like a tall order, but it is very simple. Bringing values to life means really connecting people with the meaning of the values in practice. And, through practice, turning those values into daily habits so that they are lived throughout – from the board through to the front line and everywhere in between. The value and benefit of practice is taken for granted for performers at the highest level in fields such as sports, music and art. Can you imagine teams like the New York Yankees, the Toronto Maple Leafs, the Dallas Cowboys or Manchester United just turning up on match day? In the arts, would the cast of Cirque du Soleil, the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra or the dancers of the Bolshoi Ballet just turn up on the day of the performance? Even the Rolling Stones need practice.

 

And yet often, in an organizational context, there is an expectation that simply communicating values is enough with no recognition that values can add so much to the culture of the business, or indeed how to translate those values into everyday habits. There is almost a ridiculous sense of hope and optimism that the values will make things better in some unspecified way once the leadership team has defined them.

 

From the context of sports, arts and music, we see that anyone who wants to learn and improve needs to commit time and effort to practice, to notice what works and doesn’t, to keep training until a routine is improved and perfected.

 

How can organizations learn from these other high performance contexts? Training exists, of course, but in most organizations, there is not much focus on practice or learning from that practice. Practice and reflection are the missing links between the concept, the theory, the idea and skilled execution.

 

The result of all this practice?

Purposeful practice is the primary contributing factor (above natural talent) to excellence in sport and life. The focus and attention to learning from that practice is fundamental.

 

Practising something new takes you into a four-stage learning and performance cycle that is familiar to many people:

• Unconscious incompetence – you don’t know that you don’t know

• Conscious incompetence – you know that you don’t know

• Conscious competence – you know that you know how to perform the new skill, but it requires attention, focus and energy

• Unconscious competence – you don’t know that you know; you perform the skill without conscious effort

 

A fifth stage to this model has been described as developing reflection – in-action, or reflective competence – avoiding the onset of complacency leading to mistakes and a degradation of the skills that have been learned.

 

Paradoxically, framing failure as an opportunity to learn is key to building success.

 

Planning for practice
Organizational values need to be put into active practice every day. With as many employees as possible, identify and discuss values specifically to flesh them out and bring them to life. Listen and take notice of what the team collectively puts emphasis on as being important. When your organizational core values are more concrete, distill those into practicable actions, one for each day of the following month. Each practice should explicitly link back to the core values and organizational purpose.

 

Over the next month, everyone in the organization should focus on the same practice on any day to find a way to honour that value in how they accomplish their work.

 

For example, an organization with the core value “relationships” might set the practice, “Invest time with stakeholders to build long-lasting relationships.” This practice gives a direct action to reinforce the core value. On the day of this practice, every employee should consciously look for opportunities to build strong relationships with colleagues, customers, suppliers and communities.

 

That simple action can have great rewards, and when employees see that actively focusing on the organization’s values contributes to their success, they will continue to integrate those values throughout their work each day.

 

Continuing on the “relationships” example, one employee was tasked with sending project updates to her team. Instead of sending an email update, as was usually the protocol, she picked up the phone to call the project sponsor to ask for feedback. The sponsor informed her over the phone that a key team member was in the process of resigning, and that information allowed the employee to make plans and be prepared before the information went public. The call took five minutes – it would have taken longer to send the email, and that information would not have otherwise been conveyed.

 

Over time and with repetition, organizational core values become habitual and automatic with active practice. Committing to that practice allows those values to be truly lived.

 

Alan Williams and Dr. Alison Whybrow are co-authors of The 31Practices: Release the power of your organization’s VALUES every day.

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