Assessing your values
Welcome to the latest of our fortnightly short episode which are an opportunity for us to share some of our favourite resources and thoughts with you. We hope you are finding them useful.
This episode and resource builds on from Episode 7 (Determining your values). As Jim Collins once said, many organisations already have values but our role as communicators and employee engagers is to uncover those values and articulate them consistently. Clearly articulated and well thought out values should drive behaviour and decision making at the point of action. If we know what our values are, when we reach a fork in the road, we should know which way to go guided by our values. They should empower our people, so they know what to do in certain situations that aren’t always predictable.
The resource we’re sharing with you today is called ‘Assessing your values’ and it asks you to write down your organisational values and think about how well they act as a guideline for behaviour. Are people generally proud of the values, do they mean something to people, and do they drive their motivation?
The resource asks you to look at:
- The connection between your people and the values
- Do the values provide a guidance for decision making?
- How do the values help you to decide how to allocate your resources?
- How do your values affect your priorities on a strategic level?
Do your values help you at a corporate level as well? For example, a food manufacturing company uses ‘quality’ as one of their values and the story they tell as to why it is important to them is related to a time in the past, when the raw materials that they used for manufacturing were poor quality. They were faced with the dilemma of do we ramp down production and fail orders or do we drop our quality standard and fulfil our orders? The decision was made to only produce a product which met the quality standard. This meant letting customers down with orders and also missing sales targets, but the company decided they would never compromise on quality even at the cost of some other key areas of performance.
It’s stories like this that illustrate whether a value is something that is integral to your organisation and whether it will shape the organisation going forward.
While this is designed as a personal reflection exercise, it can also be used among your team where you can then compare the outcomes and find out if you are aligned or misaligned.
You can download ‘Assessing your values’ from the resource page on our website www.thebigpicturepeople.co.uk where you will also find the previous personal reflection exercises we have shared. We will be back in a couple of weeks to share another resource with you which will build on this narrative.
If you have any feedback on the resources or the show in general please let us know via engagingic.com where there is a form you can fill in or via our email address info@thebigpicturepeople.co.uk.