How to better live your values
Welcome to the latest of our short episodes published between our regular fortnightly interview shows. In this episode we discuss a topic and share a resource we think you will find useful. Continuing our focus on organisational values, in this episode we will be looking at how to better live your values within your organisation. You can download this resource from our website www.thebigpicturepeople.co.uk. Via the menu at the top of the page, select “Resources” and you can find it listed there or you can access it directly by clicking here.
The other resources we have featured in the previous episodes are:
- Bringing meaning to work – how to better understand what your employees need to make them feel there’s meaning in their work.
- Determining your organisational values – how to either work out what your values are, or to validate the values that you have within your organisation.
- Assessing your values – checking your values are fit for purpose and whether they can be used for better decision making. Are they driving your organisation strategically forward?
- Using stories to illustrate values – how to tell stories which highlight your values and show how they are lived and breathed within your organisation.
As above, this episode is about the resource ‘How to better live your values’ and is designed to be a team exercise. The exercise is about getting people to identify the areas within your organisation where you’re excelling and finding examples of where you could utilise those strengths. It’s also about identifying where you have the biggest gaps at the moment and what you need to do in order to plug those gaps.
The exercise can be worked through on an individual value-by-value basis or it can also be performed across all of your values getting people to look at the whole landscape.
The resource includes a template that you can print in whatever scale you wish, up to poster size if required. The exercise actually works best with larger groups with the template printed on a bigger scale. In this way, you can use post-it notes to get everyone to write their thoughts and ideas down. With smaller groups an A4 size will be sufficient. If you would like to use the template for an online session you can import it into Google Jamboards or any another platform where people can write virtual post-it notes. It will also work in something like a PowerPoint presentation by importing it as an image.
The main thing is getting people to recognise where you can improve, things you can stop/start/do more of, and also to appreciate what works by looking at examples of what you do really well. So, you either want to look at your strengths and identify the gaps or look at the gaps and identify the strengths needed to fill them.
At the end of this part of the exercise you should have some ideas of what you can build into an action plan, for example, or what you can look at as a set of priorities moving forward to ensure your values are consistently delivered across the organisation. It fits nicely and builds on from the resource we shared last time, ‘Using stories to illustrate values’, though it is slightly more analytical approach.
In the next short episode, in a fortnight’s time, we are going to run through a recap of the resources we have shared with you and how you might use them in a logical sequence or prioritise the ones most useful to you.
Thank you for listening, any feedback you have would be greatly appreciated and you can send an email to info@thebigpicturepeople.co.uk or by using the contact form on engagingic.com.