Put your values to work

Here are some ways your organizational values can work for you:

• Highlight them to build meaningful connections to the work you are doing (or the reason for doing the work if the work itself is uninspiring) so that you and your teammates feel purposeful and needed.

• Use them as a sieve to catch possible solutions to difficult problems - especially problems that seem to be tearing your people apart interpersonally or emotionally.

• Celebrate them being actualized through both the work and process of your teammates to ground appreciation in a tangible way.

• Lead with them in your recruiting and hiring processes to attract resonant teammates who are more likely to stick around.

• Frequently discuss them with teammates to build buy-in for the organizational mission and perseverance.

• Rely on them to be the core of how you do your work together. Talk about how they inform your work output and processes.

• Make them the foundation for your organizational systems. Build your behavior expectations and accountability processes with them in mind first so that you have a systemically values-aligned organization that inspires trust.

• Bring them up first when hiring, delivering performance reviews, and initiating accountability procedures, using them as the clear spoken expectations for joining the team, performance, and behavior.

• Think of them as a filter for deciding to pursue new and creative opportunities so that the team can both evolve and remain true to the mission.

• Consult them as the bottom line for deciding whether something (anything) is OK for yourself, your teammates, your team, or your organization. Look to them as the standard for accountability.

• Center them as the bottom line for delegation. Leaders can let go of things knowing that someone else can act with the shared organizational values as a guide.

All of these ways your values can work for you require the (surprisingly elusive) first step of knowing what your values are. Does your organization have some somewhere, but no one knows what or where they are? If that’s the case, they are definitely not working for you.

Once you locate/identify your values, it’s a good idea to see if they are still relevant and resonate with your current team and the organization’s mission. While you’re dusting off your values, it’s also important to decide whether they are operational or aspirational. If they are currently present in your team culture, or if they are things you are heading for or hope to have in the future.

Identifying your operational values is crucial because they are the real and present aspects of your culture that can ground your behavior and accountability systems. Aspirational values inspire the building of stretch goals, but they are not a strong foundation for organizational structures because they don’t currently exist within the team.

It is always fascinating to me when I get to work with a team to separate their operational and inspirational values. That discernment process is full of rich conversations and interpersonal insights.

If you find that your energy is sapped by teammates with low buy-in, an uncreative problem-solving environment, micromanagement, wildly divergent behavior expectations, or interpersonal conflict, try putting your values to work so you can lead from a strong, confident, shared foundation. Once they are clear and operational, your values can take a ton of the load off your shoulders.