Values schmalues……
Okay, let’s go straight for the values jugular- what are your values?
Do you know?
Have you paused and thought, er…..
What are the business values- your own or where you work?
Do you know, and can you easily say them? Then if I asked why, can you give me a real reason why? Can you share examples of how you live them?
Values, as with mission statement and purpose, can become cliché and overall be a waste of time therefore values schmalues! Here’s some real feedback we have got over the years doing values workshops with businesses large and small
Who cares?
What difference does it make to me and my day job?
The boss has made them, so I just nod and agree.
Nobody remembers them. It’s a poster, isn’t it?
I don’t care about values in work; it’s just there because we paid someone to create them.
Waste of money. We got a consultant in before, and they created something that we don’t even link to what we are as a business- so what’s the point?
Our clients don’t care, so why would I?
Does it get me my bonus if I know them?
When we ask the question about personal values, the answers are similar for many[1] that are just assumed we know, yet when we explore and ask, many just don’t. This can be frustrating and even embarrassing if they’ve not connected what they do with how they think, feel, and believe. When realised, values can make dramatic life changes through realising the difference they make.
Let’s summarise what values schmalues is all about and why it’s worth the read; we share why values are important, what they are and are not, how you can improve decision making, clarity, focus, satisfaction, remove disappointment, reduce frustration and most of all create balance in business values or personal values.[2]
In our coaching experience, most people do not know their values. How often do you have a conversation starting with
“ These are my values, and this is how I use them in my life?”
How often are you asked?
“ Why are these your values?”
How much time have you dedicated to working through what your values are?
What we see and hear is that we take on other people’s values, ones that we are surrounded by – from what we got told growing up to our choices of social circles, to our workplace, culture, religion and more and we don’t consider or apply any depth to why they are what they are.
At RLC, as a business and personally, we review our values regularly, which some find odd; surely, your values stay the same no matter what. Sometimes. We find that life and our experiences mean re-evaluating them is important, allowing us to question ourselves, our direction, and our actions from the values.[3]
We reviewed them in early 2022 and tweaked a couple because we are streamlining our products and services across the business; RLC is in constant flux and change, and as a coaching and consulting business is essential must be open to all change that occurs in the world; ebb and flow is what makes our business so enjoyable and reviewing our values to ensure we remain congruent in all actions.
I saw a wonderful expression defining this from The Future Institute of
“Strong opinions, lightly held.”
This can be used to reflect values and how we can amend, tweak, develop or radically change them or even get stuck in what we have been versus what we are right now.
What is a value?[4]
Definition from the dictionary
· Principles or standards of behaviour; one's judgement of what is important in life.
· The regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth, or usefulness of something.
Other common definitions are
· Values are basic and fundamental beliefs that guide or motivate attitudes or actions.
· Provides a base for ethical decision making
Reality check
Understanding what a value and our values are (business or personal) allows us to ask one question: Does it (they) connect to this decision?
Many people contradict their values daily. Look at these examples[5]
Someone said or did something that you strongly disagreed with, but you didn’t speak up about it and felt ashamed afterwards.
You set goals for yourself and then fail to meet them.
Your life or career hasn’t worked out how you wanted it to.
What you want often clashes with what you've got to do or what’s “practical.”
You’re so busy pleasing other people that you’re not even sure what your own true values are
The reality for many is that we choose general, incongruent, trendy values, and someone else’s sounded like a good idea. We can put very little thought into our values when we should be making our brains ache a little when we choose them.
Here at RLC, we remove standardized terms such as integrity, honesty, ethics and morals. We do this not because these values are not credible in a company but because they are too easy. It’s a generalised approach[6]. It is not bringing a precise definition and real value to a company. The generalized courteous and professional behaviour, interacting with other humans politely and appropriately, should be a given in any organization.
Also, in a business, the disconnect from its employees to values can be that there is a lack of understanding of the differences between personal and business values.
The distinction between personal and business values
Being aware that when we talk about personal and business values, they do have some differences, and we experience many clashes with work and our personal self as we can work in places that irk us, upset us or offend us, we accept less than our own values, and it’s has a health (RLC fuel gauge ) impact too, when we have a balance of personal and work we thrive, blossom and grow, we deal with challenge and conflict and the benefits we deliver great work at home and work.
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A general expression of what is most important to you, a set of deep personal preferences that govern and guide how you think and make choices. They are in the background of your thinking and form an important part of who you are and how you are. When they are defined, they help us make everyday decisions, choosing what to pursue and what not to pursue.
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They are a set of core principles and standards that guide us on how we do business. No matter what changes in your market, plans, or strategies, these stay the same.
How to create values without the schmalues!
We have shared a lot of information about why values matter and what they are, and we now look at how to create or connect to values with some learnings we have experienced too.
Sharing those values create behaviours which create and connect to your culture. Fundamentally, defining behaviours is the secret to living and seeing values in your business. Leave them vague, and your teams/ clients will feel somewhat disingenuous about your business.
If you look at your value set, for example, include the many rather than a singular perspective – it’s more work, yet it creates a direct link for everyone, and people believe in them more.
What adjectives capture something extra that defines your business (or personality)? In a company, it is how your customer sees the business now and how they see it in the future. Our values workshops challenge the depth of value; an example would be if the company value is hardworking, it is not thinking deep enough as this answer creates ambiguity. Your clients and teams will feel that too and interpret it to suit them and not of the business. . These can be overused, irrelevant, generic and ambiguous for a whole company.
Let’s look at some common examples and how they can be misinterpreted
HARDWORKING
Your perception of hardworking may be having to work over 60 hours per week; for others, it may be their contracted hours and no more. Actually, working less more is more relevant when linked to values as the output is productive, effective, and impactful. More hours are not a badge of honour; it’s a sign and demonstration of ineffective time management.
ENTHUSIASM
If you have a business or a team full of enthusiasm, that would be great. It’s also not reality; it doesn’t guarantee a sense of direction for the future or not demonstrate reality or rise to challenges when things aren't going well. Even create extra pressure on the individual who doesn't feel enthusiastic about the business.
Enthusiasm is a mindset. You either have enthusiasm for what you are doing or do not. If you do not, there is an underlying issue to address – fixing your mindset.
PASSION
It’s not a value. It’s a product of enthusiasm is passion. Passion is a behaviour. Passion is something you see as an output of a cause of value. You cannot decide to make passion a value. You can turn it into a describing word to say, “I want just to make sure that I am going to do things in a passionate way.” You can only be passionate about things that are dear to you, which is what your values are.
Understanding that values creation is not a singular person's activity, it requires many, if not all of the businesses to be included. With great external facilitation (think RLC here and our values workshop, we do this as part of our Organisational Structure program).
Values create our behaviour.
A value without behaviour is just a feel-good factor statement that could make someone feel good or special at that moment. Therefore, rendering it useless and ineffective. If you can identify the behaviours you do not want in the firm and the ones you do and share them; you will see differences. This will help challenge nonvalue-based behaviours in the future.
The number of values is as important as the value itself.
The maximum we believe is 4 3 is better- less is more in values.
In business, less is more. Simplifying benefits everyone. How many of your current business values do you remember? We have worked with businesses that started out with 10 the most was 15 values. Nobody knew two of them, let alone 15.
A bit of history and facts in 1956, psychologist George A Miller of Harvard University published Millers’ Law which described the maximum things a human brain can work on at any given time. It was known as the magical number 7 and has often been described as the following formula; the magical number plus or minus 2.
This study was built around your ability to use and harness your short-term memory. In the 2000’s the latest thinking had changed to five plus or minus two. This time, focusing on presentations or diagrams or delivering key information was more than enough for the average employee. Further supported by our ability to sift through vast quantities of information from the internet, which has transformed how we seek, read, and discover information. Now from the 2019+, the study shares 5 +/- 2, so the ideal is 3.
Our RLC Values
Whatever your view about values or schmalues, done well, they become personalised even in business, your business DNA is represented by them. We asked our clients to get involved with ours too and they all shared the same words, so we knew that we were congruent in how we live and represent our values- what do yours do?
The error making values
The biggest error we see is that values become targets of personal attack; we inflict negative management of behaviours emotionally rather than factually focusing on skills and competencies. This means that values become a way of managing people to the benefit of emotional like or dislikes, and this is a freefall into a fear culture. One example we had was a business whose values are quality, consistency, commitment, and care- their leader owner would fly to their production location every so often and ask who do you like in your team and who you do not like and then say they should they be fired? How congruent is this to their values? Never underestimate how often this happens, like the conversations that occur over slack or in the office “I like them, I don’t like them” instead of factual discussion of work skills or competency?
Remember your values create the behaviours, not behaviours create the values. Work out values first, NOT the behaviours you want to see.
Once you have established your values, you can start defining behaviours. We easily fall into the trap of forgetting and changing our behaviours and value sets to what’s around us, and that’s not realistic. Value can have a definition of both what the behaviour is acceptable is and what it is not.
When you are capturing the right behaviour that brings the values to life, be sure to make them realistic and without ambiguity. Ensure the values enable and empower the team, firm, and people to engage with each other around the behaviour. Our behaviour is the output and outcome of values (even when they aren’t distinguished or even known!) Behaviours are where we explore the best way to build our business with and through the people.
Benefits of values – real value
Recruitment, healthy attrition and retention, client growth, engagement, productivity, effectiveness, internal promotion, communication, skills and competency growth, self-development, awareness, empowerment, and decision making can all be attributed to the benefits of a value set that is done well and lived.
Jim Collins says: “It is never about fired; it is only about hired. You hired wrong. End of story.”
Not creating and “living” your values will cause frustration and thus will result in the wrong outcomes. Fear cultures reside and grow, ineffective work is produced, mistakes are repeated, and poor customer service leads to less profit.
Curveball! why not? What if your values add value?
Now it wouldn’t be us if we didn’t throw in a curve ball – consider this added layer to values: do you add value by living the values?
Consider how your values, business or personal connect with what you do? Are you adding value in your day to day? Do you check? Adding value is necessary for what you do and ensuring that you focus on the needs of the client, others, AND yourself.
We experience that this may get lost or validated through poor behaviours, unethical work practices or, worse, not providing value-added services first. One of the fails within the coaching/leadership industry is that it can be so full of ego and self-promotion that the "real" value of what is being provided is lost. [7]
"Strive not be a success, but rather than to be of value. Albert Einstein"
Coaching is not about self; it’s about the sustainable (therefore self-sufficient) ways to support a business or individual to deliver and implement blended solutions that benefit them.
We can all preach we add value, yet we don't actually know; it’s our perception. We can believe we are adding that value by creating dependability for a client. Again, we are not. Creating and working collaboratively with the client understanding their goals, their current and future projects, and blending your existing skill and experience into a truly unique product for the client adds value.
Working with leadership teams and all levels of the teams to align and define the reality and not just a pre-packaged solution is adding value. Ensuring there is a clear, simple route to the solution to make a true impact and influence. That is adding REAL value.
"Not adding value is the same as taking it away." Seth Godin
Being congruent to your business and self is important and critical.[8] Respect your people from team to customer, add value first and foremost and over-deliver on expectation.
" If your values don’t add value then their existence won’t make a difference. If your presence doesn't add value , your absence won’t make a difference.”
Footnotes, research and references
Books to read to boost thinking around values
A billion acts of random kindness- Brass Monkey
Mistakes were made (not by me) - Carol Travis & Elliot Aronson
Clarity- Jamie Smart
All about Love- Bell hooks
Leanred optimism- Martin Siegalman
The power of regret- Daniel Pink
The art of possibility- Zander and Zander
[1] Generalisation is used here and has no data that shares what volume of the population has a defined value set.
[2] https://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-core-values.html
[3] Great book to read, Pam Slim Body of Work 2013
[4] https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/glossary/values
[5] https://business.tutsplus.com/tutorials/what-are-personal-values--cms-31561
[6] In our value workshops, if our clients can substantiate and clarify more general values, it’s their business, not ours – the work is validating, and can you make a decision from them? Can you question or challenge outputs with them? Can you see them in practice in your business?
[7] My opinion only and noting NOT everyone is like this just, unfortunately, a much larger % than are real value adders
[8] At RLC Global, we share with our clients and our RLC global consults robust and supportive programmes (for example, our RLC consults have a 52 (or 26) week support program, LIVE Coaching, consult online Campus, face to face workshops and an interactive community, to deliver sustainability for the individual, their businesses and their clients.
