Companies are becoming increasingly aware of the benefits of aligning their corporate values with the social and cultural values they share with their customers. Demand for this type of alignment has risen as consumers have begun to consider the social impact of their decisions to support the brands they love.
In 2015, Nielson published its annual Global Corporate Sustainability Report. The report states that 56% of consumers are willing to spend more on a product from a company known for its commitment to social values. Employees also have begun to choose roles and businesses that support commitment to social causes, personal growth, and financial success.
But what happens when companies stick to vague, stale values such as “excellence, integrity, teamwork, and commitment”? They become meaningless, often left to interpretation and not used to support the operations, projects, and programs of the company. Let’s take this opportunity to move towards more specific concepts that support both external preferences (the demands of their customers) and internal performance (employee behavior and project success).
Look at Facebook’s media page:
“Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. As our company grows, we have five strong values that guide the way we work and the decisions we make each day to help achieve our mission.”
Be Bold
Focus on Impact
Move Fast
Be Open
Build Social Value
Regardless of whether you agree with these statements, they point to behavioral values for Facebook’s employees, meant to catalyze a better way of doing work.
Values help teams connect to a purpose and establish the idea that people can share with and commit to each other, even though we’re unique individuals. To improve team performance, innovative leaders must choose strong, specific values to follow and create guidelines for following them.
In a values-driven business, these choices will drive your people, teams, and ultimately, the projects they work on. Moreover, leaders can easily adapt the concepts to use throughout the organization, specifically on project teams that need similar values to bind them together and drive them towards the project’s goals.
Regrettably, project teams often consider values a checklist item – “OK, let’s jot down some principles and then get back to work” – and toss out a few fluffy terms or borrow lists from other projects (or even other companies)! How many times have you been part of a project with no values or an obvious cut-and-paste from something else?
To advance and grow, to achieve higher performance, teams also need to connect to values in aspirational ways that move beyond the core into more. Everyone will have different opinions on this, but in today’s world of exponential growth, leaders and teams need to set the bar higher, challenging themselves to create behavioral values that are aspirational by nature.
When individuals first come together as a team, they have many questions:
“What do we need to do?” Better yet, “What do I need to do”?
“Will these people help me or get in the way”?
“Why are we doing this, anyway”? (“I don’t see the point”).
These questions need answers if you expect a team to be highly focused and achieve superior results. Fortunately, discussing values before beginning the project helps teams understand their fit and their goals. Take the time to sit with your team members and decide what behaviors will guide them on an initiative. This investment will become the foundation your team needs to support and drive their actions.
On a recent project, we developed behavioral statements that reflected the corporate values. We were fortunate because the company had already invested in developing behavioral values to shape the work environment. These became the foundation for creating project values to guide our enterprise technology program.
Together with the project sponsor, we developed a set of project values using the corporate values as a starting point. We combined our previous lessons and experiences on projects with ideas we felt would ensure success. And we challenged ourselves with the following statement: “No fluffy words! If you feel we’re going down this path, yell out ‘Fluff alert!’” It worked fabulously – plus, it made the process fun.
We then took our results to the executive sponsor, who modified them slightly. But the interesting part here was the conversation we had. The values-building exercise helped the team understand what the sponsors wanted from the project and created alignment with leadership.
It was refreshing when the team developed principles incorporating desired behaviors, user views, outcomes, and a deep connection to the organization values. Here’s a sample of what we developed:
- Understand the WHY & create a personal connection.
- Think beyond a technology project and towards transforming how we work.
- Positively disrupt the business while performing a seamless implementation.
As we built the plan, we continually connected our strategies with the project values. Our communication stayed open and transparent, helping team members understand all the elements involved in the change – and allowing us to create the change together. The process and the outcomes had a tremendous impact on gaining buy-in from leadership, inspiring employees throughout the organization, and setting the bar for the team’s performance.
Now imagine your own session focused on defining values, where everyone contributes. It becomes a place to understand each other’s varying levels of confidence, skills, and expertise and how the values will align the team with each other and the project. Connecting different views and personalities disrupts sameness. Sure, you could do the same thing you’ve always done, but sameness won’t get you ahead of your competition.
Contributing and agreeing as a team to a set of values creates instant connections that build the culture of the project, which in turn creates a greater sense of trust, buy-in and even ownership. Best of all, embracing team values and ensuring they connect to the company’s core values keeps the project a direct reflection of the company’s culture.
But what if your corporation has those vague, stale values? You can interpret vague statements any way you like. Hence the problem – vagueness creates ambiguity and confusion. You need to carve clear concepts from this vagueness to inspire and guide your team.
We all have different personal values, but if we can work together to build a mutual set of shared team values within teams, we can reach higher levels of connectivity and collaboration. And this achieves the contribution needed to drive teams forward and turn your company into the business for tomorrow.
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~Lynette
