This article first appeared in the June/July 2014 edition of Government News.

By Dr Marianne Broadbent

How often have you been in a staff room, a conference or board room of an organisation and seen a statement of ‘Our Values’ on the wall? If you are like me, you wonder what weight is really put on these and who cares about them. How did they come about? Were they generated by some consultants, or do they really represent what this organisation is really striving for?

Some years ago a colleague and I walked into a boardroom to start work with a CEO an executive team. We noticed their values exhibited on a poster on the wall, but it seemed to us that their behaviour did not reflect these.  When we indicated this, in reasonably diplomatic language, we were informed that that was just something that the marketing and human resources folks had developed. We suggested they take it down, and let’s work on something that engaged many of the staff – as our experience is that over 90 per cent of people have some idea of what is and is not working. ‘Our Values’ created by someone else can be a more negative than positive activity – especially if they do not reflect the reality of people’s experiences.

The criticality of an organisation’s cultural values are now seen as seriously shaping how they perform and how difficult it is – or is not – to shift and change, or evolved to face new and different situations. There is a greater sense of reality that values do matter. They underpin ‘how work gets done around here’ and how people behave and are treated at work. It’s important for our individual health and well-being to be part of organisations where there is some congruence in our personal values and our organisation’s values.

In the work we do with executives and teams, we are often seeking to understand an organisation’s values – both the reality of what exists today and what people would like them to be.  Think of this as three different perspectives on values: those of the individual staff members, the current values exhibited in the organisation, and the values that are important for the future.

We use the Barrett Cultural Transformation Tools approach to uncover these. The tools developed in the CTT process assists us in working with teams to clarify current values, and then having executive teams, or perhaps the whole organisation, focus on the values that really matter to their future organisation.

The relevance of this approach is both in the process and its outcomes. The process is engaging and the outcome helps identify the gap between current values and those that you really want to see exhibited in the future. The process enables organisation to really focus on no more than two or three values that most people in the team or organisation really want to see embedded in how they work.

Through some simple, but very well-developed, online tools, organisations of anywhere between about 10 and 50,000 people can engage in this process. And the approach has even been applied through sampling techniques to nations (including Australia).  But let’s get back to organisations.

We have been using this CTT approach with public sector, commercial, not-for-profit and educationally focused organisations over many years.

Working recently with a team in the not-for-profit sector, there was a clear lack of cohesiveness in the leadership group. This was expressed by one executive in the following way: “I am not sure we each have the same shared values, goals and expectations of each other. If unresolved there is a risk that the team will become more dysfunctional”.

This executive team had had real issues in differences of opinions in some major decisions they had to make. In the end the CEO did what we have now come to know as a ‘Captain’s call’. However, there was residual damage amongst a group of people who were very committed to their organisation and its constituency.

The organisation was not ‘broken’ and was performing well in its market, but they wanted to be able to deal with difficult issues and manage conflicts more productively.  They did not want the ‘cracks’ that they had recently experienced to widen, but they knew that they were not strong, as a team, in putting the difficult issues ‘on the table’. Our job was to help them understand why and to enable them to work through those issues in a robust and constructive way.

One of the approaches we used in working with them was a Values Audit. We worked with them to identify their own personal values, those they saw currently in the organisation and those they really wanted to see.

The results, and resulting discussions, proved pivotal in understanding why they were having some issues and what they needed to do about that.

Through the Values Audit the group identified many positive values in their current environment, including teamwork a results orientation, quality and integrity. Amongst the more negative values they identified were too much bureaucracy, a silo mentality, internal competition, and a confused future focus. Of the four top values they wanted to see in the organisations, only one was in their current top 10.

The four top desired future cultural values were trust, respect, commitment, and accountability. Commitment was the only one of these four in the current top 10 and it was number eight.

Having identified the desired values was just a starting point. The next step was to clarify what people really meant by those words, which we did through a workshop. We then synthesised what those values actually meant to the group as a way of elucidating current behaviour that people considered to be less than appropriate, and the sort of behaviour they really wanted to see with each other. This also served as a first step in walking through how to have those difficult conversations and deal with the sub-terrain conflicts that were being avoided.

Trust and Respect

Robust conversations are very important in organisations, but the foundation stone for those is an environment of mutual trust.   The group worked through what Trust meant to them and agreed on the following meaning:

• When there is a high level of TRUST we have the confidence that each of us has the intent, capability and integrity to do the right thing by each other and the organisation, and that we are open with each other.

While the meaning of Respect had something of a biblical tone to it, the group agreed that the words following were a real reflection of their collective views:

• When there is a high level of RESPECT we treat others as we would wish to be treated, as valued professionals who might have different perspectives and opinions, and always assume goodwill and positive intent.

My experience is that notion of assuming goodwill and positive intent is a hurdle that, once overcome, enables very different types of interactions.

Commitment and Accountability

Sometimes people are express dissatisfaction with the level of commitment of their peers or team members and want to see that really strengthened. When that is the case, it can be because expectations have not been clarified or shared and that was the situation in the NFP organisation. Their perspective on Commitment then was that:

• When there is a high level of COMMITMENT we meet agreed expectations for our role and the organisation, in terms of effort, priorities, time, energy and positive impact; and we also acknowledge and accept the need to balance personal and professional commitments.

Accepting and implementing accountability is a major issue in most sectors. This is about holding yourself, your peers and your team members accountable for whatever it is they have agreed to do, or should be doing. The explanation of accountability was that:

• When there is a high level of ACCOUNTABILITY we agree on what we are each going to do, we do it, and others can and will hold us accountable for that.

About the hardest things to do sometimes is to hold your peers accountable, that is, be able to have a frank conversation with them about where, in your view, they have disappointed you through not having delivered to clients. It is hard to do that in a really constructive and straightforward way if there is not a good level of Trust and Respect amongst a peer team. We get back to the point here that building Trust, as mentioned in early columns, is the most critical aspect of creating great teams, and it is requires deliberate work to get there.

So what do you think is the gap between the values your organisation’s espouses, and the ones that you experience and what do your peers and team members think? What action are you taking about that?

Dr Marianne Broadbent is Senior Partner, with the Leadership Consultancy, EWK International. ewkaustralia@ewki.com