There are three building blocks that establish a solid foundation for a healthy organizational culture. In this episode we will reveal and talk about the second building block which is your Core Values.
There are common mistakes that people make when creating their core values. In this episode learn what those mistakes are and how to avoid them. Understand also why values are important and how they can help you create a healthy organizational culture.
And what if you aren’t in a position to change the core Values for your organization? I have good advice for you too!
To learn more about creating a great company culture, check out my book, Be an Awesome Boss.
Transcript
I’m Tim Burningham and this is the Culture Guide podcast.
Hello and welcome everyone to the second episode of The Culture Guide Podcast. Excited to have you here with us today. Grateful to have you join the show.
We’re pretty excited. Today’s our second episode in our first season and hopefully it’ll be a good one today.
Yeah. So, in our first episode we talked about or introduced the building blocks of culture and these building blocks are the foundation of what great cultures…healthy cultures are built upon.
And again, we believe that having a strong organizational culture will help you in every aspect of your business.
We all face difficult challenges at work. We all have obstacles that we need to overcome, and establishing a healthy, strong culture could help you be successful in every aspect of what you do. And that’s why establishing a strong culture is so important to us here at The Culture Guide. And I believe if you firmly established these three building blocks, then your culture will have a very solid foundation.
So, if you recall last episode, we talked about building block number one, which was our mission statement. Our mission statement answered the question of why we come to work each day, and the mission should be easy to understand and it should be concise.
Core Values
So today we’re going to talk about the second building block that helps you establish a great culture. So, the second building block of establishing a strong foundation for a healthy culture is your core values.
And so, our core values…is really what we stand for as an organization and how we expect people to behave. It’s those behaviors that we value that we hope our people will embrace and demonstrate, and these typically are values that you believe will help you live your mission and achieve your vision.
And again, they’re the values that we expect people to live by. And these values not only can guide us at work, but hopefully if they’re well defined, easy to understand, then people can truly embrace them and apply them in their lives in and outside of work.
3 Important Elements for Core Values
And so, there’s three things that I believe are important to think about when you’re establishing your Core Values.
Align With Your Mission
First, and this is pretty obvious…first, your values need to align with your mission and vision and what you’re trying to accomplish at work. So, our values should be those things or those behaviors that we believe…If we live these core values, if we live up to these core values then they’ll lead us to living our mission…in accomplishing our vision. So, number one we must select values that really are in align with our mission.
Idealistic
Second, and again this goes against kind of the grain…against what a lot of people think values should be, but in my mind I believe this is really important to help us establish a strong culture and to have our values really push us and help us in our organization. And that is I believe, your core values should be idealistic. Right, they should give us something to strive for, to live up to.
And they should be again those things going back to number one…those things that if we live up to our values, or strive to look live up to our values, we’ll be able to live our mission and accomplish our vision.
Now, since they’re idealistic, we won’t be perfect at them. And I think we need to own that and recognize that as a leader. I think we need to say, hey, look guys, these are idealistic. Our core values are idealistic and in a perfect world we would all live them perfectly, but to be honest, we’re all going to fall short and that’s OK.
But what we do need to do and what’s important is that we hold each other accountable to these core values so that when we’re failing, when we’re not living up to our core values, we talk about it…we bring it up…we point it out to one another. And so, I won’t be perfect as your leader in living these core values, but I’m going to do everything I can to strive to live up to them. And I invite you and encourage you as well to do everything you can to live up to our core values. And if we do that I believe will be successful as an organization, and I believe that we’ll be able to live our mission and achieve our vision.
Clearly Defined
So, the number three thing that we need to do when thinking about our core values is we need to clearly define them. In fact, this is one of the biggest mistakes leaders and organizations often make is…is they don’t define their values. Their values are just simply words, and then they’re left to interpretation.
So, one common value that I hear or I used to hear is integrity. We have the value of integrity.
Well, what integrity means to you…it may mean something very different to me, and in fact it may mean something different to our coworker and to those that we lead. And so it’s important that we define what these values mean to us.
Core Values Examples
So let me share a quick example with you. So, I was working at a health care facility and we had established the value of family which at the time I thought was a great value. And so our core value of family meant to us…again, we hadn’t defined it, but what it meant to me in my mind was that we’re part of a family where we belong…we’re part of a group…we care about each other. We work together and we treat each other like family.
And on top of that, we treat our customers like family…so that when we’re taking care of patients, we imagine ourselves taking care of our father or mother or brother or son or daughter or uncle or aunt. And so we wanted to embrace this idea of love of belonging and of a high level of care, and that was the intent of our core value.
But again, we didn’t define it. I later found out that some of our employees were very confused about this core value, and that what we had hoped the core value to mean to our people didn’t mean that at all, in fact, it meant almost just the opposite.
I learned that these employees had come from very difficult family situations where their families had treated them poorly and in some cases they had suffered abuse at the hands of family members or had been taken advantage of by their family members, and there wasn’t a feeling of love and security in their home.
And so to them, the core value of family was a little bit confusing and it didn’t provide that sense of security…that sense of belonging…that sense of love that we hoped brought to our team.
And so I learned a valuable lesson about the importance of defining your values.
Let me give you another example.
And so one of the values that we chose was greatness. And how we define greatness is…we define greatness as doing our personal best every day and helping others to do the same.
And so we explained when defining our value of greatness, that to us, yeah, we could be good….but that good wasn’t good enough to us when we knew that we could be great. We explained to our people that we believed that everyone had the capacity to be great every single day.
So now this value of greatness became clear in everyone’s mind. What we meant by it and what we were striving for and how we hoped our people would behave at work…that everyone would strive to do their very best every single day and then help those around them to do the same.
And if we hadn’t defined that core value, I’m sure there would have been a lot of confusion and a lot of different interpretations about the value greatness and what that meant. But since we defined that value, it became very clear in everyone’s mind what we stood for and the behaviors that…that we valued and that we expected from our team.
So when values are clearly defined and repeated and taught over and over again it can do wonders in helping us build strong cultures in our organizations.
Reinforce Core Values
Once have our values, we need to look for ways to reinforce them through our systems, especially our our people systems, like our new employee orientation or onboarding process or interview process or evaluation process…even our disciplinary process. Our values should be woven throughout all of that.
And clarity around values leads to better cultures within an organization. It also leads to better leadership and better bosses. And people have a greater desire and more respect for their leader when values are clearly defined and it becomes a much better place to work.
Core Values When You Lead a Smaller Group in an Organization
So again, what if you’re not the leader that can change the values of your organization, or you don’t really have the ability to define the values for your organization, but let’s say those values that your organization embraces aren’t super clear.
This principle can still really help you whether you’re just leading a team, a division, a department, or a smaller group within your organization. And it can help you because you can define those values for your team. Define what they mean to you and why they’re important to you and how you believe that your team can live them. And when you do that…again, you’ll help establish this really strong culture among your team and among your group, division,department…whoever you lead.
You could also share examples of ways people are living them and catch people living your values, and this is important for all leaders.If we can share specific examples of our team members who represented our values, it will help become more clearer to the rest of our team the type of behaviors that we’re hoping to embrace and live.
Conclusion
So in review a few things about establishing our values…there’s three of them.
Of course, one we need to make sure that they’re aligned with our mission and that we believe that living these values will truly help us accomplish our vision and live our mission.
Number two, I believe they need to be idealistic. They need to be something that we’re striving for, that we’re reaching for, that we’re stretching for, and that we’re truly trying to embrace each day.
And then #3 they need to be well defined. Again, if they’re not well defined, your values may mean different things to different people.
And let me just add again the importance of clarity around these building blocks that we’re talking about that establish the foundation of a great culture. When there’s clarity around your mission, your purpose….when there’s clarity around your values and what they mean…that’s when your culture will become super healthy and super effective in helping you in every aspect of your business.
Again, in order for people to understand these things clearly, these things must be repeated often, and they must be woven throughout everything that you do within your organization. And when you do this, when you provide this clarity around the building blocks of culture, it will bolster your culture and lead to much improved results.
Again, thank you everyone for joining us on Episode 2. Hope everyone has a great day today and we’ll catch you next time.
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