Values Unify, Behaviors Clarify - Workplace Culture
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There’s a major difference between values and behaviors when it comes to organizational culture.
Personally, I believe both are important, but the most valuable thing you can do to create intentional culture is to define behaviors, instead of spouting values.
“Values are helpful to point us towards a destination, behaviors tell us exactly how to get there.”
The way many organizations have approached culture for as long as it’s ever been talked about in business is to lock the executive team in a room for two days, and at the end of the those two days they come out and say: “Trust, Integrity, Respect, Teamwork, and Fun!”
“The most valuable thing you can do to create intentional culture is to define behaviors, instead of spouting values.”
Company values are well-meaning but one of the reasons that they aren’t effective in impacting the way people show up every day is because those core values are simply broad concepts.
The reality of any team or workplace is that whatever takes place inside your company in terms of how people show up, treat each other, and the behaviors that take place is your culture. If people gossip, that’s part of your culture. If there are silos between departments and an ‘us vs them’ mentality, that is part of your culture.
Values do not do the heavy lifting when it comes to impacting people’s behaviors at work. If you want to create an intentional culture, you have to define what those values look like in practice. You have to spell out with crystal clarity the behaviors that those values represent, and what exceptional looks like on your team.
However, values do serve an important purpose when it comes to company or team culture because values unify.
When we speak to our values as a team or organization, it provides a simple way to share on a high level what is important to us and our culture. And, along with those values it’s important that we also unpack those broad concepts into behaviors and actions to create clarity and make them tangible and measurable to everyone inside the organization. Behaviors clarify.
Values & behaviors, hand in hand.
“Values are helpful to point us towards a destination, behaviors tell us exactly how to get there.”
If you say that “respect” is one of your company values, that will mean different things to each person which makes it impossible to measure, scale, or easily hold people accountable to.
On the other hand, when you say that an example of respect is: “We don’t gossip or badmouth people behind their back - if we have an issue with someone else we go directly to the source and sort it out with that person.” you’re clarifying exactly what “respect” looks like inside your organization.
Values are helpful to point us towards a destination, behaviors tell us exactly how to get there.
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