Your team seems to have hit a wall. Your boss is completely unfocused, throwing out unrelated asks and hitting you from the side with new projects. Meanwhile, you are hanging on by a thread as the go between lifting the team up and trying to anchor your boss. Sound familiar? These three positions are at all ends of the spectrum. Yet, they could be rooted in the same problem. Stalled out motivation, seemingly random ideas that distract and confuse, and the dizziness that comes from spinning in circles to connect the two all have something in common. A lack of focus. Where do you find that focus? In shared company values. Get the full picture on YouTube, here!
Now, company values get a bad rap. Employees are skeptical of them. Customers see them as nice, but vague. Business leaders see the purpose of them but struggle with how to relate them to the day-to-day. And that relationship, between values and day-to-day tasks, is where the magic lies. Let’s uncover the value of company values and how you can make them work for you.
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What’s the purpose of company values?
Organizations print their values on their letter head, they post them on the walls of the building, and on pages of their website. They invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing them both internally and externally. Yet, if you asked your average employee what the company values do for them they’d likely either roll their eyes or furrow their brow in confusion. Consider that question for yourself for a moment. What do your company values do for you? There is one common purpose to company values that, whether done right or wrong, has a cascading effect.
Company values create a unified vision
Values prompt decisive action in alignment with your vision. Simon Sinek says that all values should be verbs. They are all actions you take. When you’re in a difficult conversation with an employee on a performance plan and you’re about to lose your cool, your values kick in. Treat every living thing with integrity. When you might feel justified to yell or slam the door, that value prompts a decision on your behavior. That company value brought you back in alignment with the company vision.
It’s not just company values. It’s all values. In my masterclass, Aligned Ambitions, you uncover your unique evidence based values. Think, we listen and we don’t judge, but directed squarely to the man in the mirror. You get to take a guided tour of your own mind and identify what is actually most important to you. Equipped with those values, you’re able to build yourself a personal mission statement.
One HR Operations Director attended the workshop because she was tired or feeling over run by her co-workers in meetings. It drained her energy leaving her frazzled by the time she got home to her kids. During the masterclass she uncovered her values of feeling respected, building wisdom, and taking tropical vacations with her daughters. Her mission statement was, to infuse every interaction with wisdom and cultivate respect, enriching both my HR leadership and the cherished moments I share with my daughters. She could then get curious in the meetings to build wisdom which built her confidence and feeling of respect. Now, in the meetings she could lean on her values and ensure her actions were bringing her closer to her vision. Let’s look at how.
Make company values work for you
Understand your values for a clear vision
Understanding company values and aligning your values with them provides you with a deeper understanding of your connection with the company. You’re no longer a singular cog clocking in and out, you’re an integral part of what your company does for the world. So how do you do that? First and foremost, you need to understand your own values.
I don’t mean the values you feel like you should have. Family first, giving back to the community, those are nice but they are surface level. To truly understand and get crystal clear on your values you have to dig in. The best way I’ve ever found to do that is to reflect back on your future. (I know it sounds like I mistyped but its accurate) Visualizing what the golden aged version of yourself will be most focused on helps you move the fluff to the side and see clearly without the clouds. That is exactly what you do in Aligned Ambitions. You spend 55 minutes getting crystal clear on your vision, values, and how your goals support you in them. One CFO that completed the exercise started with the basic value of time with family. When he got clear, he realized what he really valued was the financial freedom that allowed him to support his family in the lifestyle he envisioned.
Align your values with the company values
Now, lets see how that personal value aligns with the company values. Your brain is wired to connect things. It lives off of patterns and it wants to create them so it absolutely will, based on the input you give it. Getting clear on your values, writing them down or reminding yourself of what they are keeps them in the forefront of your mind. Then, you remind yourself of the company values, and your brain will go to work on connecting them. One client connected her value of individuality with company values of customer service to provide personalized service that delighted customers with each experience. Another connected her value of career growth with the company’s focus on innovation to broaden her network through testing ideas from the company think tank. That CFO, he could combine his value of money to the company focus on integrity to create a process to investigate fraud that everyone wants to adopt. It all starts with developing your own. Click here and get access to Aligned Ambitions to uncover them.
Put a third leg on the triangle
Did you notice that we specifically called out a single value from the organization to align with? Maybe for you it’s clear which one is the most important, but for many of us, we don’t hear about any of the company values enough to know which is the most critical for us. To recap, knowing your own values comes first, then you align with the company values, but the third leg of that stool is knowing who to align the value with. In coaching you will learn how to align your actions to achieve your goals faster. You get crystal clear on where you’re going and how to use your resources to get you there. So you can know you want to be a director and know exactly who’s head to turn and how to get you there.
Value alignment in action
Let me explain, a Sales Manager for a beverage company used Aligned Ambitions to uncover her value of feeling respected for her contributions. When she brought the company values to coaching there were 15 of them. Any one of those 15 could be aligned with respect. She needed to narrow it down, but how would she choose? Her boss’ boss held the keys to the promotion to Sales Director she wanted. So she started really listening to uncover which of the 15 were most important to him. When she saw him going back to the ‘creating repeat customers’ value time and again, she got an idea. It was the new metric, referral tracking, that she created and boasted month over month increases that landed her the job in 5 months. Who wouldn’t want to garner that level of respect and promotion in a matter of months?
Value based prioritization is your new filter
Now that you understand how to utilize company values to support your values and goals, everything you do goes through this filter. Using a value filter enhances your boundaries, increases your energy, and equips you to let go of thoughts that aren’t serving you. When you embrace company values and get clear on your own you become a freer version of yourself.
Your filter in action
How much do you prepare for that meeting? Depends on how it aligns with your values. Staying late to get that report absolutely perfect? Only if it will be critical to connecting your values to the organization’s. Spending your drive home replaying that conversation in the hallway with your annoying coworker? Remind yourself that you’re not even trying to align with them and focus on how you can create new opportunities to connect with your boss. From here forward, before you put time, effort, or energy into anything you run it through the filter of how it aligns with your connection of values.
Why don’t more people do this?
There is an epidemic on values. First, people don’t bother understanding their personal values. You can spend one hour in Aligned Ambitions going deep on your vision, values, and goals. The clarity you gain in that one hour could save you countless hours on the back end. The examples I shared above show savings on time spent spiraling, advancing the wrong goals, and allow you to speed up the ultimate vision you wanted. But most people won’t take that proactive time.
People then actively push against the values of the organization. They don’t trust them or they don’t know how to align company values with their personal. They aren’t sure what those values can do for them. Well, you do now. You have the tools to understand your own, and a view of whats possible when you align yours and the organization’s. The only reason left that you wouldn’t make the most of this is that you don’t hold yourself accountable to the results. Accountability is where coaching comes in. Working with a coach directly, to push you to stay on your right track, drastically increases your chances of success. We’re talking by as much as 70% increase in effectiveness. If you’re looking to get the full advantage from aligning your values, we should talk about what your vision of success could look like. Click here and set up a time.