Impactful Core Values: A Blueprint

499 Words | 2-minute read | by Rebecca James

An organization's core values serve as the critical moral compass and the guiding light of your decision-making, interactions, evaluations, and behaviors. These three or four principal values should reflect how employees are expected to behave, work with colleagues, treat clients, and engage with vendors and partners. Leaders are typically very thoughtful about these; they are not just something you think of in an hour or a day and slap on an office wall. The process of identifying your principal values matters significantly, and when consistently communicated and authentically implemented, they shape the soul of your organization.

Consider hiring an experienced outside consultant, such as Ducere, for your core value research, interviews, and recommendations. This approach can save time and money while ensuring a professional process. Alternatively, leaders can formulate core values as part of their strategic planning. If you choose to undertake this important task, here are a few tips:

Choosing Your Values:

Limit the number of values to ensure people can remember them, preferably using one-word descriptors. Choose values that align with your mission, vision, and the culture of your organization—ones that can be consistently upheld across all aspects of your business. Examples: Trust, Integrity, Team, Growth, Respect, Curiosity, Innovation, Students First, Responsibility, Humbleness. Often, the specific supporting behaviors can nestle underneath a broader one-word concept (see below).

Team Involvement:

The process to identify your core values should not be top-down. Engage your current team members in the process through surveys, interviews, or small group meetings to collect data. Your core values should resonate with employees; this fosters genuine belief and connection. When people genuinely connect with these values, they are more likely to embody them in their work life. Look for common themes that you hear in your research and narrow down your final three or four foundational values.

Defining Your Behaviors:

It is also very important to assign several behaviors for each core value; otherwise they are subject to wide interpretation. What do you mean by Team or Trust or Respect? For instance, the behaviors for Respect night look like this in our organization:

·      We treat people better than ourselves.

·      We approach conversations with curiosity not certainty.

·      We control our emotions while communicating.

·      We practice blameless problem solving.

·      We assume positive intent in others.

Communications:

After investing the time and effort in defining core values and their behaviors, one common fail is that organizations simply put these up on their website or put them up them on an office wall. While these are essential, they alone are insufficient – indeed, if that is all you do, your values are at risk of being completely disingenuous. Ongoing communication and integration into your daily life are crucial to adoption and assimilation.

Ducere can assist you with developing a communication plan and provide guidance on incorporating your core values into onboarding, performance evaluations, and seamlessly embedding them into the fabric of your organization. This service can be performed in-person or remotely. Contact us for a free 30-minute consultation.