Craig chats about how important values are, both personally and at work.
Values are so important! They’re the things that matter the most to us. They guide and inform our thinking, behaviours and decisions, and as humans, we tend to gravitate towards people who have similar values to our own.
Our behavioural model, Why people do what they do, has a whole section about how values impact our behaviours. For me, my values are something I think about lots as they’re such an integral part of being human. For the record, I value things like honesty, integrity and fairness, and when I talk about these topics, I usually find myself holding my hand to my chest as an involuntary, authentic action of how deep these values run through me! In other words, these values mean so much to me in my life, that I have a physical reaction when I talk about them.
Even if we’re not fully aware of what our values are or what we hold dear, we all have our own set of values. But, when we’re consciously aware of what our values are, we’re more likely to take a step back, consider our actions and make better decisions. In certain situations, we may find we ask ourselves a question like, ‘How does this action/decision align with my values?’ Depending on that answer, we choose our next step.
When we’re with people who have different values, and we keep an open and curious mindset, it can open up some wonderful conversations, and help us see the world through different perspectives. It can really help us to understand why someone behaves in a certain way and appreciate each other’s differences… and appreciating differences is such a wonderful thing to do.
If you need some help figuring out your values, ‘Dare to Lead’ by Brené Brown is a great place to start. She has a list of values, to help you figure out what you hold dear. Once you’ve looked at your values, questions you might ask yourself are, ‘What’s really important to me? How do I live this value every day?’ Because if it’s so important, you may behave in a certain way to live this value even more.
Having workplace values that truly bring to life what you stand for and who you are is extremely important. In fact, they’re critical. They’re the heartbeat of any team or organisation and they form the culture that your people live and breathe every day. They create the ‘what it feels like around here’. As you can imagine, they’re so important to us at Rambutan that when we make decisions, such as recruiting our next bunch member, we look through the lens of our values to help us make this decision. We do this by thinking about our culture and team fit, involving the wider bunch in the overall decision, as well as the skills and technical capabilities needed to deliver to our clients and each other.
Our values create a common language. Everyone at Rambutan knows how we behave, how it drives what we do, how we deliver to our clients and what we can expect from each other. Many of these values align with our personal values, which is what makes it so special. It means we don’t need to learn any new values, but we can come in and be ourselves, living our values to the varying degrees that make us who we are. It’s up to each bunch member to live our values every day, to drive our culture.
At Rambutan, we love to bring our values to life by talking about them constantly, especially when seeking and offering each other feedback. It’s woven into the fabric of who we are. They’re so important to us, that I can’t think of a day that goes by where I haven’t had a values conversation with someone.
Here are some of my top tips on how you can bring your organisation’s values to life:
- Ensure your values inform the decisions, actions and behaviours of everyone
- Live them, don’t just laminate and display them as a poster (even though this may look nice, it doesn’t help you to live and breathe them!). Talk about them often, weave them into conversations daily
- Role model them to your team and colleagues
- Constantly seek and offer feedback based around your values on both the ‘good stuff’, and where there’s an opportunity to learn and improve
- Ensure there’s a common understanding about what your values truly mean, and look for stories of where this has been brought to life
- When needed, have open and honest conversations where somebody hasn’t lived a value, because this is really important
Here are a few questions for you to take away and reflect on today:
- what are your values?
- how do you live them every day?
- what could you do to help somebody else to live theirs?