It is with delight that I write this post as I have just submitted my final MA Leadership assignment! This marks the formal culmination of a two-year, transformative journey that has brought new learning, new perspectives and new tools to share with others. It has deepened my passion for values-based leadership and systems and values-based organizational culture initiatives.
Along my MA Leadership journey, I bumped into Richard Barrett’s 2017 book, The Values-Driven Organization, and was so captivated by it that I subsequently took the Barrett Cultural Transformation Tools Certification in August 2018. The book provides evidence about the exceptional performance of companies that take a values-based approach and who consciously evolve their cultures based on the identified gap between their current and desired, cultural, practiced values.
The Barrett Cultural Transformation Tools provide accurate measurement and “offer a sophisticated suite of metrics for finding the key insights – from our Cultural Entropy® score to the Business Needs Scorecard™, based on Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard. (June, 2019, https://www.valuescentre.com/barrett-model/)” These tools open the door to conversations with organizational leaders about where they would like to focus, what values to build on and work towards based on assessment data, and identify behaviours related to demonstrating the chosen values. When breaking the desired values down into specific, observable behaviours that exemplify those values, leaders can create a road map of expected behaviours, measurement of the behaviours, and systems that reward and make the behaviours easier to demonstrate. In turn, this sets up organizations to be more productive, agile, innovative, and successful in quickly changing, competitive environments. It also shines a light on how organizations can uniquely contribute positively to the world.
These are the steps of a values-based organizational culture initiative:
1. Understand what motivates your team;
2. Diagnose what is and what is not working; and
3. Discover a clear path forward.
Does your organization have published values? If so, are those values defined in terms of specific and measurable behaviours? Do your processes and procedures make it easy to consistently demonstrate those behaviours? Are those behaviours rewarded? What impact would it make if your team collectively identified and demonstrated desired values and related behaviours?
I welcome a complimentary phone call with you to discuss values-based leadership and/or organizational culture and how it may benefit you as a self leader or formal leader and as an organization. Please contact me at: jamie@sparksuccess.com to set a time to chat.
Jamie