A guitar chord only sounds good when the right fingers are on the right strings at the right time.
Your company values require the same timing and coordination to be effective. When employees model company values at different times, however, they make those cherished principles…worthless.
(What good is the value of “collaboration” if two of five people in a meeting are modeling the behavior while the others don’t desire to partner at all?)
This is where you come in: Just as playing a chord on the guitar is a skill, harmonizing the virtuous actions of colleagues is a specific leadership skill.
5 Steps to Same-Time Modeling of Required Behaviors
This is a big deal: Your team can’t execute with excellence until everyone is modeling the specific thinking and actions required to do so at the same time.
Here are five simple steps to harmonize the modeling of your corporate values:
- Demonstrate empathy: Validate the challenges colleagues are facing (without excusing the behavior of employees).
- Communicate—sincerely—your confidence that the team can be bigger than the circumstances they face.
- Reference your company’s values. Then ask: “Of our company values, which one do we need to model in this meeting to execute more effectively?”
- After the team identifies a value, ask: “What will it look like in this meeting when we demonstrate that value?” (Remember: The minds of humans operate better when they know what “good” looks like.)
- Then finish with: “What do we need to do to walk the talk in this meeting?”
You may be thinking: Those five steps are cool, but we don’t talk like that in our company.
If this is the case, you may have just explained why your company’s values are worthless.
The work of making shared values priceless has always been yours.
