Action Step – Turning Values Into How You Actually Work
DFA’s Action Steps are designed to assist organizations with implementing practical strategies to humanize the workplace, empower people, and foster innovation. Members can access full versions the Action Steps in the Member Resource Center.
Values are most powerful when they are more than words on a page. They provide a shared understanding of how people work together, make decisions, navigate challenges, and hold themselves and one another accountable. Values become especially important during periods of change. A merger, a leadership transition, or a stretch of fast growth disrupts how people are used to working together, while also opening a rare window to reset an organization or team’s culture on purpose.
But values only work when they move off the page. A value everyone nods at and no one can define does not change behavior. Common value words like trust, respect, collaboration, and transparency mean different things to different people. Bringing values to life means getting specific about what they look like in practice. For example, what does trust look like in a leadership meeting? How does collaboration show up when there are competing priorities? What behaviors demonstrate respect? How can a team recognize when it may need to reconnect with one of its shared values?
The often forgotten component of creating shared values
Creating a list of values as a team generally feels productive and leaves people feeling energized. What happens next is much harder. Values create actual value only when they translate into shared behaviors that have clear expectations and accountability mechanisms.
Most teams tend to skip determining what shared values look like in practice, treating the creation of value words as the finish line. This is why so many value statements end up listed on a website or framed on the wall, but in reality are unknown or ignored…
What a strong values process looks like
A values process that sticks moves through a clear arc, beginning with a shared purpose.. It draws on the team’s real experiences of working at its best and builds toward the future the team wants to create.
At DFA we facilitate this process using a story-based approach and our Me-We-Us model, which moves a group from individual perspective, to team need, to organizational impact….
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