If your people are not adopting or demonstrating your company values, it’s NOT because they don’t want to, it’s because you haven’t made it safe enough for them to.
It’s true! People don’t reject company values because they’re being difficult, defiant, or “just not the right fit”, they reject them because the personal values (shaped by decades of life experience, survival mechanisms, and deeply held beliefs) are a direct contradiction of what you’re asking of them.
The reason your organisation needs to understand this, is because no matter how many fancy posters you put up on the wall, someone’s personal values will obliterate corporate values EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.
No, this isn’t a ‘get out of jail free card’ for your challenging staff, because they’re actually not even aware they’re doing this, but if you have a few minutes, I’d like to explain to you why this happens and what you can do about it.
OK, point #1: Let’s explore the tension you’re unintentionally creating.
Values such as agility, openness, trust, and accountability very rarely get embodied because they stick a big, red hot poker into many people’s existing beliefs.
For example:
If AGILITY is one of your organisational values, but you have someone on staff who values control. It’s a big case of ‘bam bam, no deal!’.
A person who needs control in order to feel safe, is NOT going to relinquish this for the chaos and unpredictability of agility, just because you’ve told them to. They’re just not!
Think of it this way – a person who likes control will not go on a holiday unless they have a pretty detailed itinerary. They would have researched venues, menus, prices and other tourist’s reviews. So, therefore, your value of agility is like sending them on a mystery tour to the Land of The Great Unknown – with no itinerary – not even a weather forecast.
Agility requires flexibility, a lack of fear of change, creativity and the ability to do a ‘plot twist’ when required. Can you see the internal struggle you’re creating here? Even if your version of agility doesn’t require these things, subconsciously to the person you’re struggling with, it does.
So, while you might call them rigid, inflexible, uncooperative and/or difficult. What they are, is wired to avoid uncertainty.
Agility – 0
Control – 1
Let’s do another one.
Let’s say you have a company value of OPENNESS.
But they have a personal value of harmony.
You are going to WANT people to be brave, transparent and prepared to call out and speak up. BUT someone who values harmony (these days you might call this psychological safety), speaking up might feel like social and financial suicide.
They will be fearing (usually because past experiences have taught them to) being targeted, confronted, excluded or challenged. So, instead, safety to them is not rocking the boat, just nodding and agreeing, and keeping quiet. Saying “yes” when they want to scream “no”. In their minds, this protects their relationships, their job and their ability to keep paying their mortgage.
Speaking up, speaking out, or sharing genuine feedback comes with a risk of being told they’re wrong, of being targeted, of having people turn against them and worse – upsetting the boss who ultimately decides who stays and who goes.
Yes, it’s a bit dramatic – welcome to your unconscious mind!
Are you getting my drift?
Your staff are not flawed. They are just overflowing with human defence strategies – and NO amount of laminated posters and catchy slogans in the staffroom will override that, UNTIL you take the time to connect your values to their reality.
So, before I give you five ways you can do that, it’s important to explore what (I most commonly see) could be currently sabotaging values alignment.
MISALIGNMENT REASON #1 – Your values aren’t clearly defined in behavioural terms. “Openness” to one person means sharing ideas. To another, it means exposing themselves to risk. Unless you’ve spelled it out in a way that people understand, you’ve left room for misinterpretation.
Plus, when you consider that our survival mechanism is to imagine worst case scenario (what might happen), then prevent it – you can see how this vagueness is making them give your values the hairy eyeball.
In the values mapping workshops I run, there are more people that don’t really understand the company values, than those who do – and most of these are leaders.
MISALIGNMENT REASON #2 – You haven’t created psychological safety. You say you want honesty – but do your leaders shut people down or rebut instead of expressing genuine curiosity when they’re challenged? we’re human and we often have a greater intrinsic need to be right than to be better.
If your leaders are (unknowingly) caught in the approval trap, they’re going to be dismissing or rejecting those with opinions different from theirs and let me tell you – people are watching them do this and doing an immediate ‘click, file, save’ in their minds and reassessing their future with you.
MISALIGNMENT REASON #3 – You’ve made values aspirational, not attainable. People will engage with what’s real. If your values feel like corporate lip service, fluffy tickboxing, or vague ‘nice to haves’, they’ll be ignored, resented and even ridiculed.
OK, so if you’re starting to see that one or more of these might be setting your workplace values up for failure, what do you do about it?
To create GENUINE and voluntary alignment between personal and organisational values, you need to stop mandating behaviour and start co-designing it.
Here’s five ways you can do that:
1. Understand your people, instead of blaming them.
Run values-mapping workshops. Ask what your team values personally. You’ll likely discover the disconnect and guaranteed – they’ll help you bridge it.
Fun fact – your people probably aren’t even aware of what their personal values are. They are driven by them, but they’ve probably never questioned them – it’s all they know. This process creates long-lasting change and massive aha moments that don’t just skyrocket your company culture, but even better – start to break unhealthy (and previously invisible) generational patterns without diving neck-deep into vulnerable therapy.
2. Translate values into everyday language.
One of my favourite things to do, is help teams ‘pimp their policies’. Well, metaphorically speaking anyway.
Imagine getting your people to rewrite your policies in a way that actually makes sense to them while keeping the same message. For example, in a previous values mapping workshop I ran, a team turned “we are agile” into “we stay calm if we feel out of control, and instead of getting angry or resistant when things change or if we are confused or overwhelmed, we show maturity by asking questions to better understand, instead of digging our heels in to just get our own way.”
I cannot even begin to tell you the difference that one pivot in language had on this blue collar workplace.
Imagine your policies, written in their current form, but also with a real-speak translation available for those who glaze over at the sterile, impersonal language? Also just imagine the buy-in if your people are the ones who designed that translation. Now THAT’S what I call the perfect teambuilding day.
3. Build a safe environment to practice
Psychological safety isn’t a buzzword and it’s no longer optional. If there’s fear of backlash, your values are dead on arrival.
Self-awareness and emotional regulation are VITAL to this and as I teach in my Emotionally Intelligent Leadership training (which covers self-awareness, emotional regulation, empathy, awareness of others and authenticity) – you cannot change a person’s behaviour until you understand and learn how to change what’s driving it.
We all think we have self-awareness, but according to a Harvard study, only 7% of adults do. You need to help your people build their self-awareness muscles in a safe environment before you can expect them to use them. People will only pull down their brick walls once they no longer need them. They acquire this knowledge from understanding what self-accountability and emotional regulation really is. Once they have these tools, they check their biases, their assumptions and their default patterns of behaviour – and start creating bridges, instead of bricks. AKA they start driving the change themselves, so you can get back to work.
4. Lead with empathy AND expectation
Empathy confuses us a lot. When you understand what empathy really is, you become good at meeting people where they’re at, delivering support but also keeping expectations firmly in place. Many people mistake empathy for sympathy, which it’s not. If you believe that empathy means lowering the bar in terms of what you expect from someone, or having to stop and listen to their life story, you’re doing it wrong – and worse, teaching people that it’s a get out of jail free card for their poor performance.
A good example of the two is the concept of pacing and leading.
Pacing, is meeting people where they are, understanding what’s happening for them and making them feel valued and safe. Leading is then guiding them out of where they are and into a better mindset, better performance and better accountability for the impact they have on themselves and others.
Sympathy is equivalent to pacing.
Empathy is equivalent to pacing AND leading and both can be done within minutes when you know how.
5. Make it CLEAR what will happen when people DO (not don’t) adopt company values.
If people don’t know what will happen when they adopt company values, they’re not going to give them the time of day.
Sure, you might have a process that outlines the next steps, but again, if this is vague (see point 2), or worse – followed by leaders some of the time but not always, you’re setting yourself up for the kind of culture that grows in a petri dish, not the kind that grows organisational success.
TIP – people are NOT looking for what YOU are going to do when they demonstrate brave company values, they are looking for the guarantees that will happen for THEM.
My final 2c worth: The problem isn’t your people, but it’s also not you. It’s miscommunication.
When values aren’t adopted, the common reflex is to blame the people and assume that they’re not aligned, that they’re not the right fit, that they’re resistant, but in fact, your people aren’t broken, the way you communicate company values, is.
You can’t change behaviour if you don’t understand what’s driving it. And you can’t embed values if they don’t feel real, safe, and achievable.
So, before you launch your next culture campaign, run your next satisfaction survey or schedule your next performance appraisal meeting with one of your staff, ask yourself:
How have we made our values human enough to live by, or have we just made them look good on a wall?
If you have noticed a disconnect between how you want people to behave and how they actually do, then you’ve probably already realised that performance management isn’t helping much. You need to get to the core of the issue before you can do anything about it.
Drop me a line if you’d like to learn more about how I can help you do this through leadership training or individual values coaching. www.RebootMindsetTraining.com.au
Because – people will always choose their gut, over your glossy posters (no matter how well intended they are).
#values #leadershiptraining #emotionalintelligence #valuesmapping
