Wear your values like an old suit. A professor of mine years ago
quoted someone that said, ‘You
should wear your traditions
like an old suit of clothes rather
than like a suit of armor.’
That means you want to be
consistent, you want to understand where you’re coming
from, you want to continue on
that pathway, but you don’t
want to be so rigid that you continue on the pathway even
if it leads you in the wrong
direction.
The more carefully worked
out and the more thoroughly
vetted the values are, the less
frequently you would need to
change them. If you find that
you’re changing your values
frequently, you really don’t
have the right ones. They really
ought to guide you rather
than you guiding them.
I always want to hold out the
potential for improving or refining or learning. We haven’t really
changed ours much. That’s the
way they should be.
We’ll have an issue that would
come up, and I would say, ‘OK,
if the values are right, then I
ought to be able to take the values, apply them to this particular issue, and it should fit.’
Over and over again, I found
that I didn’t have to change or
modify or eliminate or add
values. We just needed to
make sure that we stayed true
to the ones that we had
already emphasized. That
really helped us get through
those situations. It was kind
of reinforcing over and over
again. Then, if we had things
that weren’t working so well,
it’s worked to kind of go back
and say, ‘Where did we deviate, or how could we have followed the values more accurately?’
Don’t get too specific when labeling. You can use lots of different
words to describe what might
fit into a particular category.
We collapsed synonyms, so
that the values are categorical.
We have integrity or veracity
or honesty — those are all sort
of wrapped into one category
of telling the truth. We have
empathy and compassion and
sensitivity, and those are
wrapped into the one that we
call empathy.
We would get different
words that described one category of value, and we just settled on a word that exemplified that category of behaviors,
rather than be too nitpicky
about using every single word
that might be a synonym.
That helps as well to sort of
think of them as zones. Respect,
for example, is a zonal term
rather than a precise, specific
thing. It’s a series of ways to
behave and be feeling.
Let the values guide your behavior. One of the things about the values is that they ought to guide
the behavior of the leader.
The leader ought to exemplify
those values in a way that he or
she conducts business in the
enterprise and the way that
people are rewarded in the
enterprise, and the way that
people are counseled or redirected in the enterprise. They
need to be living, guiding principles that work for you. The
leader has to be the best exemplar of them. You can’t say, ‘I
value appreciation and tolerance,’ and be intolerant at all.
The values really have to be
your guiding principles as you
use them to help you guide the
organization.
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