Whereas, if you ask someone to go away and give serious thought to outing their values framework, what they come back with will be their own personal behavioural blueprint for the future: a barometer they could use to set them on the road to achieving a vision of their ideal self. Such a blueprint is therefore an exceptionally powerful tool, not just for any individual wishing to change their life, but for anyone charged with building a collaborative team or improving the culture of any human endeavour.
And if that includes not allowing conflict to play such a huge part in your life, then so much the better!
How to do a values-outing exercise
Values outing is easy to do – I simply ask anyone wishing to join one of our teams to repurpose their CV and all they have achieved, not just academically or career wise but in their wider community, around a set of four or five personal values of their choosing.
Why four to five? Because this is the average number of values claimed by companies in the FTSE 100. A fascinating 2016 survey of the value of values in British business, undertaken by the consultancy firm Maitland, revealed that 84 of the FTSE 100 published a values framework on their websites and therefore recognised their importance. However, when I looked, none of them displayed how their values were enacted. In other words, there were no specific examples of past, existing or planned future behaviours. This means their influence on internal culture is impaired; there’s no blueprint to help shape good internal culture.
The report featured a foreword by the then director general of the Institute of Directors, Simon Walker. While he acknowledged the importance of values as a major differentiating factor, he asked how many CEOs could honestly say the values they so lovingly crafted were fully understood and implemented within their organisation. Indulging in a bit of values outing may be one way of addressing their dilemma.
Give it a go yourself: don’t worry, even if you forget to WhatsApp your mum on her birthday every year, you’ll definitely be able to identify a set of personal values. Try and distil everything that you believe to be true, or would like to be true about yourself, into a handful of identifiable and easily communicable qualities.
Take your time about it – you should think of your framework as something wholly immutable that will guide your behaviour in the future. A bit like a set of New Year’s resolutions that will last a lifetime. It’s a big commitment which needs some serious thought – you wouldn’t want to enshrine your values now and return later only to wonder which loser wrote them.
Equally, most people are so unused to thinking about themselves in aspirational terms that it’s embarrassing to contemplate at first. When I originally attempted my values-outing exercise, I kept cringing at the thought of leaving it open on my desktop. I could only imagine the increasing levels of ridicule that might be heaped upon me if it was, in turn, discovered by my wife, my kids, then my colleagues and, much worse, certain friends with a particularly cruel sense of humour.
Don’t let such thoughts put you off. This is an entirely valid and personal exercise that could change your life – although I did delete ‘world changer’ from my framework. I didn’t want that claim to be seen by anyone who’s witnessed me snoring in my pants.
Finally, take the acid test to see if your past behaviour lives up to your set of freshly minted personal values. Grab your CV and review all your achievements, experience and ideas against them. Importantly, try to show how you have lived your values by reworking, rewriting and categorising the structure of your CV using each value as a heading. It’s OK to omit some details of your past if they don’t stack up with your shiny new core principles. One use of this exercise is to create a road map to self-actualisation; that moment when your ideal self becomes your true self.
How to use values outing to positively shape your culture
Hopefully you can begin to see how values outing might be applied. The reason I do this exercise is to identify indicators of behaviour that mark out those we are looking for: we want people who will be a good fit in a specific collaborative and conflict-reducing culture. You may be seeking another type of culture. The exercise is flexible, as long as you have a strong viewpoint on which values will maintain the culture you have in mind.
Watch out for qualities that you believe to be strong components of the kind of culture you’re looking to achieve. In my case, this includes variations on key themes such as collaboration, team player, teamwork, solidarity or inclusive. Or anyone picking words that riff around fairness, justice, equality, conscientiousness or socially conscious. Integrity is another – be careful of that one, though, almost everyone aspires to it. Certainly those in public service, finance, real estate, politics, security, education, manufacturing, medicine, law and a huge chunk of all global corporations. In fact, the Maitland report found that 35 of the FTSE 100 claimed integrity as a value – so much for differentiation!
Steve Marinker, a partner in Maitland, described the difficulty of articulating authentic and distinctive values, with firms worrying that they might sound trite and unconvincing the more common they are. Which is why, if you have asked someone to out their values and are reviewing their framework, the next step is to maximise the possibility that the candidate is actually authentic and a genuine fit for your culture.
It’s possible to get a firmer handle on this by cross referencing a person’s claims against complementary attributes. If someone really has a sense of justice, then they should claim other values that ultimately reflect this. A challenger, campaigner or a brave person, for instance, might be someone who will speak up against unfairness when they encounter it.
Note that conflict is still inherent in these qualities. In all this talk of collaboration and inclusiveness, I don’t want you to lose sight of the fact that we are not talking about eliminating conflict altogether. We will always have a world view to disagree with, it’s just that we need to learn to manage conflict more effectively to reduce its insidious effects – a values-outing exercise helps with this.
I recently asked Lily Watson, a hopeful young applicant in the last stage of the interview process, if there were any values she ascribed to. Like many others, initially, she had no firm answer. But after giving it some thought she referred to a discussion she had with a group of friends about what it was that drew them all together. The answer was kindness. She brought it vividly to life by explaining how they, as a collective of young and broke millennials trying to make their way in London, pooled resources. They shared food, sofas to sleep on, clothes for interviews – some of them even met doing voluntary work. I was struck by the power of kindness as a binding force.
When does that quality ever get spoken of in business?
It certainly doesn’t exist as a value in the FTSE 100. Though the quality is actually common in life, it’s uncommon in a values framework. It was a real head-turner for me. (Lily got the job.)
Undoubtedly, more kindness in business would make the world a better place. It might mean less plastic in our seas. Perhaps the number of zero-hour contracts would be reduced to zero and our young people would not need to pool resources to find work. Possibly, had kindness been enshrined at Volkswagen, the well-documented culture of fear that led to their 2015 emissions scandal3 may not have existed.
In the wake of the scandal, Volkswagen conducted a huge consultation with their workforce, asking for help in reshaping their values framework. Of the six values that emerged at the end of 2017, two stood out when viewed against their past behaviour; ‘courage’ and ‘genuine’. The former is certainly key to overcoming a culture of fear; the latter seems to lament the organisation’s failure to be what it should have been – and aspire to something better in the future. This smacks of Rogerian self-actualisation, which is, of course, the end goal of the values-outing exercise.
How values outing could change the world
I happen to believe that flawed organisational culture is the primary source of all conflict everywhere in the world. Pick any subject!
Wars arise from disputes between opposing leadership, government or ideological organisations. Global warming arises from the conflicting challenge