If you desire to build a successful business or a successful team at the workplace, you must define your values, stick to them and teach them.
Values often emanate from our beliefs, our culture, our upbringing, as well as from our experiences. They could be honesty, integrity, accountability, being respectful, peace-loving, keeping to our words, being environmentally conscious, etc.
Instilling these values in your team would mean that you’ve imbibed these values as a person. It makes them easier to transmit when you aren’t simply talking, but also doing. It’s your lifestyle that your team members see daily.
When they become your values, you must endeavour to instil the same in your team because values guide our behaviour, attitudes and how we relate to one another. So, if your team doesn’t have the same values, the organization will suffer.
How to do this:
1. Make those values an entry requirement:
Alignment in values should be an entry requirement. I know that a rich CV is what most employers seem to be bothered about, but working with someone whose values do not align with yours can be more frustrating than working with less-skilled personnel in the long run.
When values are aligned, the employee feels comfortable working for the organisation and the organisation benefits because values are difficult to instill when people are formed.
2. Communication:
You must communicate these values when a member joins your team. Also, during your meetings these values must be reiterated.
The team must be constantly reminded. Repetition helps these values settle in the subconscious.
3. Make the values plain:
Make these values visual and displayed in strategic places.
Write the company’s values and paste them around the workplace such as the elevators, TV monitors, the walls, the canteen, the restrooms, boardrooms, meeting halls, work desks etc. Attach these values to the company’s official email accounts.
4. Hold workshops/training where these values are taught and/or reminded on a regular basis. And stress the importance of abiding by them.
5. Team members should generate ideas
Let everyone come up with ideas that highlight the core values of the organization.
Ask team members or employees to develop projects that depict these values.
6. Develop projects around these values:
Values are not abstract quotes that are highsounding, but are seen in the products and services they company offers to its clients and how the management relates with the employees. If a company that taunts integrity as its core value goes on to falsify invoices, that value makes no sense. So, values must be embodied by the products the company offers.
7. Tie these values to benefits in personal life
Show the benefits of these values even in the personal lives of your team members or employees. If people see that living by these values improve their lives, they’ll more likely imbibe them compared to the opposite.
8. Incentivise and reward alignment
Recognise and reward employees who work according to these values. This will strengthen their resolve and assist in making others align to the values.
Successful people are very clear about their values and try to hinge their lives around them.
I also counsel to define your values correctly and hinge them around God. It’s a principle that works.
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