6 Barriers to Your High-Performance, Can’t Live Your Own Values (part 3)

Part 3, Living Values: You can’t live from your individual values and strengths, so you can't belong with yourself

Here's a couple of ways that not being able to live from our personal values and strengths automatically inhibit high performance. If I do something counter to my actual values and strengths, I burn energy and focus trying to resolve that internal conflict while I am trying to do the thing to get something accomplished. That’s energy and effort that’s no longer available and not advancing my performance. You ever worked for a boss that holds the focus on your weakness, in relation to the job or a task to get done? You ever had a boss tell you to do something that conflicts with one of your core values?

Further, now I’m in a lose-lose situation that triggers my #innerittybittyshittycommittee, you know the impostor, your negative inner-voice. My brain cycles over and over about the conflict from a space of, I'm not good enough, a.k.a. I'm having to work from a deficiency mindset. How am I supposed to do this thing that just feels wrong to me? This is an enormous energy suck. After I wrestle with that for however long it takes, only then, do I move towards making progress or the completion of the task. I’m thinking maybe we all might have that problem too.

Can you relate? The disconnect we feel inside consumes us.

I Remember… the economic downturn that happened after 9/11. Our company like so many across the US got put into a serious holding pattern. That seriously hindered our revenue. The teams that we would send out to do the initial asset audits for our wireless customers got stranded, and then we couldn't even send them out. Ultimately, the word came to me when I was an IT director. Paul, you're going to lose one of your people. (Dang I feel the tightness in my chest just recalling it.)

One of my core values is love and belonging. Now, I understand that sometimes in business the unavoidable is, letting people go because economically, the company can't be sustained with its current number of people. That we've gone past the point that everybody in the company tribe should suffer a little so that no one will suffer a lot place. That's where we landed. And what I would have to do, conflicted with a very central core value for me. But that's the shallow point of where it really clashed.

The deep. I was told not to inform my employee that he was going to be let go on a certain date. He was going to come to work and be shown the door without warning. And he had served our company incredibly, and, was a total badass. Worse still, he was and still is one of my best friends.

In case you're wondering if I can keep things confidential. As an IT director, I was basically a janitor of ones and zeros. I had the keys to the kingdom. And unless there was a legal/ethical/moral situation that had to be dealt with, not even the executive or C suite would get privy to those keys. By the way, I was very blessed to have an executive team above me that would never force me to give them those keys in the 14 years I served as an IT director.

UGH!!! I spent a couple of days completely and utterly distracted by the idea of having to give zero notice to one of my employees and letting them go. I guarantee you my performance level at work dropped significantly. You know how I knew, people kept asking me if I was all right. Well, I chose to inform him ahead of time. We went out for coffee and I gave the hard news. I would not hand that duty over for HR to communicate. He was my person. It was my right thing to do. And, I wasn't doing anything illegal.

So, I informed my CEO that I let my guy know. There was both ugh and relief on his face. I told him I was sorry I couldn't comply, that I had to live in my values, and, that I'll accept the consequences. I was glad and fortunate that we were close enough in our values.

Now we’ll take this understanding into a situation where the person is trying to be in a company where the company’s core values run counter to their personal. She ends up being hired into a performance deficit right out of the gate. If the ways we belong as we get the tasks done are internally problematic for the person from a values core space, they’re set up to do something and be accosted by an inner struggle with themselves. I'm clearly differentiating this from not having the technical skills for a role. We can all get skills to do a task and while that might be frustrating, between the success and failure in advancing in those skills, that doesn’t equate with a core conflict that always saps your performance potential before even entering the skills arena.

And then there’s the problem of the toxic environment that arises when a person, leader, or employee, violates the tribe’s values of caring for each other in belonging. They may get the whole bunch of shit done, but that’ll undermine the trust and faith in the leadership. Ultimately this leads to belonging subdivides that coalesce around some values that support a self-preservation subtribe. These groups become competing and self-preserving interests with their compromised values, within a single company, further sapping human potential from being dedicated to higher performance.

Clearing the Barrier: make it so people can live from their genuine personal values in clear agreement

Bring people into your company, whose personal core values line up with your company's core values. And, or, if you're joining one, make sure the company you going into won't put you in a situation where you'll have to compromise yours. Core values gotta be compatible. Not identical. They don’t have to exactly match. But you can’t have opposing core values from a person who’s supposed to be living by the company ways. When a person's and the tribe’s values cohere, there's a force multiplier effect that gets a whole bunch more shit done. We also get much healthier work environments with respect to mental health. When we find a place where we belong and get to be ourselves from our core, even in conflict, we belong, we're safe. This is where we can belong in tribe and with ourselves at the same time, never more powerful!

Clearly differentiating that the “how we belong” is uncompromisable versus how we get shit done is flexible, is essential, and requires agreement. The rule I applied back when I was an IT director: our job was to make the rest of the company’s life faster, better, easier through adapting IT technology, continually, and changing it without messing everybody’s life up. Be approachable, positive, motivating, trustworthy, and fun.

The singular focus of get-shit-done at the expense of your own people puts our human needs, relating to belonging, at odds with outcomes. Performance ends up taking a massive hit. People who live their values and strengths in workplaces that reward their core values lived in belonging, outperform those that don’t.

Create a Belonging Culture Operating System (BCOS) with lead and lag measures in place to reward individuals intrinsically and extrinsically for living their values cohesively with the company’s core values, just like you would for your organizational operating system, (OOS).

What would you do if you truly belong with yourself, or at your company? It's pert near impossible when we're disconnected from our core values and strengths.

Feel free to reach out to me, let me invite you into a space to belong with yourself, in your own values.

Give me a call, 206-714-6113, or drop me an email, [email protected].

Next in the set: 6 Barriers to Your High-performance,

Part 4, Joining in Story: you're not joining, you're hedging, that equals no Us story & less performance

#belonging #highperformance #culture #corevalues #livedvalues #mentalhealth #belongingcoach