My brilliant best?

Provocative title, so I’ll get it out there quick. It’s not about me.

My “brilliant best” was a term I used to develop a values framework for a business I own. It has been an asset to our company, and I now lend the idea to others. Maybe similar terms are used elsewhere. In developing our values framework, we could not find an approach we had confidence in, so we created our own. “My brilliant best” was pivotal to this approach.

We weren’t looking for values. We were looking to drive a positive culture that would be a positive differentiator for our business. One that would support more significant opportunity than would be the case without it. On the basis that “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” a famous quote from Peter Drucker, we considered this a critical project. After we had worked out what our culture should be, then values would be our way of describing and promoting the result. And herein lay the initial conundrum.

Can you give culture to an organisation?

A guiding principle adopted at the start of our project was to assume we could not. We could learn what the culture was. At best, we could try to emphasise the best parts. The culture could not be given but instead had to be discovered. This was no board table project. It would have to encompass all levels of the organisation. And that is what we did. All employees were allowed to participate. 15% did.

Five works groups for different parts of the business were established. At the start of the first meeting, all were asked to remember a time when they were at their “brilliant best,” a marvel superhero where bullets bounced off, work did not overwhelm, deadlines did not frighten, work was a joy and a challenge to be relished. We then asked each person to describe what made them feel this way. That was it. We wrote on paper notes all over the walls of the room. We discussed.??

In their own words

We never changed the words the staff had given. We could delete comments through discussion. We could reduce it down to common themes. We could focus on positive attributes. In their own words became our second guiding principle. This process went through two rounds. In the second round, the common themes (still in their own words) were reviewed, discussed, and voted on. 5 value statements that define our culture have not changed since its release. They still describe what we want our culture to be if we are all to be able to enjoy work and perform at our “brilliant best.” They represent the way we all want to behave and want others to behave towards us.

So what’s next

In my experience, values that populate posters and PowerPoint do little to add to the net worth of an organisation. They need to be embedded. Our third guiding principle. We started with recruitment. Our effort to understand our culture was a one-time event. If our aim was to protect what we had from being diluted, we needed to hire new people who would work well within this framework. Values-based recruitment was re-introduced to work with these values. Performance management and disciplinary processes also adopted these values. If needed, behaviours could be benchmarked to values as performance can against KPIs. We had to educate all team members on our values framework and make an ongoing effort to make these a standard part of most team meetings.

Values know no hierarchy

Lastly, we had to approach values and culture differently from almost all other aspects of the business. If positive regard for colleagues, for instance, was to be core to us, then managers had to point out to team members when this was not the case. This could not work if the manager did not demonstrate this themselves. So, in contrast to KPIs, values became somewhat anarchic. We made it clear that anyone who sees values not adhered to could, in a polite way, raise them up or down the organisation. This made it a little fun and a lot more acceptable. This was our fourth and final guiding principle for an approach that worked well for us.

You may have your own approaches, comments, and ideas. Please share.

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