The Value of Values

I don't believe for a second that there is (or ever could be) such thing as a ‘grand unified theory of management’.

But if there was, it would probably have something to do with values.

And that's almost certainly why there is so much written and spoken about values, and yet, they're rarely well understood.

I've been on a journey across the last decade or so, crystallising lessons that I spent much of the preceding 40 years learning.

Those lessons are largely to do with how important values actually are, not only to the leadership and management of an organisation but also self-management and personal development.

Values provide a compass for your habits, your life, and your success. To some extent, they define your identity and provide a GPS for the direction in which you want to travel.

Values underpin everything that really matters in life.

What are values?

This is from my own observation and experience. You won’t find it in any textbooks, although nothing I am saying here contradicts prevailing thought, it merely builds on it.

I find it helpful to conceptualise Values with three interlinked definitions:

1. Intrinsic Values – the characteristics or traits that define who you are today and, to the extent that there are traits you admire and aspire to, the person you might like to become in the future.
2. Extrinsic Values – social and organisational norms that define the required behaviours for tribal inclusion. Extrinsic values are social mores and organisational etiquette. They can be applied from a ‘top down’ point of view, a somewhat weak form of ‘forced compliance’ (“I’m only doing things to ‘fit in’ with the group”), or they can be ‘bottom up’ which is much more powerful in terms of sustainable group cohesion. When you have a strong personal alignment with the values of a particular society or organisation that you're in, then you feel truly accepted and included. This are a key facet of a true sense of belonging and connection.
3. Liminal Values – These are extrinsic incentives that are causally linked to intrinsic physiological and psychological motivators. Simply, they are external to you as an individual (e.g. - money, title, status) and they satisfy internal physiological and psychological needs (e.g. – safety, freedom, dignity). They are therefore incentives that are aligned with internalised motivational factors. These are ‘things’ that you value; not ‘a value’ in the sense of your morals or character. The acid test is that they can be given or earned, and they can be taken away or lost.

The Importance of Behaviour

To quote a different Matthew (my Biblical namesake), “by their deeds shall ye know them”.

Values are simply words unless they are translated into behaviour.

Consistent and constant behaviours define what your values mean in reality – they breathe life into your personal interpretation of your values.

For example, two people might share the value ‘personal strength’.

Maybe they even share a definition of ‘personal strength’ to the extent that it has something to do with being in control, being self-directed, having a no-nonsense attitude, having an unwavering self-belief, and that they can ‘hold their own’ when challenging authority and others.

However, in terms of behaviours, for one of them that might manifest as being Machiavellian, selfish, arrogant, bullying and coercive, for the other it might manifest as being authentic, vulnerable, empathetic, having a growth mindset and being respectfully and constructively challenging.

Both of those wildly different behavioural approaches can come from the ‘shared’ value of strength. It’s very important to understand not only the base value, but what that means in terms of behaviours.

?Values without actions are simply words.

Intrinsic Values, Intent, and Trust

The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to infer intention from, often superficial, context and behaviour and to bias that interpretation towards negative intention.

In short – human beings tend to assume the worst when considering why someone else did something.

The example I usually give when explaining the fundamental attribution error is this classic:

“When someone cuts you up in traffic it’s because they’re an inconsiderate bad driver, when you cut up someone else in traffic it’s due to the extenuating circumstances that explain and excuse your bad driving”.

As we have already said, intrinsic values translate into character traits.

If you consistently act in a way that is congruent with your internal values, then that will telegraph your intentions to other people.

If your intentions are benevolent (you have other people’s best interests at heart) then that is a trait that will shine through your actions. This is the foundation stone for trust, which is essential for all forms of meaningful relationships (whether personal, leadership, management, or sales relationships).

If your actions are selfishly self-interested, then that too will shine through and will undermine trust.

The trust equation, from David H Maister’s, “The Trusted Advisor” says that ‘trust’ is born out of Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy, divided by the level of self-orientation.

Credibility is “I know what I'm doing”. Reliability is “I do what I say I'm going to do, when I say I am going to do it”.

Both of those things are really what one might call the “tickets to the game” - the entry level requirements for trust.

You are either somebody who is credible and reliable or you're not. It's binary.

Then you have the third component. Intimacy.

Intimacy is about vulnerability-based-openness. This is the willingness to show up and be real and authentic with other human beings. Being prepared to enter any relationship or interaction with your soft underbelly exposed and be genuine with somebody.

That’s a risk. Being open to a real connection also means being open to getting hurt.

You cannot be open to a true connection without also being open to the possibility of that connection going badly.

But you can't expect somebody else to show up and be open and real with you, unless you are prepared to do it too … and you can’t control other people, only yourself, so chances are high that you must make the first move.

The other person's certainty about your benevolence of intent is the critical element to engendering the kind of trust that one requires for a real relationship to blossom and become productive.

In any scenario, but particularly in the workplace, the best relationships are those where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts – where the IQ of the group is exponentially higher than the sum of the IQs of the individuals in the group. You benefit from the wisdom of crowds, rather than suffer the collective baying idiocy of the mob.

For two or more people to work together in this way you must have authentic trust. Without it, people can't disagree with one another constructively and come up with better ways than any of them could do as individuals. If people don’t feel ‘safe’ to disagree with one another then you will only ever have a collection of individuals instead of a team.

Without trust you cannot have constructive challenge.

When you consistently ‘walk the talk’ of your intrinsic values other people understand what your character is. They can make realistic predictions about your behaviours, and they are more likely to infer the correct intention behind your actions. They are less likely to fall into the trap of the fundamental attribution error. They have more certainty about your benevolence, and this is the perfect set of conditions to nurture trust.

Values, Identity and the Future You

Values you admire and aspire to can be the key to addressing the things you don't like about yourself.

Setting values-based self-improvement goals can define not only what you want to achieve but also who you want to be in the future.

If you want to build positive habits and leverage the power of compound interest to improve your life, then there is a lot of strong behavioural science to tell you that the key component is action.

Basic behaviourism will tell you that you will perform an action providing there is a salient trigger, the action is easy to do (high capability/ low impediment), and you have sufficient motivation (you want it and the rewards are appropriate).

Getting started, though, requires some cognitive psychology and a bit of self-determination. An ‘identity pact’ in the form of a positive affirmation or label is very powerful in this regard.

It needs to be stated in the present tense, use the first person and the verb “to be”, and it must have no conditional elements like “if” or “when”.

For example: “People are healthy when they give up eating meat” may be true, but it is a very weak affirmation statement that is unlikely to lead to behavioural change. Whereas “I am the sort of person who doesn’t eat meat” or, more simply, “I am a vegetarian” are strong ‘identity pacts’.

These ‘identity pacts’ are about establishing a new intrinsic value you seek to adopt as part of your character. The become part of who you are.

Benjamin Franklin’s journal (a guide on living a ‘good’ life, which he wrote as an instructional manual for his son) was, you could argue. the first ever ‘self-help’ book.

In it he talks about the ‘virtues’ he aspired to, which were the antidotes to the things he identified as his ‘vices’.

What he called ‘virtues’ are values that he admired and worked to live by to improve himself and his life. As he said, “A bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection”.

?His list of thirteen started out as a list of twelve: Temperance, Silence, Order, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation, Cleanliness, Tranquillity, and Chastity.

The thirteenth, Humility, was reputedly suggested to him by a friend who pointed out that the polymathic genius politician, inventor, and raconteur had something of a blind spot in that area, too.

He probably had some cause to be self-confident in his abilities, but apparently that could spill over into a little bit of hubris.

An MDH Management Rule: build your team with diversity in all things, except values

Culture is “the way we do things round here”.

As my friend Danny Wareham always says “culture leaves evidence”. That evidence is behavioural.

Based on what we have said so far, it doesn’t take a significant logical leap to realise that culture is the living, breathing, expression of the collective values of everyone in the organisation, group, or community.

In my previous role, with Roy Johnson in Sandler Training, one of the exercises that we used to do when we were working with management teams was illustrative of this point.

We would ask a group of middle managers or emerging leaders within an organisation to talk about the things that they didn't like within the company, in terms of the things that people ‘get away with’.

They would often provide examples such as name calling, backstabbing, playing politics, turning up late or turning up dishevelled and unkempt… any of the numerous not-quite-career-limiting, but certainly annoying things that seem to be the norm in many companies.

Roy and I would typically tease out the first couple of points from the delegates, we would put them on the whiteboard and enthuse about what they'd said, so that a few more people would come forward and say a few more things… and then the floodgates would open, and we would fill a whiteboard very quickly.

We would always leave a little gap at the very top of the whiteboard and, once the flood had slowed to a trickle, we would write in big bold letters at the very top of the board “this is our culture”.

The effect was often the kind of 'aha' moment that would often precipitate a change initiative.

Culture is not a collection of neatly curated platitudes that external consultants have helped to craft and draft, and then nailed to the boardroom wall in a cheap aluminium frame before raising their exorbitant invoice and buggering off into the sunset.

Culture is an emergent property of collective behaviours which themselves stem from the intersection between intrinsic, extrinsic and liminal values.

And that's true for any culture. It's the way that things really get done. It's the etiquette, the taboos, the laws, the things that are acceptable and not acceptable. You learn what is acceptable through osmosis, from the way that you get treated – if you do “x” you are accepted, if you do “y” you are shunned.

The more aligned those social mores and organisational etiquette are with your own personal values, the more ‘at home’ you feel; the more you truly belong.

This is where you are more likely to make discretionary effort (go ‘the extra mile’) because you feel like you are part of something bigger than yourself, that you matter, and that you are doing good and meaningful work.

I mentioned ‘liminal’ values, which are extrinsic incentives linked to intrinsic motivators.

They can be a 'trap' for managers because they're often a lazy analogue for managers to ‘motivate’ people (as though 'motivate' is something you can 'do' to someone, rather than an internal force).

Financial rewards, titles, and softer things like nights out with colleagues (especially those that are a ‘three line whip’), having a pool table in the office… all these sorts of things can be great, but incentives are only incentives if they match an intrinsic motivation, and they are no substitute for the belonging that comes from shared values and all pulling in the same direction.

As a leader or a manager, it’s vital to understand that these ‘liminal’ values (like money and titles) are superficial and ineffective unless they are linked to the deeper motivation.

You might value your position or your title for the respect and dignity that they signify, and which people accord to you as a result. ?Dignity and recognition are key psychological needs.

You might value money for the security it provides to you and your family, or the freedom, flexibility, and self-determination it can give you. Safety and security are basic physiological and psychological needs, and self-determination (an ‘internal locus of control’) is a key psychological need.

There is a useful acronym to remember, here: SCARF.

This stands for:

• Status, (which includes dignity and the respect of others),
• Certainty, (which is the antidote to anxiety – the ability to predict what is going to happen neutralises fear),
• Autonomy (which is about agency – the internalised locus of control),
• Relatedness, (which is about connection and the interrelatedness of human beings. We are, after all, a herd species),
• Fairness, (which is a sense of justice. Interestingly, not everybody defines fairness in the same way. There are broadly speaking three different definitions of fairness: ?equality – means equal slices - if there's eight people and one pizza, everybody gets one eighth of the pie; equity – outputs are proportionate to inputs so if the pizza cost ￡20 and you chucked a tenner into the pot, you get half the pizza and everyone else shares the other half; and ‘needs based’ fairness … the hungriest person gets the whole pizza).

…and finally

We all know values are important, but in my view they are foundational to everything that we do. It’s not overstating the case to say that they provide direction and meaning for life.

Our lived values sculpt our behaviour. When we are forced by circumstances to behave in a way that incongruent with our values, that is the breeding ground for regrets.

The opposite is also true... When we intentionally develop new habits that are congruent with the values to which we aspire, we build self-esteem and healthy pride.

Values give clarity and certainty about your character and what your intentions are in any given scenario. This becomes a foundational bedrock for any healthy constructive criticism, any debate or discourse where people disagree violently about facts and yet remain collegiate...

For this reason, one of my rules for building a high functioning team is (as stated above) DIVERSITY IN ALL THINGS EXCEPT VALUES.

I'll be talking more about high-functioning teams (and the leadership traits that create them) in my next article. In the meantime I will simply say this:

You must recruit for values.

If you want to know what that looks like from an interviewing and hiring point of view, then reach out to me for a chat. I’ll be happy to have a virtual coffee to discuss it.

#business #personaldevelopment #culture #values #businessdevelopment #businesswithpurpose