What are your values???

A lot is said about values in the corporate world. Employees are preached about company values and are made to follow them as if they are laws or rules.

Little do the corporates understand that values cannot be adhered to or followed. Values are something that come from within. They can be cultivated, they can be inculcated. You cannot preach them.

Show them in your behavior and people will fall in line. Employees tend to follow what they observe in the organization. No matter what values you preach at induction, they will behave the way they see their peers and seniors behaving, unless they have their own, dominant value system.

The right approach should be to identify values an employee stands for and then help him/ her map company values to them. The companies must realize that the corporate values are a proper subset of an individual's personal values. Therefore, the better way is to help employee identify his personal values and help him map the corporate values with them. The idea is to make their own value system dominant and then reinforce them by mapping company values with them.

Till the time an employee will think of corporate values as something imposed onto him/ her, he/ she will not imbibe them in spirit and letter. They will always remain something superficial.