Why Diversity and other Values Aren’t Lived

Your CEO gets up on stage at your all-hands meeting and powerfully shares the organization’s new values, strategy, or purpose. Everyone leaves inspired, but a few days later it’s back to business as usual. No one changes their behavior or direction – and your attempt at cultural transformation falls flat.

Only 23% of employees strongly agree that they can apply their corporate values and just 27% even believe in them (Gallup).

Values are the foundation of your culture and vital to collaboration, recruiting, retention, and productivity. Most companies invest millions of dollars articulating their values and launching them but little time or intention to actually activate them in their culture.

Hearing leaders talk about values is inspiring but it doesn't create ownership. Values can’t be “told” they need to be owned if they are going to be applied and lived.

Values only become meaningful to employees when they are able to connect them to their identity and experience. This, we have found, requires enabling every employee to tell their own personal stories about your values.

Meaning Making

Meaning comes from reflecting on and linking experiences. In other words, we create meaning when we connect our experiences to feelings, patterns, and insights about ourselves.

A value, say “diversity”, is just a word. You can add a nice sentence (a group of words) to it to clarify the intent behind it: “Diversity: we value all voices and believe that what makes us different makes us stronger.”

While this value may be critical and meaningful to the corporate strategy, unless it is linked to their experiences, feelings, or identity, it will only be a concept.

The meaning comes when an employee can answer these questions:

• When has ‘diversity” been important to me in my life? What does it mean to me personally?
• What are examples of how I have made decisions in my work based on my belief in ’diversity’? What were the consequences?
• When have I seen ‘diversity’ not used and what were the implications?
• How can I embrace ‘diversity’ more in the work I am doing today?
• How do I benefit from other people embracing ‘diversity’?
• How is ‘diversity’ key to my success going forward at this organization and beyond?

The employee has now linked the value to their experiences, emotions, and identity. When they hear the word ‘diversity’ it now registers as personally meaningful. They are invested in it, believe in it, and can apply it.

This is classic change management. To change your need awareness, desire, knowledge, and ability. This is what starts to create change. But to make change stick you need one more thing - reinforcement.

Socializing Meaning - Creating a Values-Driven Culture

There are a lot of ways to reinforce values. Many companies build them into talent systems like performance reviews and feedback. They are often used for recognition and rewards. This is structural reinforcement.

The critical piece that is missing here is social reinforcement. This is the reinforcement that happens in conversation and in relationships. This is the true glue.

Peer Coaching Unlocks Social Reinforcement

As you read the questions above and reflected on ‘diversity’ in your career and organization, it was powerful. But now imagine that you did this in a peer coaching conversation with a colleague. You asked each other these questions and encouraged and challenged each other to dig deeper. You saw how ‘diversity’ is lived and experienced differently and are able to hold that shared meaning now together.

You have now moved from the story of self to the story of us.

This creates support, accountability, and begins to foster values-based storytelling in the culture. It gives people the ability to truly live the values and to have the community around them that reinforces them.

You are now ready as an organization to create the story of now - how you are all moving forward together to realize the potential of the organization.

Imperative - The Peer Coaching Platform

How do you scale peer coaching across a 500, 5,000, or 50,000 person organization? Imperative's SaaS platform makes it easy. We design the conversations with you and then use our matching algorithm to create coaching pairs. The conversations are scheduled and completed over video-chat on our platform. At the end of each conversation, we measure the results so you can immediately see the impact.