Align Your Team With Values
Updated: Oct 26, 2020
Communication and trust should be at the heart of every business. You should focus on building relationships with your team, which in return boosts improvement in trust and communication levels in your organization.
Know Your Values
One of the most important aspects of building trust is by communicating the company’s values to everyone. We define values as those things that are most important to the organization or the team. Although, the definition of values can also be expanded to the standard that measures what either gets praised and appreciated or gets condemned and punished.
It’s important to clearly define what values mean for your company. Company values help ensure everyone, from the c-suite to entry-level, are working towards the same common goal, and share a bigger purpose. When everyone is aligned it is easier to achieve success.
A Key Driver
Your company’s values should be at the core of everything you do. The core values should function as a key driver in your company. Businesses have several drivers; however, belief drives tend to have the most impact on creating results in business:
Business drivers—Most companies start with the founder’s vision as a business driver. It leads to processes like creating a product and selling it, which in turn lead to results like sales growth and profit dollars.
Emotional drivers—The emotional driver consists of an underlying passion for the business, product, or customer, which in turn generates communication about those things, again generating results.
Factual drivers—Factual drivers are the numbers but, more importantly, the tracking mechanisms that provide ongoing feedback that causes people to get results.
Belief drivers—Belief drivers are the unique values that each individual brings to the organization, which drive their behaviors and either get results or don’t. Belief drivers are usually ignored by management, perhaps because we think we can simply post our values on a wall plaque and they’ll be embraced. That’s not enough. We must teach our values, use them, tell stories about them, and make them a part of what makes things happen in our business.
Values Identification Exercise
To identify your company values—or refresh them, if needed—you can use the Values Identification Tool. Gather your team and ask them to share what they think the company’s core values are. Define your organization’s or team’s values and go through all the answers together to make sure everyone understands the values.
One of the best ways to accomplish goals and flourish as a business to make sure everyone is united by the company’s values and vision.