Kathy Shanley, the Founder of Statice, served 30 years in the C-suite. She helps leaders and businesses level up their leadership skills.
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You’ve probably heard about the role of values in your life, which drive your behaviors, actions and reactions, responses and decisions. What you may not have considered is the increasing role that personal values are playing in the workplace.
In 2023, researchers at Start With Values reported that employees are more satisfied and less likely to look for a new job when their personal values overlap with their company’s values. Increasingly, employees are asking organizations to acknowledge or advance personal values more visibly. At the same time, organizations may face challenges when organizational and employee values are misaligned or competing.
As organizational leaders, how do you understand what your employees value, and what brings them personal satisfaction, while balancing them with the values of the workplace itself? As employees, how do you discover what your values are, align them with corporate values and watch out for career derailers?
1. Relate values to work.
As leaders, we can show employees how pre-set corporate values—such as integrity or innovation—relate to their work and establish expectations for how employees must act.
For example, I worked with a team who listed innovation as one of their corporate values, and trust and communication as team values. We created a connection to these values during the reportedly most challenging part of their job: cross-teaming to make decisions. Using a coaching mindset, I challenged the team to discuss the behaviors that represented these values—innovation, trust and communication—during decision-making.
We asked questions: "If we take this pathway, how are we aligned with our values, and where might we be misaligned?" "What would the results be if we tapped more into these values of innovation, trust and communication?" And individual team members set goals to honor these values by making decisions that were strategic and moved the team forward, while also listening to understand their team members. They agreed that focusing on past points of contention misaligned with innovation, eroded trust and resulted in team members talking over each other instead of communicating with each other.
2. Recognize how values impact you.
Whether you feel elated, content or frustrated around a situation, your emotion likely is rooted in whether your values are being honored or you value something differently than another. Recognizing what’s important to you helps you navigate situations and decide how to approach them appropriately.
For example, a different client ranked caring and social responsibility highly as core values, which showed up in many ways in her company's workplace. She leaped in to orient employees about new programs and projects and developed templates and processes when she saw there were none. Helping educate her colleagues and sharing resources made her feel good about her role. Conversely, when her relationship with her organization became tense, she sensed that it was because the organization was stripping away some of the customer service approaches she valued.
Knowing why she felt increasing frustration and discontent was foundational to addressing the situation in a thoughtful way. We discussed which value of hers was being challenged by corporate decisions, namely caring for customers. We reflected together on where that value was still a focus in the organization. Taking a step back, she recognized that her company still prioritized their customers, but changing external variables had caused a shift in resources to zone in on those services that retained and attracted the most customers. This change avoided cutting staff and bonuses.
Using this new lens, she created a connection between conserving resources, retaining and attracting customers and doing what was best to care for the staff’s job security.
3. Build awareness of derailers around values.
Leaders and managers should help employees navigate desires to stay true to their values while being great employees. As part of my coaching training, the leadership experts at Kick Start Your Edge taught me about the behaviors related to values that could derail a leader or employee’s progress.
Four that stood out for me:
• Judgment happens among team members because of their different values. Think about the manager who values being on time at meetings—and discounts the professionalism of the team member who shows up late.
• You think everyone should value the same things you do. Think about the manager who loves structure and creates a process for everything, even when it may not be needed.
• You may be overly sensitive when there is a perception of a values challenge. Think of the person who values independence and bristles when their supervisor asks for an update or tries to include other team members on the task.
• You may go to battle based on values when it’s not appropriate. Think about the advocate on your team who pushes their organization to issue statements on social issues that may not directly relate to the corporate mission or area of expertise.
As you identify the behaviors that could derail you, think about what would be possible if you changed your behavior. If there are any obstacles to changing this behavior, consider developing a plan to overcome those obstacles. Take the example of the manager who values structure and develops a lot of processes, even when they may not be needed. What’s one area where they might dial back on structure and lean into more flexibility?
Conclusion
As organizations and employees, think of values as your guiding principles for how you get work done well, respond and make decisions. In a time when values are impacting job satisfaction and employee retention, paying attention to the role of corporate and individual values in day-to-day interactions makes good business sense.
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