Every company has it’s values. You would have seen this on their orientation presentation or on wallpaper at the office reception area and other locations around the office.
We also know that having those values projected on walls and on slides doesn’t mean anything.
Guess where this is from?
These were the values that were put up on the Lobby of.
Drumroll, please…..Enroll! Now if you don’t know who Enron is, it is an energy company that went Bankrupt in 2001. Their CEO Jeffrey Skilling was sentenced to 24 years in prison for insider trading and accounting fraud. It later went on to be called the Enron Scandal and is a perfect example of corporate greed and corruption.
There is a documentary on Netflix about this called the Smartest Guys in the room
Having your values in the lobby as in Enron’s case means nothing to a company if you don’t practice your values daily.
That gives me a perfect lead-in to tell you about our Values in Insight Consultants and how we practice those values on a regular basis.
Our Values:
Now having this on our website is no different from what Enron did on the Lobby.
But the key difference is how we work on it on a regular basis!
What we do is break down our values into actionable behaviours so that we can work on them in varying intervals ranging from daily, weekly, monthly to quarterly.
Let’s dive in a little more on what happens with that approach.
As indicated in the image above we have 6 values. Now what we do is break our team into smaller groups of 3–4 people and we meet every week or month to discuss our values.
Our first week, we decide what value we are focusing on. For eg. we pick the value of Service. Then during the meeting, we sit down and write the behaviours. Now, what do we mean by behaviours is that we simply take a particular action relating to this value that we must consider for a certain interval to carry out.
For Eg. Let’s take the value called ‘Service’. It could be as simple as planning the day effectively to help serve my client better (the frequency here will be daily) or sending an email to the client asking him if he needs any help other than what we are doing for him (the frequency here will be weekly).
This way we are repeating our action/behaviours on a regular basis and thereby impacting our values.
The great basketball player, Shaquille O’Neal paraphrased a quote from Aristotle and said
Excellence is not a singular act, but a habit. You are what you repeatedly do.
So the values have to transform themselves into action and that action has to be practised repeatedly.
The reason behind why we do it this way:
If you read Charles Duhigg’s book called the Power of Habit and the more recent James Clear’s Atomic Habits they talk more specifically why breaking down anything that you want to achieve into habits gives you the higher chance of achieving it.
The power of habit speaks of the method called Cue — Routine-Reward which is a scientifically-backed technique to habit change.
In conclusion, we meet every week or every month based on the team and talk about our 6 Values and how we can create behaviours that impact our values.
We do it one behaviour at a time!
Once we feel we have reached some level of consistency of behaviour on one value then we pick another behaviour of another value or the same value and work the new one and we do this again and again for however long we can to provide the highest possible value to all the stakeholders right from our clients, leadership, employees, vendors etc.
