How clear values drive behaviour

Are you aware of what’s really driving your behaviour, or the behaviour of your people? I’ve recently had a number of discussions about unwanted staff behaviour. If you don’t have clear company values and associated behaviours as solid foundations to stand on, it can make addressing these issues incredibly awkward. Giving feedback on under-performance can be tricky at the best of times, but giving feedback on unwanted behaviour is often difficult to put into words. By tolerating it, many managers unintentionally damage the morale of their teams.

So, how do you get someone who is often brusque and surly with colleagues to acknowledge and change their behaviour? How do you get a manager who isn’t conducting appraisals or 121s to realise they’re being neglectful by not conducting these vital conversations? You need clear reference points, like a set of desired behaviours to use as a basis for explaining the company values and emphasising what’s most important.

Discovering what’s most important

Take Emma, a competent trainer and facilitator. She’s due to run a pilot Time Management workshop for a new and potentially very big client. A combination of factors means that she’s running late but there’s just enough time to get set up and prepared for the workshop.

However, just as she’s approaching the client’s premises, she sees an elderly lady fall and hurt herself. Emma is a qualified first aider and the lady will need some help, but if Emma stops she’ll be late for her new client. Arriving late for a Time Management course isn’t a good look!

So, Emma has a dilemma, a values conflict. It’s important to her to make a good first impression and to demonstrate that she can ‘walk the talk’ when it comes to effective time management. However, it’s also important to her to help others, especially when they’re hurt and her first aid skills will make a difference.

What should Emma do?

Below-conscious drivers

How you decide what Emma should do next is actually based on your personal hierarchy of values, an often below-conscious process that we use to guide our behaviour in any given context.

Let’s look at how Emma could develop or damage her credibility and levels of trust with her new client, how she will maintain congruence and personal effectiveness… or not.

If Emma attends to the injured lady, but is distracted about the client’s reaction to her lateness, she might not be as helpful and caring as she intended to be. This will cause her frustration, and when she does finally arrive, she’ll be stressed about what the client may be thinking. Her agitated state will probably prevent her from delivering a good session, and she may lose the client.

However, if Emma ignores the lady and gets to the client on time to set up, she may still have a conflict because she’s distracted by all the ‘what if’s’ and that she should have, at least, checked the lady was OK. This will mean she’s not concentrating on the workshop, and will come across as distant and not fully engaged, and she may lose the client.

Powerful awareness

Now let’s say that Emma is clear about her values of ‘helping others’, ‘providing great learning experiences’ and ‘taking a realistic and pragmatic approach to what she trains’. She quickly sees that this incident is a great example of how values dictate our behaviour, and how a conflict can damage our congruence and our power to engage with others. She knows it will provide a perfect real-life example.

So, she calls ahead to explain that the group are in for a very special learning experience. While they wait for her to arrive, they need to write a list of the ten things that are most important to them. Then they need to put them in order with the most important at the top. When she arrives, Emma is calm and confident about the incident and how she can incorporate it into the workshop. The participants are highly engaged with her energy and passion for the material, and feel she’s very genuine. They have a great learning experience and she gets excellent feedback, with no mention of the late start. She will probably be contracted for more training.

Identifying what’s most important

Whenever we’re feeling upset, it’s because our values are being neglected. Whenever we feel good it’s because our values are being respected. The trouble is, most of us don’t even consciously know what our values are. By acknowledging them, we can become much clearer about why we’re feeling the way we do. Then we can choose the most appropriate and constructive response. This is far better than simply getting angry, which prevents us from thinking rationally. This sounds easy, but it requires some conscious effort to ‘think about our thinking’.

I do a lot of work with senior teams and their values. One exercise I use is asking each person in the team what’s most important to them about working together. The results are often revealing.

The most interesting part is teasing out the different meanings people have for the same words. Common values like professionalism, communication and teamwork can mean very different things to different people. The same is true for more abstract values like trust, respect and honesty.

In fact, it’s not unusual for three or four people to put up the same word, but have an entirely different meaning for it.

Facilitating these discussions can be very powerful for everyone in the room and it can often get heated. When the team put the list of values into a hierarchy, people’s personal values start to come to the surface. So, it’s very powerful when the team decide on what they consider to be most important, in order to achieve the business objectives.

However, it all becomes meaningless if there is no accountability.

Addressing unwanted behaviour

When a team or business has a clear and agreed set of values, they must be communicated to everyone in practical, everyday terms. Senior managers must visibly demonstrate those values in their day to day behaviour. People need regular reminding of how values can influence behaviour. Managers, including directors, must be held to account if they don’t set a good example. This is where real leadership shows up… or not!

I recently facilitated a workshop with a large group of managers. The focus was on setting clear expectations and giving objective feedback. It was encouraging to see them recognise the importance of the fundamentals. Things like clear targets, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and unambiguous outcome-based job descriptions all provide solid, objective reference points.

However, most managers got stuck on setting a SMART objective or standard for improving someone’s ‘poor attitude’. While they were often clear about what they didn’t want, they actually struggled to define what they actually did want.

For example, one manager complained about two team-memberswho were always bickering and ‘just couldn’t seem to get along’. When I asked her what she wanted instead, she struggled to put it into specific, measurable and objective terms. Another manager complained about supervisors being impatient and dismissive of junior staff. However, he was unable to come up with a clear statement of what he wanted to see from them.

A surprisingly simple solution

The solutions were actually readily available, but the managers didn’t see them… yet.

It comes down to defining behaviour, rather than focusing solely on ‘attitude’. Focus on the specific unwanted behaviours you can observe. Have a conversation with the member of staff about the behaviours that matter to the business. Explain clearly how their behaviour isn’t aligned to the company values.

The business had recently developed a very comprehensive set of behaviours to demonstrate the company values in terms of what they do and don’t want to see. Once managers were familiar with these, they could give clear, specific and measurable direction.

A clear set of agreed values with aligned behavioural expectations gives managers a rich resource for setting expectations. But without consequences for those who don’t meet them, values become meaningless: that damages both morale and engagement.

So, when it comes to addressing unwanted behaviour… stay curious!

To explore how you can shift behaviour in your business with clear values, get in touch here.

David Klaasen

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