Aligned or Aspirational Workplace Culture?

Are your company’s behaviors in or out of alignment with your company values?

If you have a set of stated organizational values and your behaviors don’t reflect them, you do not have an aligned culture. You have an aspirational culture of pie-in-the-sky thinking versus one based in the reality of day-to-day experience.

But when your behaviors are in alignment with those company values—boy, you create an incredible place of loyalty, commitment, engagement, pride, and enthusiasm, a place where people are going to stay, regardless of what generation they’re a part of. It is something that feels like magic.

Values make us feel alive as individuals and as members of a team. That’s what a thriving, intentional workplace culture is about: connecting diverse individuals through a common intrinsic motivator. And core values are about as intrinsic as they get. They naturally satisfy you. How great is that?

So much of that natural sense of personal satisfaction comes from being able to give of yourself to something that in return gives you pride in being able to make a difference. But there’s a fine line that many of us can teeter between, a line that makes a whole world of difference: the divider between passion and stress.

Simon Sinek says, “Working hard for something we don’t care about is called stress: Working hard for something we love is called passion.” And that sure is the truth! When your work is aligned with your core values, passion is ignited. When it’s not, stress is sure to come.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve worked hours on end without even realizing it because I was so excited by the work I was progressing with. I have just as many stories of working on things that took only a few hours but felt like they had taken lifetimes because I didn’t care about the work, it wasn’t in my passion zone, and it made me feel like I was wasting my energy. When I first started my business and was taking everything on myself, I often had outbursts of anger and regret, including twitchy eyes and sleepless nights that rippled their way into stress for my team.

Your people aren’t stressed because they’re doing too much—they’re stressed because they’re doing too little of what aligns with their values. From the experiences that make us come alive to the people who make us cringe, our core values define what we stand for in life.

How many of us take the time to discover what they are? And how many of us use them as a guide to direct our environments at work and within ourselves?

When your organization knows, owns, and lives its core values, it can be intentional about attracting, retaining, and growing its people through a shared sense of purpose, productivity, and passion. Your results will speak for themselves.

But when you don’t know your core values, you will never have a clear compass or guardrails for your organizational culture. This can lead to disengagement, dissatisfaction, and disconnection, both within your team and externally, in terms of your reputation and customers.

As we continue on this journey, you’ll become crystal clear on the words that define your team’s intrinsic motivators through core values. They’ll serve as your compass for success and your guardrails against failure. By recognizing the behaviors that are in or out of alignment with your core values, you’ll begin to uncover what’s working, things that can be lifted up to create more impact, and what’s taking away from your company culture and needs to stop or morph accordingly. In that process you’ll identify your culture killers and culture keepers, starting by looking in the mirror. What may feel stressful at first will eventually become an act of grace, accountability, and positive energy to fuel your team and organization toward their greatest potential for achievement.