Making a change in your workplace culture starts with you
Whenever I facilitate company values work with organizations, it’s a two- to three-day retreat experience, where the first full day is all about the individual. We start by walking each person through the process of naming their core values and then connecting them to their life experiences. We’re not just born with this set of values; they are typically instilled in us by others—for better or for worse. When we take the time to honor our past, we can make sense of our values in a much more meaningful way than just picking words off a list.
We then do a deep dive into looking at your milestone moments, and we map them out in terms of your entire life. Then, using our values profile, we overlay our values onto each milestone moment, seeing apparent trends and clear frontrunners for the values that matter most to you as an individual.
This process could easily be a full week, month, year, or lifetime thing, should you have the interest and commitment to the work.
When you do this type of reflection, a lot of the work doesn’t feel good in the moment. It’s challenging, it’s difficult, it’s uncomfortable. In a recent corporate values retreat, one of the participants noted that he’d never looked this deeply into himself and it was making him upset. He didn’t understand what this personal work had to do with the company’s values and why he wasn’t able to do this work with ease. I was so impressed that he had the energy to speak up and articulate what was going on in his internal dialogue. It helped every other person in the room who was experiencing any level of that feeling too. It also gave me an awesome framework from which to explain why it mattered so much for each person to go within before looking outward. One thing always rings true: You cannot sustainably embrace or operationalize your values if you don’t have self-awareness. It’s necessary for everyone to know that self-awareness is a long game that’s typically not easy, fast, and fun.
In an article in Fast Company magazine, Mary Slaughter and David Rock of the NeuroLeadership Institute wrote,
Unfortunately, the trend in many organizations is to design learning to be as easy as possible. Aiming to respect their employees’ busy lives, companies build training programs that can be done at any time, with no prerequisites, and often on a mobile device. The result is fun and easy training programs that employees rave about (making them easier for developers to sell) but [that] don’t actually instill lasting learning.
Worse still, programs like these may lead employers to optimize for misleading metrics, like maximizing for “likes” or “shares” or high “net promoter scores,” which are easy to earn when programs are fun and fluent but not when they’re demanding. Instead of designing for recall or behavior change, we risk designing for popularity.¹
Reflecting on the same issue, Brené Brown has stated, “The reality is that to be effective, learning needs to be effortful. That’s not to say that anything that makes learning easier is counterproductive—or that all unpleasant learning is effective. The key here is desirable difficulty. The same way you feel a muscle ‘burn’ when it’s being strengthened, the brain needs to feel some discomfort when it’s learning. Your mind might hurt for a while—but that’s a good thing.”²
Are you looking to change your workplace culture? This is an excerpt from MaryBeth’s new company culture book: Permission to Be Human: The Conscious Leaders Guide to Creating a Values-Driven Culture.
Want to know and live your values? Check out MaryBeth’s course Knowing and Living Your Values on Insight Timer.
Or take our core values quiz to find out what are your values. corevaluesquiz.com
