CANDID
Every month, Grant Greeff shares his professional learnings, experiences, and ideas about business, leadership & culture through a South African lens.
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CANDID
7. How to describe your culture and set values that actually last
In this episode, I would like to share an approach to formalise values from scratch and reconcile your company values to your culture today.
Throughout my professional career, I have encountered numerous organisations claiming to uphold certain values, but their actions tell a different story.
You may find yourself in a startup with no established values, leading a small team within a large, long-standing company, or serving as an executive during a time of change for your organisation.
I trust you will find the two approaches practical.
Have you ever seen an organization and they've got these beautiful articulate values and you walk into the organization, whether working with them or working for them, and they're completely different when it comes to their behaviors, their default behaviors or conduct versus what the actual claimed values say they should align with. That experience has happened to me in my professional career thus far, and I think for me the ambition has always been to find a way of how to describe a culture via setting values. Ultimately, so that team members can hold each other accountable because that's the benefit of having values. It's not purely just a PR stunt as we've seen in the industry today, it really enables the team to objectively sit in a position, no matter what the circumstance, no matter how uncomfortable or pressurizing it may be, they can lean on the values of the business and they can say, Hey, this is what we all collectively agree to default to as conduct in terms of our behavior. I'm holding you accountable on this because you're completely misaligned or what you are doing or what you have decided to do is completely misaligned to our values. And so the moment people are in that position where they can hold each other accountable, regardless of the hierarchy within a business, it really then, in my experience, It creates a tremendous amount of momentum as well as buy in. Um and then what that translates into is a very healthy culture. So in this episode seven of Candid, I'm going to share two approaches that I've implemented in companies that I've either worked for, started or worked with. And I really hope that it's practical enough for you to consider no matter if you're in a startup without an explicit set of values yet, because it's still early days or in a longstanding, but you have a specific team that you are leading or even in a senior executive position and your team is say 20 to 40 people, there's still a big opportunity to always go back to the existing values that are there and really test them of whether they're going to take you to the next stage within the business life cycle. And before I jump into this, my key objective here is just to give you another angle in which to help really strengthen the culture within your business. So the first approach is when you want to formalize your values from scratch. So this can definitely happen when you're in a startup or when you've taken over a business and you really need to kind of recalibrate and you can't just take over from the culture from the previous founders and so on. So in terms of how this works. is you get the team or all of the team together. And if you've got, say, more than 30 or 40 people in the company, get them to, to vote for representatives. And around about, let's just say, 20 to 30 percent or roughly around 8 to 10 representatives to do the workshop, uh, with you, right? Because the key part in creating values or let's call them formalizing values that are already there is you can't approach it from a top down. Aspect you have to then make sure that there's a bottom up, i. e. the contributions, the participant participation by the team members is real, and they can see that from their contribution, there is a direct link to translating that into what values were refined and as well as then selected. So in terms of this approach, what I'd recommend is literally getting those representatives of the team together. More like in a workshop environment, so maybe on a Saturday, um, you can even go, you know, do the little retreat and as part of that retreat, do this activity, but you want to get everyone together, then you need to have a pen and paper with them or like a notepad, then you've got either a whiteboard or, you know, one of those like big, um, white, um, The papers that you can draw on like good old Simon Sinek does. And literally what you want to do is ask them one question first. And that question is going to be in the most recent days and weeks in the business, what have been the negative situations or the uncomfortable situations that you have been in? They could have made you feel angry, upset. And like I said, uncomfortable. And so, ask them to list around three to five of those negative experiences or the situations that they've been in. And ask them to be as articulate as possible. And just as a disclaimer, before carrying on, the culture needs to be at least in an environment where people actually are going to be able to write it and they're not fearful of any, like, Reprimand, um, taking place. So this is the, you know, the kind of caveat to all of this is people have to actually be able to at least share feedback without any fear of being targeted or attacked. So now that everyone has shared their negative experiences on their pieces of paper. Then what you can do, um, is basically ask them, all right, can you now write down three to five positive experiences that you've been involved in, in the past couple of weeks? And those experiences could have made you feel proud, happy, motivated, inspired, and, and ask them also to, to write that down. And so now on their piece of paper, they've got a negative experience and a positive experience, a couple of them. And then what you want to do then is start bringing this to the table, um, in terms of getting the whole team to, to, to look at around about, um, 15 to 20 to 30 types of negative and positive experiences. And so how I did this was basically with that massive, um, paperboard. I would literally then say, okay, let's go through, can, you know, can someone share with me a negative experience that they've gone through? And then I would have like a split and I would write negative, or I'll write, you know, negative experiences and then I'll start writing concisely like what they're sharing, really trying to get to the point of what they're sharing. And then all of a sudden you've got the negative experiences on the one side. And then you would say, okay, now let's go to the positives. Just describe to me, anyone, just jump in with any thing that you've written down. And then so you write it on the other side. And then what you have at the end is you've got this opportunity for the team. And they'll pick this up very quickly. You've got this opportunity where the team are literally looking. And they're going to start to pick out specific commonalities that many of them have shared. And so examples, for example, um, in my experience, in my previous company, um, we had a big warehouse, we had a warehouse team, logistics team, uh, front office, back office. And literally what the, um, one team member said is, That when I personally walk in, uh, to, to the office, I don't go to the warehouse and the logistics area and greet everyone to start the day. And so therefore, if I go straight to my office and I go straight into work, which is, you know, my personality is, if anyone knows me, that, that tends to be the case. Um, and so literally if I do that. My first encounter, say, with any of the team members that I haven't greeted across the warehouse area is possibly going to be to do something, maybe something's gone wrong, and it just leaves a very sour taste because that's the first, um, you know, interaction. Versus if I actually walked the floor, greeted everyone sincerely, and then, uh, you know, went to do my work, that may have taken me an extra five to ten minutes, but it really kind of lays a solid foundation. And that's what that was shared as a negative experience. And so literally, if you go through this now, you're going to pick out specific things that people all didn't like, didn't agree with, um, felt upset, angry about. And then on the positive side, you're going to see also, um, parallels, people really kind of bringing up certain things that they really do recognize and value. All right. And what you then do with this is you, is you kind of hone them down into a couple of points and a couple of statements and then it gets to around about, let's just say eight and you say to the team, okay, can we agree that these are the eight super important actions that we shouldn't be doing or and should be doing? It can be a mix of the negative and positive, but ultimately it's around placing value and ultimately a non negotiable of what is accepted and unacceptable. And then from there, that's when you go through the process of creating around four to five values. And remember in my episode six, I shared around values Sinek. Um, around them being doing phrases, not nouns, uh, really kind of, um, being able to visualize what people should be doing from a behavior, a default conduct on a day to day basis. So check that out if you haven't watched, um, and read, um, episode six. So that, in my opinion, is a great way to create your, um, uh, values from scratch. And, um, the team is really involved and, uh, personally, um, I've never had, had a problem with that experience and it's, it's amazing then to see the buy in from everyone because, um, it, it first initially comes from personal experiences of them that they liked and didn't like and, and then they can see it formalized into a far more, uh, sustainable succinct type of, uh, format. All right, so that's the first approach, um, if you wanted to do values from scratch. And then the second approach is if, say, you joined an organization, um, or You just bought an organization and you really just wanting to ensure that your current values can stand the test of time because we want that to be the case. This is around then reconciling your values to then your culture today, right? And a personal experience here is when I joined Search Engine Africa. I then actually went and I interviewed everyone in the team, one on ones. It was anonymous. I wasn't recording everyone's name. Um, yes, I could remember kind of, you know, what one person said to the other. But believe me, by the end of, you know, interviewing 20 people one on one, you kind of just have your, you know, your, your, your, your notes down. And like I said, is you want to keep it as anonymous. And the reason why is because you want to look at the information more than trying to ascertain the specific person. Because everyone contributes to it. And so this approach then is around making sure that you either get someone independent, um, or like a, a recent senior person that has joined the team, to then have these one on one interviews with the team members. And so the types of questions that you're trying to ask or that you are asking for to um, get specific responses is all around how those individual team members view. The world of this business and through their eyes and so a couple of examples with regards to some questions is in one word, how would you describe your culture within this business, right in If you were to leave this business What is one thing that you would miss if you were to leave this business to another business? What is one thing you would be glad to get away from, from this culture, right? Um, and so there's varying different ones. I've included it in my LinkedIn newsletter, quite a list of, um, questions that you can ask. But the real design outcome here is to get to a point where you're literally in a position where you've got all of these responses that basically paint a very, very vivid picture of all the different perspectives of the culture. i. e. the default behaviors that people take within this business. And then from that, you take all the responses, and then you start matching them to the existing values of the business. So for example, in our company here, we've got one value which is say it how it is. And I've actually referred to that and used it as an example in episode six. And what I picked out, um, in terms of the responses that the team members were sharing with me, is they shared with me, um, There is no bureaucracy here and you can go to senior management with any issue and you can be honest about like what you're struggling with. And that is an example then of a response that I would link then to the say it out is value. And so throughout this process you can then look and you can see then what responses you are then aligning and linking to specific values. And you may come across then a couple of responses. that completely do not align to any of the values and you may even find values that have little to no responses that connect to it. And that's then the process to go through a consideration of is this value still worthy of, of us, um, you know, holding and upholding. Um, and then also, well, from these responses. Should we be actually in, uh, create a process now to articulate a new value in the business, right? And in terms of the number of values, I highly recommend no more than six values. I don't think it becomes, yeah, it just, it just becomes administrative. And most people then won't even remember the value. So you want to make it conversational enough and memorable enough, um, in terms of the point. So I think no more than six, so don't go overkill. Um, but I really hope that. In either one of these approaches, you can find an opportunity to, again, just strengthen your culture. Because going back to the point here, um, values in a business are, are necessary because it allows all of us then to hold each other accountable, where it doesn't come from our opinions anymore. Now it comes from, you know, a principle around this is what we agreed on. This is what we strive for. This should be our default conduct. You're not, you know, this in, in how you're performing or behaving right now, it's completely not aligned to that. And I want us to strive to be the best team and individuals within that team. And so therefore, we need to align and move forward, um, toward the values that we've all, um, agreed to uphold. I hope you enjoyed this episode and, um, I'll see you in the next one. Cheers.