B2B Inspired
B2B Inspired, the podcast by BlueOcean - The B2B Agency, is all about exploring the ins, outs, ups and downs of B2B Marketing here in Aotearoa, New Zealand. We'll uncover emerging trends and thinking while sharing inspiring real-world stories from B2B Marketers here in New Zealand. With the goal of supporting New Zealand’s B2B Marketing community in becoming one of the best and brightest anywhere in the world, let’s roll up our sleeves and take on tomorrow together.
B2B Inspired
Creating Authentic Company Values with Clare Swallow
Wondering how to create real organisational alignment? In this episode of B2B Inspired, we talk with Clare Swallow, founder of Mulberry Street, about how culture, values, and leadership work together to unite your team and drive performance.
Clare shares how she helps ambitious companies surface authentic values, embed them in everyday decision-making, and connect them to purpose and vision. She explains why values should be lived, not laminated, and how to spot when they’re out of sync.
From tackling team scepticism to using storytelling as a tool for alignment, Clare offers practical ideas leaders can use to create a shared understanding across the organisation. We also explore the role of leadership behaviours in shaping culture and building trust.
Whether you’re leading a small team or an entire company, this episode will help you put values into action and align your people behind a common direction.
For more B2B insights, ideas and opportunities, head to www.blueoceanagency.co.nz
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Let’s roll up our sleeves and take on tomorrow together.
Thank you, ecosystem. We're here to help the New Zealand B2B community to become one of the best, boldest and brightest anywhere in the world. Now if, like me, you live and breathe all things business to business and you're looking for a place to connect, learn and be inspired, you have come to the right place. Let's join Freya Spaven over in the studio.
Speaker 2:Kia ora, and welcome back to the B2B Inspired Podcast. Today I'm so excited to talk to Claire Swallow, who has a long and varied career in various leadership roles. For the last five years, she's been focused on helping ambitious companies solve challenges with connection, collaboration and creativity, via her BSEEC agency, mulberry Street. Claire is also a design thinking coach and is an executive fellow teaching here at the University of Waikato and a qualified director. All of this experience means she knows a thing or two about people, particularly how to motivate and inspire people so that we can build successful companies together, and we'll dig into some of that today.
Speaker 2:Claire, welcome to the podcast. I'm so excited to have you here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's such a pleasure Now. We first met at a five-day design thinking workshop a year ago, facilitated by you and the lovely Carl Stevenson, and I have to say it was one of the most fun and engaging workshops I have ever done, and I say that with a deep sincerity. There was so much laughter, there was props like spaghetti, loads of post-it notes, and I was so impressed with the way that you facilitated the workshop in a way that engaged everybody, got everybody on board and we were from such different backgrounds and I loved it and I learned so much. So how did you get into doing workshops like that and facilitating workshops, and why are they so effective?
Speaker 3:Yeah, interesting question Because I've really struggled with the term facilitator for a long time. In fact, I didn't even know that was a thing. I remember a few years ago I had started hearing about this group, group or community called the facilitators network and I was kind of like, what are they all about? And at that point I was probably searching for my tribe a little bit. You know, I'd left the corporate world and I was doing my own thing and I love working for myself, but it's also quite lonely at times. And so I was kind of searching for for my people and I thought, really spur of the moment, last minute I'm going to go to this facilitators network festival. And I walked in feeling like the complete fraud, like I was like I'm not one of these people, but let's go and see what it's about.
Speaker 3:And within two days I was like, oh, there's a whole world of people that are really passionate and really amazing at bringing groups of people together to solve problems, to connect, to learn to whatever. These are my people, and actually I've been facilitating my whole life. I just didn't know it was a thing. So, yeah, my path has been very non-linear, was probably the right term. Kind of marketed by trade, fell into technology, uncovered the world of customer experience, which is where I started learning about design thinking and then went well, if we kind of focus on the customer, how do we turn this inward and focus on our employees? I started playing around an employee experience space, uh, and then when I had two small humans, I thought I'll go and do my own thing.
Speaker 2:So get to sphere my days helping groups of people solve really important, chunky, amazing problems right, wonderful, and that's how mulberry street came to be yeah, yeah and what would you say mul Mulberry Street does in terms of, if you were to sell Mulberry Street, what would you say?
Speaker 3:I think the headline is helping organisations solve the problems that matter with the people that matter. So the harder, the bigger, the more complex the challenge, the more excited I get. In some ways, I think the wisdom's always in the room, but often we don't know how to collaborate with other humans. And so getting people together to really understand a problem or an opportunity because we're really great at humans that go straight to solution mode We've been taught to do that over time. But actually getting people together to really understand a problem before we move into that space is my most favorite thing to do and what I do through mulberry street wonderful.
Speaker 2:so I'm so excited today to get your perspective on company values because there's such an intrinsic leadership tool but so many companies are not sure where to start. They might have company values that are on the wall and they don't take uh, nobody takes any action on them or look at them, or looks at them regularly, and we were just talking a little bit before about the differences between purpose, vision, mission and value.
Speaker 3:So I'm really interested to get your perspective on that yeah, I think, um, they're all words right, and sometimes language gets in the way of, uh, belief or understanding and action. And so when I talk about kind of purpose, vision, mission and values which I think is super important but people have a right to be skeptical. Where they sit in a workshop, you get someone like me and, as a facilitator, you have a great day and we feel like we're aligned, and then we walk out of the room and nothing changes, and so people have learned to be skeptical over time rightly so, I think. But for me, when I talk about purpose, vision, mission and values, I kind of liken it to a boat analogy.
Speaker 3:So imagine you're coming together to go somewhere. So your purpose is why are we even getting on this boat? To start with, your vision is that island in the distance that we're trying to sail to, the mission being the kit that we have to get there. So what is our boat, what is our crew, what is our navigation systems? And then the values is how are we actually going to work together as a team to get to that island in the distance?
Speaker 2:I think, when you break it down in quite simple terms, those things are all really important they are, and it's almost like the values piece is one of the most important things, because otherwise I can see the boat now and I can see it going around in circles.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and we're all arguing to be the captain, and actually we just need to head that way yeah, that's how we need to get to you.
Speaker 2:Um, so you talked a little bit about people being a little bit skeptical. Yeah, um, when should somebody realize when their vision and mission and values aren't aligned? Like what kind of symptoms, I guess, can you see within a business where we might think that we need to readdress our company values?
Speaker 3:yeah, I, I always talk about values as verbs, and they should be something we do, not just something we say, and there's a big disconnect between what we say and the posters on the wall and therefore, and how we act. Um, and so I think if you're not or cannot use values as a tool for decision making, they aren't working for you. And so either you, um, aren't using them because they're just posters on the wall and you kind of have done it once and forgotten about them, or you can't use them because they're not constructed in a way that is actually useful and you can test decisions against it. So I think that's a great test. If I was faced with a really hard decision today, can I get my company values in front of me and say is this going to make it easier to make a decision or not? And if the answer answer is no, then they're probably not serving you.
Speaker 3:I think the other way is I love the human element of them. So if you walk through your organization and you say to someone what's the values one, you'll get some irls too. No one will, often no one will actually be able to recite them, or three. They pull up their screensaver and quickly go. Oh, here they are, but they don't mean anything, and so I think, if that's the case, they feel a bit hollow then it's time to do something different time to re um.
Speaker 2:Where would you suggest that somebody would start and whose responsibility is it within the business? Yeah, um, because when I think about company values, I think about it from the employee perspective, from the managerial perspective? Yeah, um, and the c-suite as well. So when we're coming top down, they might not work and your culture, it is your employees, or how you act on a daily basis. So how would we even initiate?
Speaker 3:the process. Yeah, it's an interesting conversation because, as you said at the start, I do some work in the governance space and sometimes the conversation there is values should be driven by the board, and I fundamentally disagree with that, because I think your values arrive at work in the morning and they leave again in the afternoon, and so, well, whatever time of day you work, and they are in your people and, whether you've called them out or not, they already exist. And so actually, our role in organizations, when we think about values, is how do we surface them, how do we then identify the ones that are going to serve us in terms of that vision that we're heading for, and how do we deal with the ones that aren't serving us, that potentially are harming us? And so I think it always has to be bottom up, and I don't think it's a get everyone in a room for a couple of hours and we've got it solved. I think it's changing a bit, and I had this conversation with someone the other day about AI and the use of AI in values generation, and my skin kind of crawled a little bit, because you can, ai can make things sound awesome, but it doesn't mean it's you, and I think values is one of those things that has to be authentically the organization, and that's the.
Speaker 3:That's what I see a lot of organizations doing wrong. They start with a list and they go here's a list of 40 values. Let's pick the ones that are relevant for us, as opposed to start with the stories of what already exists. So when I do values work inside organizations, there's a lot of storytelling, there's a lot of connection, there's a lot of humanness to actually understand. You know, tell me about a time you're most proud to work for this organization. Or if someone started working here tomorrow, what are a couple of stories that you'd tell them about how things work around here? And in those stories live the values. And I think once we start surfacing them, it becomes really obvious what they already are. And then we go well, what's the purpose and the vision of the organization? And are these values that we've surfaced going to help us to get there? And if not, what are we missing? And then how do we bring that in? So I think that kind of bottom-up approach works a bunch better.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that I was interested to dig into because, I have to admit, when I first moved into the world of work, I was given a set of company values and I was a little bit confused about how they fit in with my personal values right, especially when some of them were so strong and some of them, maybe, were telling you how to act, and I was a little bit. I was not conflicted, but I started to ask the question of how are these different from my personal values? So could you talk to that?
Speaker 3:I think that's a really awesome indicator for employees coming in to say do I have values, alignment with this company? And if I don't, is this the right place for me to be One? Do they actually live them or are they kind of wallpaper? Test that first. But if they are living them and they aren't aligned with yours, then is that the right organization for you to be part of? And so, yeah, I would be a big advocate for organizations using, and even individuals using, that as a litmus test of is this the right place for me? Because I think there has to be alignment right. If it's not, then you'll quickly realize it's not the right place.
Speaker 2:I, because I think there has to be alignment right. If it's not, then you'll quickly realize it's not the right place. I think anyway, yeah, absolutely. And on that alignment piece as well, you know we think about, you know this disconnect between teams. Sometimes you know we're not sailing in the right direction. There can be friction, especially between marketing, sales, product. How can company values tie those together and help to make that process a little bit smoother? Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:I think they have to be and I kind of go back to the values as verb things. They're something we do and so they have to be a tool to have really hard conversations. Often you see empathy as a value or some shape or form of empathy as a value. But if you have empathy as a value and you spend your whole time treating people as a line item in a spreadsheet, uh, it's quite hard to say you're living that value. And so how do you use empathy as a value as a tool to bring teams together where there are silos, to actually have better conversations? So, hey, we said this is a really strong value for us. Here's what it looks like if we live this five out of five all of the time. Here's where we are today. How do you guys feel about that? And then, how are we going to shift it that way in this particular scenario that we're in?
Speaker 2:right. So it's a really collaborative approach yeah, I think so and involves the everybody in the whole organization.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and there's two parts to it to me. So I, whenever I do values work and I've kind of made it a bit of a boundary for myself now I won't say yes to values work unless the second part is in place. And so I think there's one role to surface them and to make people believe in them, or not make people, but ensure people believe in them because they see themselves in the stories that are being told. But there's two to put it into action and bring it into real life. And if that part isn't thought about, planned, used, refined, it's not, it's not serving you and therefore it's not me that's going to help you to a bit um, you can use that for the other bit, okay, but I think it's um.
Speaker 3:That second part about bringing them to life is the work. It's not, you know, the easy bits actually surpassing them.
Speaker 2:The hard bit is living them on a day-to-day basis it is as well, and I know that in b2b we have a shared um view on brand. A b2b branding and brand work is how you show up in the world, yeah, and from the campaigns that you run to how you handle discovery calls, sales, onboarding, marketing, delivery, um, we talk about the new brand being the experience. Right, brand experience, um, how can company values, in your view, help to deliver on that brand experience? Because that is that is it in action?
Speaker 3:right, how we connect with our customers yes, and I think even more so in a b2b sense.
Speaker 3:It's like you don't have volume of customers necessarily, depending on what market you're in. It's about quality relationships and, uh, your values are how those relationships play out in every touch point with your customers. So you know from the moment someone picks up the phone to you've worked with them for 10 years. That is your values in action, whether we call them out or not, and so I actually think mapping your customer journey aligned to your values, and then actually kind of planning for it based on that is is a really important part of bringing them to life. Um, a project I worked on recently was doing just that, and one of the company values was around being real, like being really authentic and honest with customers, and so when stuff goes wrong in that organization, the customer knows about it really quickly. There's no hiding it and you know everyone makes mistakes and they're really honest about it when it happens. Their proposals are so much more transparent than I've seen and with other people in their industry, so they really live that value through the touch points of that customer journey.
Speaker 2:And what kind of results do you think that that company sees because of that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, this is the hard bit, right, and it's a question I'm always asked in boardrooms like prove the value of values and I kind of like flip it, prove to me that it's easy to prove when they're not working, right, you know, like we can see the impact of culture and we can see the impact of customer experience that doesn't go well, that becomes visible. Is it always easy to pinpoint it back to the values? Probably not. But yeah, sometimes I think it's easier to prove when it isn't working than when it is.
Speaker 2:And that's the real difference between those table stakes ones, like you know integrity, teamwork, yeah, and they feel fundamental to the organization, shouldn't we all be?
Speaker 3:you know working as a team Shouldn't we all be? But when you put it in language that people understand and it feels like authentically them, then it means something. We can use it as a tool to say hey, one of our values is being real.
Speaker 2:And in that conversation or in that interaction, I didn't feel like you were honest with me. So let's have a chat about that, right, I see? So that's values in action. Yeah, totally yeah. Are there any other examples that you can pull from, uh, of your recent experiences around?
Speaker 3:value. Yeah, one of my favorite or when I won't name names, but one of my favorite companies I've worked with in this space, um, I was engaged with them maybe five years ago to help define their purpose, vision, mission, values, about 40-person technology company, and we got everyone involved in that process and that process took a couple of months to kind of really land on where we were at. And they, more than anyone, have run with values. You can walk inside that organization and if you didn't know what their values values are, you could almost name them just by how it feels. And they went so far as they have a weekly newsletter that goes out that all that people nominate other employees for the different values that they're exhibiting.
Speaker 3:All of their meeting rooms are labeled as one of the values. So one of their values is about being bold and leading the industry, and so they, whenever they have to make tough decisions or really big decisions, they actually go into the meeting room with that kind of putting on that persona of being really brave. All of their performance review process is aligned to their values. They actually align their KPIs or their OKRs to a company value. They celebrate them. They're just alive inside the organization in every interaction and I just think that's probably been my favorite example.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's incredible. So, like being bold, I often find that people sometimes need a little bit of permission, yeah, um, to be bold. I'm certainly a bit of an introvert and, you know, maybe a little bit risk averse, but it's something. So, um, as an employee, can those values help to unlock? Um, unlock innovation, unlock being bold, and give people permission to, um, to to actually do this scary thing, you know?
Speaker 3:And the flip side of that is you cannot say you've got a value about being brave and then punishing or penalizing people for taking a risk. And so that's where you see this people getting skeptical about values because hang on a minute, we've got this vision up here or these values up here that say as a company, we're going to be bold, and I tried to do that over here and actually I'm being punished for that. And so I think that's where things come unstuck a little bit. That's not to say people can just be careless yes, there's a difference but actually encourage people to take a risk. One of the best managers I ever had in my time sat me down in my like first week of work and went through the company purpose and vision and mission and stuff and he said to me I will never, ever fire someone or, you know, penalize someone who is living these values. And here's what they mean to me and that really stuck with me, of like, go and live the values and you kind of can't do wrong.
Speaker 2:that's living it I think, oh, that that is amazing. Yeah, yeah, that's a real translation. Yeah, yeah, of that. Yeah, that's incredible. Maybe the mark of a good manager as well, I think so, like leading into leadership, yeah and modeling it, because it's all very well to be like you guys.
Speaker 3:The team should leave these, but I'm gonna go and hold myself to a different set of account.
Speaker 2:You know, if that's it, you do see that a bit, yes, yeah, and in an innovative company, you know, when we we're trying to be innovative first, especially when we're trying to push the boundaries a little bit of what's possible, you know business isn't is a little bit tough at the moment for a lot of people. Um, I think shared values and, you know, being bold, you know, like say, gives that permission to, to act and and being bold doesn't mean big up and lights, risk all over the show.
Speaker 3:You know, being bold to someone maybe just speaking up in a team meeting, or being bold to someone maybe just trying this thing over here that they've never done before, like it doesn't have to be this big stuff, and I think that's where values and bringing it to life is quite a personal thing and needs some assistance to kind of figure out. How does that connect with me and my role and what am I doing?
Speaker 2:Now one of your from a very early conversation that we have, one of your guiding principles seems to be that when you want to go to an organization, you want to help them become organizations, that you would be proud that your children worked in. Speak to me a little bit about that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think you know the world of work or the future of work that they're going to inherit is is unimaginable to me at the moment, which is quite terrifying as a parent, but, um, an opportunity. At the same time. There's two sides of the coin, and so my kind of mission of purpose, I guess, is like how do I help create the organizations that I'd be proud for them to work in and the leaders that I'd be proud for them to work with? And I think I don't know what those roles are. I don't even know what the companies are that they're working in the future.
Speaker 3:But if we help organisations figure out how to build human connections with their teams and with their customers, how do we help organisations actually collaborate to innovate? Because I think we're not taught that as humans. We're put into rooms and say you guys figure this out, but actually there's a bit of an art and a skill and a natural collaboration and then how to be brave, to be a bit more creative. I think if organizations have that at the heart, then they're going to survive one and two. They're going to be organizations that I could see my children working in in the future, absolutely.
Speaker 2:So that is almost the purpose and the mission piece of what mulberry street's all about, right, and so if you're a founder and you're trying to move those values um throughout the company, yeah, and that's that top down piece, and then you want your employees to be um living them, living them, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:Who is an example of a b2b company? Do you think that's doing really well in this space? Let's pick one that we know so that we can go and um go and try and emulate yeah, yeah, um, lots of the tech companies are way more transparent with this stuff than others.
Speaker 3:So people like atlassian they have a great and I'm struggling to come up with them off the top of my head but they have a great set of values that when you read them you're like I really get a sense of what it would be like to be inside that organization, and they're written in a way that are very real, very humble, but also as a customer of theirs, which I have been in the past you can see that play out in their interactions with you as a customer. It's not just marketing. I think they do a great job. Not just marketing I think they do a great job.
Speaker 3:One of my favorite stories is also an engineering company that I worked with a couple of years ago and 90 person engineering firm and you know Steel Cat Boots, high Viz, vess. I think they had about 92% of the workforce was male and the leadership took a really brave decision that they were going to redefine their company values and get every single person in the organization involved. These are guys that work on the line. They don't come into, you know, meeting rooms and talk to people like me, and so it was a bit of a risk for them and it was probably my favorite project of all time. So we I got them telling stories about what, what they were proud of, what, um, when it got really tough, why would they keep coming back beyond the paycheck and some of the stories that they were brave enough to tell, which the leadership team thought they would? You know they would never go there, that they will just get the real surface level stuff.
Speaker 3:We had people in tears. We had um one person talking about how he was going through a really rough patch and, um, a person in the leadership team realized that and put him up in a hotel for a couple of months and paid for it out of his own pocket. And no one in the organization knew that story existed. And when he told that, the amount of respect in the room and like that's what living our values actually looks like was amazing. And so now that organization has some values, one of which is we lead with heart. There is no way that company would have written that down or picked it off a list. When you're an engineering firm, that's 92% male, had we started with a bunch of you know values, words on a page. But when you started with the stories, it was very cool where they got to and they won an award for that project. They live it. The team get really behind it. They celebrate it all the time in terms of living those values, so that's possibly one of my favorites.
Speaker 2:That's amazing and very heartwarming. Yes, well, very, very heartwarming. So where would a company start?
Speaker 3:I think by asking questions, really good questions. Take all the technology away and start by getting people to open up around what makes them tick inside this organization and be open to finding out things that you might not like hearing Big one.
Speaker 3:Yeah, because I think values is not just the great stuff right on. Yeah, because I think, um, values is not just the great stuff right, there's also we value, not talking about the hard stuff, or we value some of those already exist, and so actually surfacing that and figuring out a plan of what we do about that to create the opposite, uh, is really important part of this work. So don't be afraid of the what you're going to hear, but be really open to what you're going to hear. So start a list of questions. I use those kind of questions a lot. Tell me a story that signifies to you a time that you think we were performing in our best. That's one of my favorite questions in the value space and you'll hear the most amazing stories that were really personal to that person and you probably don't even know existed in their mind. One I did a workshop on this the other day and someone told a story about how, when he joined the organization, he had come from overseas and someone pitched him off at the airport and the company had paid for him to be in a hotel for a couple of days just to land on his feet, but the manager had gone in and put a bowl of fruit in the hotel and filled the fridge with a few breakfast supplies and he's like that to me was like they really thought about me beyond, just me arriving in the city and not knowing anyone. That kind of stuff is living your values. So, yeah, I think, tell the story or ask for the stories in a way that doesn't feel too full on for humans, and then listen to what those themes are that are emerging, that kind of are repeated, so you can see those are all your values that exist, and then promise me that you're going to put the second part in place and that is to live them, to build a plan of how do we live these.
Speaker 3:And when I talk about building a plan of how we live these, I get people to describe if we were living this value, if we were leading with heart five out of five, all day, every day, what would I see inside this organization, what would I hear and how would that feel like? If I was an alien coming down from another planet, how would I know you were living that? What would that look like? So, getting people to describe it in a tangible way, so you start surfacing some of the behaviors and then where are we at today? And so they might say this is really important and this has come through real stories, but actually we're only living this at kind of a two or three level. What's going to push us to there? And that becomes a bit of a roadmap around how do we actually do something differently to live these values?
Speaker 2:and that's the value of people and culture in organizations, right like they're the people who are integrated within the organization and usually have the the? Um kind of empathy and the capacity to look at, um what's happening in the people space beyond a human resources capacity, um. So have you seen that in companies?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think people in culture get a bad rap right and inside organisations. I think we've come from this generation of HR with the R standing for resource and resource is something you consume and throw away, which has never quite sat right with me when we're talking about humans. But I would love for values work to sit with people in culture teams and and leads inside organizations because they're the ones that can influence the bringing it to life piece. It doesn't always, but I think that is the right home for it and um, and they generally have the empathy and the curiosity to go and do some great work in that space absolutely what.
Speaker 2:What else should we, what else should we dig into before we go to the end?
Speaker 2:Um, I mean, we've covered so much ground already. I just love how you were talking about um, how, what the effect is on the customer, like you were saying about. You know how does somebody um talk about? You know, when you're delivering a proposal or that felt experience, sorry, on the other side of um, on the other side of values, like when a company is really doing this right, you know they're playing not necessarily in the atlassian size, um, but these are our engineering companies and our local companies that are working together. So it sounds like not only can we have an effect on the internal, we can actually have quite an outsized effect on what's happening outside the company as well, which I can imagine has a direct effect on you know how many reviews that we see. You know we are seeing that in marketing, the reviews are an extremely important part of our marketing stack. Um, and how, yeah, just in general, how the customers react and experience our brand I've got a customer that um does customer qualitative customer research every six months.
Speaker 3:Um, I have been doing that work for them. So I get someone independent to spend some time with their customers to understand that experience from their point of view and we actually almost we do bring up the values and say can you provide some examples of where they may or may not have lived this?
Speaker 3:so it's really tangible at a customer level to say you know, can you feel this and if not, what do we need to dial up or dial back to make that happen? And so I don't think it's an internal only tool. I think there is a bit of a disconnect sometimes between kind of value proposition and brand and company values, and I think they should be super tightly aligned because your company values are what your customers should feel through their interactions with you, and that is brand as well, and so we can't kind of split them. I think people try to and I think that's a result of marketing approach to brand, to company value sorry it's, it's been led by what sounds good to our customers as opposed to what is inherently us as humans inside this organization as marketers, maybe we can be a little bit guilty of um, of putting them in a bit of a bubble and not involving the whole company.
Speaker 2:But I think that one way we can be a little bit guilty of um, of putting them in a bit of a bubble and not involving the whole company, um, but I think that one way we can do that is is to get the whole company involved, get everybody into a room, I might say, take away the technology, yeah yeah um, remove some of the barriers. Yeah, get the post-its out. Yeah, and um and yeah, have a good old house and story. Yeah, tell some, get around the game spy.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the other thing is keep it in their language. As we take I see this all the time is like we'll have a values session and we hear all these amazing things. We take it away, and that's where people say, oh, just run it through AI and AI will make it sound amazing, or get a copywriter in to make it sound amazing and then almost unrecognizable from where you started and those stories that were told, and so I think, as much as we can, keeping it in the language of where it started is authentically who you are, and so don't do that. Basically, keep that language really human.
Speaker 2:We see all the time as well with you, know, when you think about the voice of the customer. We want to be carrying the voice of the customer through all of our marketing work. Usually that's something that we start with, so the voice of the employee Totally Same thing.
Speaker 3:And we speak in human you know, and when we create copy and when we use tools that help us make it sound amazing. Typically, it doesn't sound amazing to a human because that's not how we talk, and so actually and like Atlassian's a great example of that it's written in a way that you and I would have a conversation about, not in a way that feels shiny on a website, there's a.
Speaker 2:There's a big difference as well between a word like honesty and a big difference between a word like honesty and integrity, and they can sound like the same thing, right, but they don't. They have a very different meaning and they might show up very differently in the world. So how can we use language as a tool within these values, to translate what we actually mean? Yeah, obfuscating.
Speaker 3:Yeah, what we're actually trying to say yeah, clarity, I'm working on a project at the moment where the values have a global organization and the values have been topped down from head office offshore into New Zealand market, which is kind of the opposite of what I'm saying, right, so they have been gifted, these values that they now have to then create some meaning in, and so that is a world we live in and you can't just say no, we're not going to adopt those and they mean nothing to us. The way in which we kind of create some meaning is the word says this on the. You know, the label on the dial says this. But to us here in New Zealand, what does that look like? What does that feel like, what does that sound like? And maybe we have some other words to describe it, and that's fine. But this is that value coming to life, and so still that kind of same process, even though we've got the values being kind of sent from above.
Speaker 2:That's an interesting perspective. Yeah, it's a really interesting perspective. What are some of your favorite resources on this? Like we've talked a little bit about the Emotional Culture Deck, which I heard you mention before, what other tools can businesses use, or people in culture or human resources use, to surface these values?
Speaker 3:Yeah, emotional Culture deck is a great one, and for those that don't know what it is, it's a card deck that has emotion words written on each card. There's about 100 words, half of which are perceivably pleasant and half of which are perceivably unpleasant, and getting people especially like. I used that as the warm-up activity for the engineering firm that I talked about to get people comfortable to talk about stuff that they would never normally talk about with their workmates, right, um, but it gives people a license to do it because actually, we're just playing a game and I'm just getting you to sort some cards and you know what's important to you from a how you want to feel at work, um, so tools like that are great at opening people up to tell some really great stories. Before we're into the storytelling bit, what else do I use? I think anything you can use or view. The more kind of storytelling aspects, the better. So there's lots of people that play in that space.
Speaker 3:You know, simon Sinek's an old favourite. Everyone talks about him, but he actually is really great at this stuff of using really interesting and important questions to unlock the stories, and in the stories we find the values. Um, so, yeah, his stuff is amazing, like the start of why I kind of peace. It's been around forever and it's still. I think it stands just as true today. Brené brown talks about values as verbs all the time.
Speaker 2:Um, so some of who works interesting in that space I remember reading atlas, Atlas of the Heart, and being so shocked at the statistic that she gave that. You know the big study done and there was only three emotions that people were feeling happy, angry and sad. So it became her mission to give us language, shared language, to use around values. So that book is also fantastic. I enjoyed that one.
Speaker 3:I think that connection between values and emotions is really important because it is what we feel, you know, and values is how we feel at work, at day and day. I often talk about. You know, it's the. It's the how your stomach feels about turning up at work after a long weekend or after a holiday. You know, that's where am I aligned to this company value or am I not? Am I in the right place or am I not? So you can't split the emotional piece from the values piece. I think it is it.
Speaker 2:That's very interesting. Thank you, If there's one thing that you'd like our community to walk away with today what would it be?
Speaker 3:When it comes to values, do it with your people, not to your people. That's probably the main takeaway. Your values already exist. Your job is to surface them in a way that's authentically you and then bring them to life every day, day in and day out. I love that. I love that.
Speaker 2:You've got a very engaged LinkedIn profile, so people can find you on LinkedIn. Yeah, I know, so where else can people find you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, LinkedIn's probably the right home, because I'm terrible at like doing what I tell other people to do and updating my website, etc. So there is a website, mulberrystreetconz but LinkedIn is probably the place to be.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. I've immensely enjoyed this conversation. I think that it holds a lot of value for people, especially if they're looking to revamp or try and understand how they can redirect their company value. So, thank you, go and do it, they're amazing.
Speaker 3:Thank you, thank you.
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