Personal values refer to the beliefs, principles, and ideals that an individual holds as important and meaningful. 

These values may be influenced by an individual’s upbringing, culture, religion, personal experiences, and other factors. Personal values can include things like honesty, integrity, respect, compassion, and loyalty.

During the Dare to Lead™ program, we share a list of suggested values (which is non-exhaustive) and invite participants to consider what their values are. It’s often a tricky section of the course where partcipants may choose values that they have held since childhood and these may be values that have been instilled in them by their family members or the community they grew up in. Sometimes there is a realization that these are not the values they hold today. Through discussion and faciltation we consider that often our values show up when we are making decisons and when we are functioning at our best.

We dig in further to these values in order to demonstrate what our behaviours look like when we are aligned with our values and when we are not. This helps to firm up what are values are but also recognise when we are moving away from those values, potentially creating conflict for ourselves and others. This exercise has become a valuable assesment tool for intact teams where participants can hear their colleague’s personal values and learn about some of the reasoning that these values are important to them. Building a foundation of connection the team members can build on as they work together. 

Organisational values, on the other hand, refer to the shared beliefs and principles that guide the behaviour and decisions of an organisation. These values are often established by the organisation’s leaders and are intended to define the organisation’s purpose, priorities, and culture. Organisational values can include things like customer service, innovation, teamwork, and social responsibility.

The difficulty is people in organisations often have individual ideas on what these values look like in practice. There could be two employees at the same level in the organisation with completely different ideas of how this value should be represented in daily behaviours.

We also invite participants to share their lived experience of these organisational values and whether they feel they can connect to them at the behavioural level. Do they need to be updated to reflect the different cultures and experiences of the people working there? Do they give every employee the opportunity to be their geniune selves at work and do their best work congruent with their personal values? 

This is a common issue but fortuantely there is a solution! This values assessment is a key opportunity for the organisation to receive input from their team members. It is recommended that the work to operationalise your values for the orgnaisation is completed after participating in the Dare to Lead™ program however you can do the work independent of the program. The full instructions and downloads are available for free from here.

If you have downloaded the content, worked through it and are still looking for help in developing your organisational values, you can get in touch with me here. 

If you are looking to unlock the potential in your team, the full Dare to Lead™ leadership development program is available to complete in person over 3 days. After an initial consultation, a full proposal will be submitted along with detailed objectives of how the program can meet your organisation’s leadership objectives.

Reference

Brown Brené (2018) in Dare to lead: Brave work, tough conversations, whole hearts. London: Penguin Random House, pp. 185–217.