Culture and Values

Values serve as a reference guide to behaviour and, therefore, are an essential part of a companies’ purpose (raison d’être). The highest performing companies use their values to foster cohesion, while at the same time translating these values to meaningful behaviours at various levels in the organization.

It can be sometimes be tempting to focus on the negative aspects of your corporate culture, but we believe that a corporate culture and its elements are there for a reason. A culture is seldom just all good or bad.  If there is a way to to demonstrate the relevance of e.g. original values and articulate examples that illustrate their meaning, they may still be relevant. Acknowledging what is already there could help make major change feel less like imposing and more like a shared evolution.

So rather than changing your culture from scratch we believe that targeted and integrated cultural interventions, designed around changing a few critical behaviors at a time, will engage your people and enable them to collaborate more effectively. We seek to work with the culture that is there and focus on a few key behaviors that will make the difference. Dancing instead of wrestling, using the positive energy to facilitate the change. Obviously leadership support plays a key role in this process. Via our Values to Behavior process we can help you to link the values to tangible behaviours and build a frame of reference for teams and leadership. 

Values to Behaviours

The Values-to-Behaviour process uses the organizations’ core values to (re-) establish trust and improve communication within and between teams, thus improving daily cooperation and performance. It consists of several steps, starting with the creation of a “Charter of Behaviour” and ending with actions for learning to better ‘live’ these behaviours. Behaviours in the Charter, desirable as well as undesirable, reflect the teams’ opinion of the specific behaviours needed to guarantee the effective handling of the daily workload in a positive and constructive work environment.

The process builds on the inherent energy that comes from values that are genuinely shared within the organization; core values that capture what the organization stands for. Typically core values reflect what binds and connects those working for the organization and are expected to be part and parcel of the corporate identity. However, core values often fail to energize management and employees. Why? Because core values as such are too abstract and generally unfit to give guidance in real life situations. Therefore, core values need to be interpreted or ‘translated’ for them to become relevant in people’s daily work.

This is the purpose of the Values-to-Behaviour process. Participants in a workshop explore in depth the behaviour they mutually expect from each other. From this they then jointly create a Team Charter capturing a limited number of observable desirable and undesirable behaviours for further embedding and ‘living’. This process is ideally applied within an intact team or a group of people working together on a frequent basis.