Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Inculcating Your Organization's Core Values in Your Employees

How do you inculcate your organization's core values in your people?  How do you make sure people understand and live out those values in their day-to-day work?   Here are a few tips:

1.  Take the opportunity to communicate the core values on many occasions in many different arenas.  Communicate those values simply and consistently.

2.  Recognize and reward those people whose extraordinary efforts embodied those values and made the organization better as a result, even when they could have taken an easier road perhaps with better short term results.

3.  Be consistent.  Make sure that top leaders act in a way that is consistent with the values that they articulate.  They can't just espouse certain values; they must back it up with action.

4.  Engage your employees in an ongoing discussion of the merits of these values.   Why do they matter?  How do these values manifest themselves in day-to-day work?  Don't just talk at them.  Create a conversation with them about those values.

5.  Create case studies of situations in which the organization may have strayed from those values.  Talk candidly about what the negative consequences were, and discuss the lessons learned from that experience.   Focus on learning, not on blame.

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