OVERVIEW

Our values are our prime drivers in our lives. We may not know them consciously; however, they are the drivers of our behaviours and all we do. That is why revealing them and working with them is so crucial to understanding and developing our identity. This is why Values sit in the Identity Element of the Investors in Learning Driving Success model. When we start working with our values, we are consciously looking at who we currently are and who we would like to be. Without raising our values to the conscious level, we are just living in the automatic mode without any self-awareness.

Understanding Your Values as an Individual, a Team or a whole organisation is a paramount element of your Identity. Without clarity on our values and beliefs we are not on a conscious journey of travel. We will all have attitudes and thoughts and ideas that are unconscious and automatic, but any development journey is about raising the automatic to the conscious level. Once they are conscious, we can work with them, understand and reflect on them in order to instigate necessary change. In order to achieve that we need to develop conscious awareness and standards that we wish to set for ourselves. A common set of shared values in a team or organisation form a fundamental basis to how we guide our behaviours and can guide our communication and understanding on challenges and issues. It makes a solution-focused approach possible. Of course, we also need honesty about the attitudes that underpin the individuals and whether people are committed and accountable to the cause. Our values are inextricably connected to our attitudes.

If you are serious about wishing to build a productive and courageous Healthy Learning culture where people have the necessary environment where they can grow and feel engaged and motivated, then the role of values cannot be underestimated. Having clear values to live by creates the expectations which take people on a journey where they can challenge themselves to live up to the standards that will support the outcomes we are seeking. Of course, the necessary work is to spend the time reaching understanding about what the values mean in practice, whilst also recognising that we all have our own individual understanding and interpretation of the values. We need to realise that no two human beings will see the world in the same way and we only have our own lenses to look through. It is the interchange of information which makes us richer and deepens our understanding and our ability to work with each other’s strengths. The more we know each other’s perspectives, and learn from each other, and share our individual perceptions of the values we are trying to build and live, the more interconnected and stronger we will all become.

The benefits of working with values is that deep consideration is given to our individual life, the life of a team or that of a whole organisation, and the way in which we want to live and behave. We need to recognise and be honest that every day we give messages with our behaviours. We need to ask ourselves “are my behaviours the messages I want to be giving to the world?”. The very process of thinking about and developing values requires a connection to the inner self, it requires honesty, self-reflection, humility and the need to also allow yourself to be vulnerable. Vulnerability enhances learning and is the bedrock of honesty. As we discuss values in a team it brings with it the great likelihood of issues being voiced that may be sensitive, political, or perceived very differently between individuals and departments. The very process of developing values will take people through a process where they will start to really understand each other’s core. We need to realise that this is not always a comfortable experience and will very likely take many people out of their comfort zone. This can be a difficult and emotional process, especially if there are unresolved issues within individuals, across a team and multiplied across the whole organisation. There are many organisations that have espoused values but really do not live them. That can be more damaging than not having any organisational values at all!

We offer a programme on the development and embedding of vision, values as well as vision and values combined. The reason for this is that it is so crucial that dedicated time can be given to developing your vision and values separately as well as together.

Developing and living our values requires a dedicated approach, and if you are dedicated to becoming a values based individual, team or organisation then you can use values frameworks to develop values with meaning and purpose into your own life, into your team and across your in business.