How? The Values that Drive You
Values are about our principles, about what is important to us in the world, and the reason for why we live and work in a certain way. It’s imperative to know your personal values, and make the values of your organisation explicit. People don’t want to work for companies whose values (and whose mission) don’t align with their personal ones.
Useful questions are:
- What values do we want to pursue as an organisation?
- What values are needed to shape our mission and vision?
- Why did we choose these values? What makes them so important to us?
- What is the concrete meaning of our core values? How do they translate into behaviour? How can we observe them in the organisation and in contact with our stakeholders?
These questions are already a good start. We have two other exercises to help define your values, or the values of the organisation.
- A list of values can help you to determine your personal core values. You find a great example of one in this helpful brochure on how to elaborate on your career path.
- Existing companies can also start by recalling past experiences of when they knew they where following their values. Define those underlying values, put them in words or symbols.
Get inspired by Simon Sinek’s 4 minute talk on 'How should a company shares its values?'. One of his most interesting takes is 'Values should be written as verbs. They have to be actionable, they have to be do-able'.