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Haines Watts
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By Daniel Morgan, Managing Partner, Haines Watts Esher
DEFINING YOUR VALUES AS A LEADER
Talent retention has always been a key challenge facing business owners but no more so than in the last couple of years. Motivation and purpose are now key parts of people strategies and your business’s values can be central to this.
The aim of values is to align your teams with a shared purpose and sense of community within their teams. When executed well, values achieve exactly that, and can be crucial to the continued engagement amongst your colleagues. However, if they are not, they can cause more problems than you perhaps began with.
❛❛ The aim of values is to align your teams with a shared purpose and sense of community within their teams ❜❜
THE IMPORTANCE OF A CLEAR SET OF VALUES
In the early stages when there are very few people in the business, it is likely that the founding individuals are well aligned and similar values or ambitions were shared.
As the business grows and more personalities are added to the mix, you risk diluting this shared vision you once held. Communicating your core values and implementing them in all areas from recruitment to business processes means you can keep your team well aligned to your goals. When considering your values you need to ask: n What are you trying to achieve?
What are your ambitions for the business, is it innovation? Fast growth? Providing jobs? n How do you want to do business?
Whether that’s making an impact in the local community, protecting the environment, to the basics around how you want people to be treated within your teams n What drives you and your key team members? Some will be profi t driven, others want their workplace to feel like a community, others will want to know that what they are doing matters.
Once you’ve considered the answers to all of these questions you have the foundations for your values.
DO YOUR VALUES REPRESENT YOUR PEOPLE?
It is important to open up the discussion with your teams. If you implement a set of values that don’t relate to them, trying to apply them through the business will be an uphill battle.
Workshops with people at all levels can offer valuable insights into what they think the key strengths and weaknesses of the business are at present and what behaviours they want to see more of. The way that values are implemented within the business is pivotal to their success. You could have a great set of values but if they are contradicted or not well communicated, the messaging can fall fl at. In this situation, at best, no one will pay attention and all your hard work will have been for nothing. At worst, people will feel alienated and frustrated by the empty statements.
LIVING YOUR VALUES
While your core values should represent the heart of your business, this does not necessarily mean that everyone will be displaying them from day one.
Leadership buy-in needs to be concrete and this can mean that conflicts surface. This can be hard and requires you to step up and speak when someone is deviating from your core values. It is crucial that messaging from the top is consistent and that these values are displayed by leadership day in, day out.
Implementing values can be a hugely rewarding process, the increase in personal investment and motivation from your teams can be significant. If you want to discuss defining your business values, get in touch.
