Values at Work

Knowing what’s important improves commitment and performance.

I have been reminded of the importance of values in organizational life several times over the last few weeks. It’s interesting what happens when you give explicit attention to something that usually resides quietly in the background. 

Not long ago, I was working with an executive leadership team during their first retreat in about nine years. This was a group of aerospace engineers and scientists; people you might think have little time for “values”. We didn’t set out to talk about values, but they were a constant presence. 

Over the course of two days, conversation kept drifting back to words like responsibility, integrity, excellence, and cooperation.

Virtually all the participants, even the hard-bitten cynics, found the time they spent to have tremendous value for their work and relationships. Creating an opportunity for people to talk together about what is important to them has a very positive impact.

Values serve two purposes in the life of an organization, group, or individual. First, they keep you rooted in what is essential. You know where you stand. Second, and somewhat paradoxically, they make it possible to flex and adapt as circumstances emerge. Having clear values doesn’t make you rigid; rather, it makes it possible for you to know how to adjust to something new. Equally as important, others then know how to adjust to you.

Way back when I founded Campden Hill, I settled on five core values of my own. Not that I invented them or that they are unique; though maybe in this combination they are:

Curiosity / Wonder

Trust

Respect

Courage

Wisdom

Accidentally or by design, I find these values infuse my work nearly every day. Of course, this could be nothing more than the expression of the phenomenon that occurs in everything from social sciences to quantum mechanics: you find what you look for.

Curiosity makes it possible for me to ask lots of questions. Trust and respect allow me to remain open to what I hear in response. Courage enables me to challenge myself and others to reach beyond what we think we already know; to be vulnerable and not rush to judgment. And wisdom is an ongoing pursuit, something that emerges at the end of an experience. If I’m paying attention.

It’s nice to know I’m not alone in holding these values dear. A favorite blogger, Paul Bennett of IDEO recently posted some of his thoughts on trust. I especially like what he says toward the end of the piece: that “[t]rust doesn’t come from knowing, trust is born from safely not knowing.”

Here’s evidence of another of those apparent paradoxes we keep running into: strength, courage, and trustworthiness can come from vulnerability and not knowing.

I’m interested in hearing about how values influence your work and life. What do you say?

How to Change Behavior

“If you want to change a mind, simply talking to it may not be enough.”

In a story about how what teachers do can influence what they believe and consequently improve student performance, reporter Alix Spiegel looks at the results of research being conducted at the University of Virginia.

While many commenters focused on the impact on student performance in the research, I was more intrigued by the connection demonstrated between action and beliefs in the teachers. 

Something we all understand is the notion that our beliefs influence our actions. What I think, what I know, or what I think I know, determines how I act. 

In an oversimplified way, the study seems to show us something else: trying to change what someone thinks by giving them loads of new and compelling information will not necessarily get them to change what they do.

No matter how good your data is and how skilled you are at telling the story in that data, the information itself is often not sufficient to change behavior.

This has interesting implications for any of us who work in the change business (and who doesn’t these days?).

If you want someone to change the beliefs that drive their behavior, start with the behavior and watch the beliefs adapt.

The actions I take influence how I think about the world. How I behave can shift what I believe.

This story shines some light on the two-way nature of the mind-body connection. Each enhances the other.

In our over-rationalized, Cartesian world, we often forget the power and impact of physical acts as a tool for influence and change.

Cheating at Harvard?

What can we learn from the brewing scandal?

A few days ago I was listening to accounts of the story about cheating at Harvard. This was an incident that allegedly occurred last spring when around half of a class of 250 students was found to have engaged in some form of impropriety (copying, collaborating, and plagiarizing) on a take home exam.

Leaving aside the juiciness of cheating at an elite institution of higher learning, I was struck by the several questions that leapt into my head, none of which were being asked in any of the stories I read. (Maybe I’m just reading the wrong news.)

To begin, let’s go back to first principles. What IS cheating? Do we all agree what it looks like? Did we spend any time beforehand making sure we are in sync? I’m not offering a definition, only the suggestion that it’s a good idea to start here and find out whether we all have the same notion.

Then, what assumptions are we holding that we ought to be testing? To wit, that everyone in the community knows that cheating, as we choose to define it, is bad? That when someone sees someone else cheating, she knows to turn that person in?

These are only assumptions, and as assumptions, they need to be constantly monitored for their ongoing meaning and relevance. We’ve all been in situations where what we thought was true turned out to be only our own faulty and incomplete interpretation of what was happening.

And my last question: Is there a different way we need to be thinking about academic integrity and performance expectations? This case highlights the prevailing philosophy that individual performance is what matters most. This is what we try to measure throughout academia. Problem is, the world beyond the academy doesn’t work that way.

I have clients who pay me lots of money because they want help figuring out how to break free of the rut of individual performance expectations and get their people working collaboratively, across boundaries. Sharing information and resources. Finding better answers together than they could have by themselves.

Why doesn’t our education system prepare us for these real world challenges?

For all the wonderful things our education system does, it seems that this is one place it is lagging behind. Perhaps these Harvard students are in the vanguard of something new. I wonder if the institution has the courage to ask itself some tough questions about what comes next.

The Science of Organization Development

Touchy-feely has nothing to do with it.

I was reading an article tonight that reminded me about the science of what I do. 

As a consultant who works with organizations on what ails them, potential clients often perceive my offer as soft and imprecise. 

I'm getting better at demonstrating the real-world payoff for working with me: engaged employees, aligned organizations, better business results, improved relationships, more sustainable success. 

At the heart of the work is an approach that is analogous to the scientific method: data gathering, hypothesis development, and experimentation to test the hypothesis. We call it “action research” to distinguish it from what you do in physics, for example. But the process is the same.

We see this same approach elsewhere in organizations too, like in product and service development.

One distinction in the social and behavioral sciences is that our results usually cannot be replicated because of the vagaries and complexities of human systems. No two are alike.

Still, with enough rigor, patterns emerge that credibly support hypotheses, and these patterns can then be turned into frameworks. These frameworks can be used in other experiments, and the body of knowledge grows.

What We Mean By "Agreement"

The purpose of having an agreement is to create violations.

The purpose of having an agreement is not to prevent violations but to create them.

There's a counterintuitive notion if ever there was one. 

Most simply, without an agreement, it is impossible to have a violation. You may find yourself upset or angry with me over something I have done, but if we never took the time to devise an agreement, then it's impossible for you to tell me about the line I crossed in a way that has meaning for me.

On the other hand, if I know what we've agreed, I know what I can and can't do, and hopefully most of the time I'm on the right side of the line. If I shift my perspective accept the opening proposition here, I find I have a very different approach to my interaction with you when I do step over the line.

Keeping agreements is about integrity. Synonyms for integrity include rectitude, probity, virtue, and honesty. 

Integrity can be found at the personal and at the organizational levels. In my experience, organizational integrity is a much trickier characteristic to nurture and sustain. This is in part because of the challenges inherent in crafting group level agreements. 

Organizations are very good at writing policies and establishing rules, but these policies and rules are not very good at fostering collective integrity. That's because they are generally intended to address the extremes of behavior: the egregious violations that require disciplinary action. 

Integrity, rather, is something that is part of an organization's day to day existence and operations. Or not. It is not very effectively imposed from the outside. It grows from within. In groups, culture is a far better incubator, and regulator, of organizational integrity. 

I have been working for years with a national non-profit that is a paragon of this kind of integrity. Even though they have been on an astronomical growth curve lately, they continue to be very rigorous and intentional about guarding their culture, protecting it as one of their most valuable assets. 

A fundamental part of the culture there is a commitment to open communication. Lots of organizations say they have this value, and I have never seen one that lives up to it the way this one does. What makes the commitment so unique in this case is the way the entire organization reaches explicit collective agreements, acknowledges that violations of these agreements are only a matter of time, and then engages over the violation to either reconfirm or adjust the original agreement. 

These organizational agreements are living, breathing elements of the group's life together. When they become stagnant, they lose their meaning and impact.