Respect - what does it look like to you?

Source: thedisneyprincess.tumblr.com via Alison on Pinterest

Yesterday I blogged about our relationship to time. As a result of tweeting about the blog I asked did someone being late show a lack of respect. It was a trick question really because as I explained in the blog - those with a preference for In-Time won't believe so and those with Thru-time preferences will.

And they're both right - from their worldview anyway. I suggest it's up to both parties to understand the other's worldview. Those In-time should understand that their colleagues with Thru-time preferences may judge their behaviour to be disrespectful and understand the repercussions if someone holds that belief about them. Those Thru-time should understand that those In-Time would believe that their undivided attention in meetings is more respectful.

Which had me thinking about our values - of which respect might be one.

Our values are what inspires and motivates our daily actions. They're what determine what we will do and what we won't do. They also determine what we do and don't admire in others and therefore how we judge them - and ourselves for that matter.

Even at it's simplest level what values are in our top five can and will lead to disputes between individuals about what to do and what doing it means. As another blog in Supply Management suggested when I chunked our values into Achievement, Affiliation & Power. Someone valuing Achievement and Success may very well want to manage a project differently than someone valuing Affiliation.

Every action is motivated by a need to achieve a value - yes even actions that a majority of us would deem to be unacceptable. Which brings me to the added complexity that our values are nominalisations and we each have our own definitions for what achieving them means.

If I take respect for a moment then it might mean any, or none, of the following to someone:

• Being on time for meetings
• Giving our undivided attention in meetings
• Listening to what others are saying
• Acknowledging you have heard what others have said 
• Saying thank you
• Doing what you say you're going to do (see blog on being faithless and therefore trustworthy)
• Being honest
• Doing what they want you to do
• Respect for yourself
• Respect for others
• Respect for the planet
• Fairness (which I'd suggest is in fact another value)

The key is understanding that your definition of respect is just that - yours and that others are likely to have a different understanding of what respect is or may not even value respect as highly as you.

Alison Smith
Helping Procurement understand their and their stakeholders' values.   

Disposable Lives

I saw a tweet recently by Leslie Kohler about completion of her book Disposable Lives. It's a title for a fiction book but it resonated for me for life in general.

I don't have any story to tell or insights to share as such on this today just a few questions:

Are you treating your life as disposable?

Are there aspects of your life that you treat as disposable - health? relationship? work?

Are there people you treat as disposable - partner, family, friends, colleagues, those who making your life easier?

Are there behaviours that you treat as disposable - connection? balance? honesty?

Are there beliefs you treat as disposable - sustainability? greater good?

and more importantly

what will you to do to make the necessary changes.

Alison

Alison Smith
Helping procurement offer permanent and sustained difference to your business

Balance in Life

Following on from yesterday's blog on life balance - Susan Jeffers has a model that I often use with clients to explain why we should aim for 'life balance' and not 'work/life balance'.

The model Susan uses splits our life into different areas such as the 9 listed below (each of us may have different words but she encourages readers to identify 9).

Each of the 9 areas provides us with something we need in life. What they are and what they provide will be different for each of us and link to our own individual hierarchy of values. It's this hierarchy and our ability to meet these unconscious desires that will ultimately determine our level of motivation, satisfaction and yes even wellbeing.

So for example: Work may give us Achievement, relationships may provide Love, hobbies may bring Spirit, leisure may provide Freedom and friendship may bring Connection. In the short term if we don't get Achievement, Love, Spirit, Freedom AND Connection we we may not notice any ill effect. In the long term, however, if all we're getting is achievement then our lack of love, spirit, freedom and connection will make itself heard one way or another - feeling unfulfilled, lack of motivation, unhappiness and yes even illness.

In essence one area cannot meet all our needs. Therefore in order to have a life that ensures all values are being met it is important to have activities in a number of different areas. So work cannot be someone’s whole life – in order to function, in order to get what they need to survive they need to do other things. In the example above they need to spend time on work, in a relationship, on leisure, on a hobby, with family and friends, on personal growth, contributing and with their higher self. It’s not just because other people want them to but in order to meet their own unconscious physical, mental, emotional and spiritual needs.

What areas of your life do you have too high expectations of by spending all your time on them? How can you find more balance in life?

Alison

Alison Smith
Helping you keep on track by aligning action to your values
alison@alisonsmith.eu 07770 538159

Business Values - do they really exist?

Values are what drive all our behaviours and are our unconscious motivators and de-motivators. Understanding them more, therefore, helps us to explore changes that may need to take place in order for progress to be made towards our goals. What values aren’t - are things we decide or even choose to have ie they’re not conscious they’re unconscious.

The challenge is can we translate personal values into business values? I know many organisations have published values statements but I wonder can we really suggest the current values statements used by most organisations are the same or even similar to our personal and unconscious values? And therefore should we be even calling them such? I’d suggest not - for a number of reasons:

• When eliciting personal values we start with an individual’s behaviour to understand the value(s) driving that behaviour. Business values seem to work the other way round and simply become aspirational choices rather than something that reflects or explains current actions.

• Personal values cover ALL our actions. Many business values seem to concentrate on the ‘softer’ aspirational values and forget about the ‘harder’ values that inform for example the strategic direction, profitability or pricing choices made.

• Even if people have the same core value, what behaviours they judge to be acceptable or unacceptable will differ greatly. Why else, for example, are there numerous linkedin group discussions exploring what integrity or honesty mean. Business values statements are therefore useless without a statement of behaviour to identify what the values looks like for that organisation.

• Because they’re our personal values it’s automatic for us to behave in ways that support them. Unless our values are aligned with an organisation’s it’s likely we may find taking on its values and associated behaviours difficult. If they’re in conflict with our own even more so. I certainly don’t see much evidence of values based alignment in interviews or restructuring when new or updated values statements are published.

• Making any changes to our personal values and/or their hierarchy (ie their relationship to each other) is not easy. Yet organisations’ management teams seem to be able to find it easy to issue a values statement and assume it’ll work.

Which all means I’d much prefer we found a different term for all those business values statements.

PASSION in Business

I realised I talked a lot about business values and hadn't written any myself so I rectified that the other week. Imagine my surprise when they started to spell the word PASSION and even more when I realised the first value would be profitability!!

PASSION - without passion where would a business be!

Profitability - a reminder for me that we wont be able to keep doing what we're doing unless the work we do is profitable. Others may not need reminding but I do otherwise I'll keep forgetting to value (ie charge for) the service we provide. I love that it ended up being first on the list. We'll also apply this value when dealing with suppliers and other partners.

Authenticity - about saying "No" not "Yes" if that's the right thing to do and searching for those who we can easily say yes to because they accept us for who we are.

Sustainability - ensuring actions allow for the sustainability of our business, others' businesses and the planet.

Service - remembering why we do what we do ie to make a difference in others' lives by getting them back on track and connected to what gives them passion every day.

Intuition - not all business decisions will come with logic and lots of supportive data.

Openness - being honest sharing who we are and our journey and walking our talk even if we don't always find it easy.

Nurture -nurturing others so they may develop and grow and be the change they want to see in the world.

I'll let you know how we get on.

Business values - time to wake up and smell the coffee

As a business owner do your business values reflect your own personal values or do they additionally include values that ensure the sustainability of the business? As a manager of an organisation are the values consistent with still being here in a year's time?

In the preparation for a session I facilitated I had to explore a variety of business values statements and I was surprised with what I found. Values statements are intended to reflect the values that will ensure those working for the organisation know why they're doing what they're doing and how to do it.

Lets just compare 3 organisations stated values:
Microsoft
Integrity, Honesty, Openness, Personal Excellence, Constructive Self Criticism, Continual Self Improvement and Mutual Respect.
Body Shop
Against Animal Testing, Support Community Trade, Active Self Esteem, Defend Human Rights, Protect Our Planet.
Innocent Drinks
Natural, Entrepreneurial, Generous, Commercial, Responsible.

I'd suggest looking at the values statements that Innocent Drinks is the one that has taken seriously the need for the values to reflect reality and to include the need to sustain the organisation in the future.

A real eye opener for me and a reminder that my business isn't me and needs to have different (or perhaps just additional) values that are more entrepreneurial.

Are you connected to or have you abandoned your personal values?

I've had lots of conversations with people over the last few weeks either unhappy and unmotivated themselves or with unhappy and unmotivated people working for them. In all cases this was negatively impacting the company's brand.

The problem seemed to be the non alignment of values between the individuals and the company. In fact not non alignment as much as they'd abandoned their values!! The WHY they had allowed this to happen had a few components.

In some cases the person just wasn't clear enough about what their personal mission statement was. So they joined or even set up an organisation that seemed to meet their needs and then became unhappy when their unconscious needs weren't being met. Understanding what motivates you and the outcome you want to have on others is really important in ensuring that you can jump out of bed with enthusiasm every day. This can take some time but is well worth the effort. I'd also suggest it doesn't have to be in words that others understand. This is about finding the words that best motivate you.

For example my personal mission is I'm a path finder - I help people transform their lives by getting them on their path. That may not make sense nor motivate anyone else but so long as that informs what I choose to do and what I choose not to do that's what's important. As you will see from my web site, blog, LinkedIn and Twitter I choose to translate this into Paddle Finder for career creeks. Clients find this description easier to understand what I can do for them and relate to.

If you're clear about your own personal mission statement it will be a lot easier to keep on track when aligning with an organisations mission. Are you clear about your personal mission?

The other type of situation was people joining an organisation where their values were not aligned with those of the organisation. They therefore then apply and operate from their values when working on behalf of the organisation. The problem here is that others then see how they operate as representing the organisation. Which can significantly and sometimes negatively impact the perception of the organisation's brand.

Agreeing values statements and code of behaviour to meet these values is one solution. However sometimes it's simply the case that the person's values will always conflict with those of the organisation and they should not continue to work there. A hard decision but one that is best for both in the long run.

How does you personal mission statement align with that of the organisation? What changes do you need to make to achieve better alignment?

Make 2010 a year to remember

Flexibility - Values - Optimism - are the keys.

Well they were at the discussion I facilitated this morning at a 4n networking event on the above and I've like to share the highlights with you.

I do have access to a number of different tools to help set goals for 2010. However a comment at the Transformation game I facilitated at the weekend reminded me that we'll have a year to remember when we get our way of 'being' right!

With that thought in mind I didn't share my 7 step out of the creek process nor the NLP Well Formed Outcome process (although links to both can be found on the RHS of this blog). Instead I used the Frameworks for change Coaching Process (FCP - again see RHS for explanation of the process) and invited my audience to participate and find their own connections with the cards. Which you might like to do before I share mine:

Mentor: Flexibility
Insight: I model my values at work
Setback: "If I'm not winning, I find it hard to celebrate anyone else's success"
Insight: I'm willing to bear the discomfort involved in shifting perspective
Mentor: Optimism

Flexibility: To be open to make changes and think and act differently. What do you need to do to be more flexible?

I model my values at work: Do you really? What would that mean? I got tearful when facilitating today because this is something I feel strongly about and yet it gives me the most challenge. Can I walk my talk as I talked about in my last newsletter? Can I say NO to work because it doesn't align with my values even when the bank balance says YES!! What about you - what are you being asked to do to ensure you model your values at work?

"If I'm not winning - I find it hard to celebrate anyone else's success": We discussed the impact on us of others in communities or organisations saying this? If a business' sole focus is on sales that they're not getting how easy is it within that business to celebrate anything? The setback is the negative impact and spiral down that can have on everyone in the business. In some respects if we're not winning the best thing for morale is to start celebrating others successes. At least that will get everyone in the right mindset.

I'm willing to bear the discomfort involved in shifting perspective: Which is what we have to be able to do if things aren't working out for us. A mindset that allows us to stay positive and be flexible to make the necessary changes - even if it can be uncomfortable.

Optimism: For 2010 to be a year to remember we certainly need to be optimistic about that being a realistic outcome. Without optimism we might was well give up now and I for one know 2010 will be a year to remember -for all the right reasons.

What way of being do you need to embrace to ensure 2010 is a year to remember?

What would make you proud to have named after you?

Interesting how things happen. Dr Who names a galaxy Alison. I ask a question in LinkedIn about what would make you the proudest to have named after you (not a person). And the responses provide me with the perfect question for my workshops when discussing step 3 of a process I've developed called Mission! (see link)

The last blog will have given you a sense of the 7 steps I've developed to help you get out of the creek or take action to avoid going down it in the first place. After stopping and putting on your life jacket the third step is about using what you enjoy, are good and have passion for, along with connecting to your values, to identify your mission or purpose for your life. In other words what will get you out of bed in the morning with enthusiasm? (This was discussed in my contribution to How not to be like your parents - again see links on rhs.)

I've tried many different questions to get to the heart of the matter and so have others - what's your legacy, what would your eulogy say, what difference would you most like to make in the world etc etc. The question 'what would make you proudest to have named after you' seemed to hit the mark. The answers have been truly inspiring:

Those things being named included: schools, colours, streets, institutions, libraries, rooms, processes, methods, cures, vaccines, parks, funds, charities, awards, hospitals, ways of living, roses and butterflies.

It was the why these would be named after them that seemed to tap into their mission - the difference they wanted to make in life.

What would make you proudest? and why? and what can you do today to start to make it a reality? You may not get the library named after you but you will have made a difference.