Case: bringing your values to life, giving them some punch

May 21, 2024
1
 min read

How the board of a corporation measures the impact of the new corporate values.

Situation

Months after the board had agreed with the new corporate values it was hard to see what impact they had on the business. Pierre looked expectantly at the Synthetron team he had brought in. “So it’s clear? We need to know how to bring the values to life in the organisation!”

Approach

It’s clear, they replied, then started asking about where the values came from and what they were based on. He really hoped they weren’t going to tell him more people than his team of 4 should have been involved in defining them. And indeed that wasn’t what they were suggesting.

Though they explained that since this was the situation, participants would need a bit of space to absorb and respond to them. “They are mostly operational staff,” one of them was pointing out, “so they probably don’t use the same kind of corporate language as you do here in head office.

It might be that they agree with the values at heart but expressing them differently would make them easier to relate to and therefore live by – which is your aim after all”.

Discovery

Three weeks later when he was listening to the results of the discussion he was glad he had taken their advice. The values had indeed been on the right track, but they didn’t make sense to the employees.

Thanks to his great communications campaign 300 staff had participated in the discussion. They had rephrased the values into much shorter, punchier and more emotive words.

Once they had agreed on the new language the rest of the discussion was lively and generative. Thus, Pierre got plenty of quick actions to help bed the values into their way of doing business and move forward.

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How the board of a corporation measures the impact of the new corporate values.

Situation

Months after the board had agreed with the new corporate values it was hard to see what impact they had on the business. Pierre looked expectantly at the Synthetron team he had brought in. “So it’s clear? We need to know how to bring the values to life in the organisation!”

Approach

It’s clear, they replied, then started asking about where the values came from and what they were based on. He really hoped they weren’t going to tell him more people than his team of 4 should have been involved in defining them. And indeed that wasn’t what they were suggesting.

Though they explained that since this was the situation, participants would need a bit of space to absorb and respond to them. “They are mostly operational staff,” one of them was pointing out, “so they probably don’t use the same kind of corporate language as you do here in head office.

It might be that they agree with the values at heart but expressing them differently would make them easier to relate to and therefore live by – which is your aim after all”.

Discovery

Three weeks later when he was listening to the results of the discussion he was glad he had taken their advice. The values had indeed been on the right track, but they didn’t make sense to the employees.

Thanks to his great communications campaign 300 staff had participated in the discussion. They had rephrased the values into much shorter, punchier and more emotive words.

Once they had agreed on the new language the rest of the discussion was lively and generative. Thus, Pierre got plenty of quick actions to help bed the values into their way of doing business and move forward.

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