The Values-Driven Organization

Cultural Health and Employee Well-Being as a Pathway to Sustainable Performance

Richard Barrett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317193890
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Values-driven organizations are the most successful organizations on the planet. This book explains that understanding employees' needs—what people value—is the key to creating a high performing organization. When you support employees in satisfying their needs, they respond with high levels of engagement and willingly commit their energies to the organization, bringing passion and creativity to their work.

This new edition of The Values-Driven Organization provides an updated set of tools to assess corporate culture, new case studies on cultural transformation and additional materials on sustainability, measuring cultural health at work and the specific needs of the millennial generation.

The Values-Driven Organization is essential reading for students, researchers and practitioners of organizational change, leadership, HRM and business ethics.

Part I
Understanding values

Every excellent company we studied is clear on what it stands for, and takes the process of value shaping seriously. In fact, we wonder whether it is possible to be an excellent company without clarity on values and without having the right sorts of values.

Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr., In Search of Excellence

The purpose of Part I of this book is to provide the reader with a clear understanding of why values are important, the role they play in our lives and what it means to be a values-driven organization.

1
Values-driven. What does it mean?

In order to understand what values-driven means, we need to know what values are and where they come from. We also need to understand how values-driven organizations unleash human potential, thereby making them more valuable and successful than other organizations. Finally, it is important to understand the difference between positive and potentially limiting values and how potentially limiting values inhibit performance.

What are values?

According to sociologists “values” are the ideals and customs of a society or a community toward which the people have an effective regard. I prefer to define values in a more pragmatic way: “Values are the energetic drivers of our aspirations and intentions.” You could also say that they are a shorthand way of describing what is important to us individually or collectively (as an organization, community or nation) at any given moment in time. They are “shorthand” because the concepts that values represent can usually be captured in one word or a short phrase. For example, honesty, openness, compassion, long-term perspective and human rights can all be considered as values.

The interesting thing about values is that they are universal: They transcend contexts. Behaviours, on the other hand, which are the outward manifestation of our values, are context dependent. For example, depending on the country in which you live, the behaviours associated with the value of respect could be: (a) always address people by their title; (b) never interrupt your elders; and (c) never express a contrary view.

The same is true in an organization. The behaviours associated with the value of responsibility may be different in different departments. This is why, when you define the values of an organization, you should allow different departments to define the behaviours that most align with the values that have been chosen for the organization.

Because our values represent what is important to us at a particular moment in time, our values are not fixed. The values that are important to you at this particular moment in your life are a reflection of (a) the needs you are experiencing right now under your current life conditions (b) the needs of the stage of psychological development you are at, and (c) the needs of the stages of psychological development you have passed through that you have been unable to master.

Here are some examples of how our value priorities change with age. Figure 1.1 shows the proportion of people in different age groups living in the UK who selected friendship as one of their top ten personal values.¹ You can see from this chart that friendship is an important priority for the young, but decreases in priority as we get older. One of the explanations for this could be because when we are young and single we have a greater need for friends than when we are married and have families of our own.

Figure 1.2 shows the proportion of people in different age groups living in the UK who selected honesty as one of their top ten personal values. You can see from this chart that honesty takes on increasing importance as people get older, but becomes slightly less of a priority for seniors. This does not mean necessarily that seniors are less honest than middle-aged people; it simply means that seniors have more pressing needs that may cause honesty to move to a lower priority ranking.

Not all our values change as we grow older. There are some values that we hold dear throughout our lives. For example, some people will always consider honesty to be one of their core values. Others, as Figure 1.2 suggests, give more importance to honesty once they reach middle age. They begin to recognize that honesty is an important component of integrity, and integrity brings many benefits; not the least of which is that it is a significant enabler of trust. Trust facilitates personal and business interactions and enables us to meet our needs more easily. As soon as people begin to recognize the link between honesty, integrity and trust, honesty moves up their value priority rankings.

Figure 1.1 Proportion of people in different age groups in the UK who selected friendship as one of their top 10 personal values

At this point, you might find it useful to think about your values and write them down. Alternatively, you can do the free Personal Values Assessment (www.valuescentre.com/pva) which invites you to pick your top ten personal values and then plots them against the Seven Levels of Consciousness model.

Figure 1.2 Proportion of people in different age groups in the UK selecting honesty as one of their top 10 personal values

When you have done that, think about how some of your values have changed over the past ten or twenty years. The values you embraced twenty years ago will be different to the values you embrace now. Why is that? The main reason our values change over time is because our needs change as we move through the different seasons of our lives.

Where do our values come from?

Almost every hour of every day, every person on the planet is focused on the same thing: getting their needs met. Even when we are serving others in helping them to get needs met, we may still be attempting to satisfy our need/desire to make a difference or be of service. There are hardly any activities we undertake that do not involve in some way trying to satisfy our ego’s needs or our soul’s desires.²

Viewed from this perspective, the answer to the question, where do our values come from is relatively easy to answer. Whatever you think you need at a particular moment in time or is what you value.

What we need = What we value

This leads us to the question, what is a need? I define needs as either deficiency sensations experienced by the body or feeling deficiencies experienced by the ego.

Deficiency sensations

The body has deficiency sensations. Although we say we feel hungry, or we feel thirsty, what we are experiencing is a deficiency sensation. We say we feel thirsty, or we feel hungry because the ego identifies with the body. Whenever we identify with the body, we interpret bodily sensations as feelings; in reality, they are sensations.

Deficiency sensations occur when something that is essential for the maintenance of the internal stability (biological functioning) of the body is lacking. This is why satisfying a deficiency sensation is for the ego, a survival need. Deficiency sensations only capture our conscious attention when they cause us discomfort. You know you need to eat when you have the sensation of hunger. You know you need to defecate when your bowels feel uncomfortable.

Feeling deficiencies

The ego has feeling deficiencies. When we say we want/need to be loved, we are expressing the need to experience the feeling we call love—we want connection. Similarly, when we say we want/need respect, what we are saying is, we want to experience the feeling we call respect—we want to feel valued.

Feeling deficiencies occur when the ego believes that something essential for the maintenance of its internal stability, safety or security is lacking. It may not be lacking, but the ego believes it is lacking. This can happen in the present moment or when a present moment experience triggers the memory of a feeling deficiency that we experienced in the past. What is being triggered is a childhood memory of an unmet need that has not yet been resolved in your mind. We project the emotion and feelings associated with that unmet need on to the present situation.

Defining needs

Based on the above we can define a need as:

A real or imagined lack of something that is essential for maintaining the body’s physiological (biological) stability or the ego’s emotional stability.

You know you have a conscious or subconscious ego need whenever you experience fear, anxiety, anger, frustration, impatience or any other form of emotional upset. The emotion of fear and its derivatives are signs that you either have a belief that something is lacking or a belief that something you have that is important to you may be lost or taken away.

What you are effectively saying, when you believe you have a need is: “My life conditions are not perfect because I am currently experiencing a feeling deficiency or a deficiency sensation.” When your life conditions are not perfect, you want things to change. If, for whatever reason, you feel you are unable to make the changes that are necessary to get your need met, then the fear or anxiety you are feeling can lead to anger, sadness and depression.

Defining desires

The ego has needs and the soul has desires. Desires are not needs because a desire is not a yearning for something you believe is lacking; it is a longing for something that is as yet nascent or unexplored. It is a yearning for the “materialization” of potential. Whereas the ego gets anxious or fearful if its survival, safety and security needs are not met, the soul does not get anxious if its desires are not met. Instead, the soul feels sad. This sadness may ultimately lead to depression. When we are able to satisfy the soul’s desires we feel joyful and experience a sense of meaning or fulfilment.

Thus we can recognize three levels of needs/desires. These are shown in Table 1.1.

The distinction I make between needs that cause us to feel anxious and fearful, and desires that do not elicit a fear-based response, is important because the unmet needs that cause us to be anxious or fearful always take precedence over our desires. This is because the ego is “genetically” programmed to focus on fears before it focuses on desires.

The ego’s job is to keep us alive, safe and secure. Consequently, only when we have no conscious or subconscious fears about meeting our ego’s survival, safety and security needs can we give our full attention to focussing on our soul’s desires. Therefore, a precondition for finding fulfilment in your life is to eliminate your ego’s conscious and subconscious fears about me...