Make It About Values, Not Us…

Highlighting our own behavior to provide examples that define our values certainly helps us build those values into the conversations we have with our teams, but don’t mistake this as a suggestion to be boastful about how amazing we are; it’s anything but that! 

Not long after starting our business, Cindy and I were leading a small group through John Maxwell’s book, Everyone Communicates, Few Connect. Following nearly every idea we discussed as a group, one participant asked what would keep someone from using it to manipulate others. After talking through this at least a half a dozen times, I couldn’t take any more. Truth be told, I had never considered using anything we were covering with the group to take advantage of someone. If you’re even remotely familiar with Maxwell’s work, you know that’s definitely not something he’d ever so much as imply. My final response was something like, “the only ones who would use this to be manipulative are the ones who are just plain manipulative!” That was the last it was brought up. I had clearly pissed off that participant, and I no longer cared!

What I learned through dealing with that participant over the year or so that followed was that they were very willing to spin things in a way that would manipulate a situation for their own benefit, and apparently very suspicious that others were just as willing to reciprocate. If our approach to highlighting our own behaviors as examples for defining our values is to shine a light on ourselves and manipulate our teams, for personal gain over the team as a whole, then we probably have more folks paying attention because they have to than people following us because they want to. But when sharing those examples serves as a foundation that will serve our team members even more than it serves us, they’ll be far more receptive when we work to explain how their behaviors connect with those same core values.

In so many of the organizations we’ve worked for (and with) over the years, Cindy and I have seen incredibly skilled team members be promoted to supervisory and management roles - and they’ve absolutely earned those promotions! That was the main reason we created our Emerging Leader Development course; to help bridge the gap between their technical expertise and the skills they’d need to truly lead their teams as effectively as they had achieved results on their own. But even the ones with the broadest technical experience had rarely mastered every single role they’d be responsible for managing in their new position. And in some cases, we saw those supervisors and managers take on responsibility for positions they had no experience in personally. A harsh reality we’ll all have to face as we take on more and more as we lead is that we won’t always be the best at every task we need to ensure gets done - and it’s not reasonable to feel like we should be. That said, we will need to become competent in everything we’re charged with overseeing. And when we accomplish that, learning the behaviors necessary to successfully complete each task, we can tie our organization’s core values to those behaviors in nearly any conversation we have with our teams, individually and in group settings.

While this may sound daunting at first, that’s not my intent. As we’re intentional about starting this process, it can become part of our routine over time. It will likely be awkward at first and tough to remember at times, but eventually we can develop it into a habit. In addition to tying behaviors to values in our general conversations, we also need to be sure this is a focal point in each of our formal conversations with our teams, so we’ll work through that to wrap this up next time.