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In the simplest terms, values are the standards of behaviour that you consider to be most important. Knowing what matters most to you enables you to stay focused and optimise your time. This gives you the best opportunity to experience a fulfilling life, professionally and personally.

I believe that as a business leader, your organisational values and your personal values should be the same. This view is supported by Barrett, who argues that who you are and what you stand for is becoming just as important as the quality of products and services you provide. [1]

It is quite natural for leaders to align their personal and professional values, but it doesn’t mean that your staff will always see them. This is where difficulties can arise.

Being clear about what your values are and sharing why they are important to you are two different things. Not explaining your values can happen for a number of reasons.

Firstly, you may simply assume that everyone gets it – if something is obvious to you, it can be easy to forget that it might not make sense to other people.

Secondly, you may not have thought too deeply about what underpins your values – you know what your standards of behaviour are, but you may not have analysed the reasons you hold them to be important.

Finally, you may be reluctant to open up about things that are very personal – sharing your thoughts and feelings with others, particularly in your professional life, may not be something you are comfortable with.

However, if you are not clear about why something matters to you, then you may block others from sharing your point of view. If people only know the ‘what’ and don’t understand the ‘why’, then your values may be meaningless to them.

My values are really easy: Excellence; Leadership; Collaboration; Sustainability; and Failing Forward.

I define excellence as ‘quality without compromise’. It’s why I take things personally when something doesn’t work, because I really do want the absolute best.

As for leadership, my intention is always to lead by example. I don’t play the victim. I’m the person who takes action, and the person who takes responsibility. Leadership isn’t about never making mistakes. It’s about continuously seeking the best way forward from your current position.

With collaboration, I bring people together to achieve the desired aims of the group. There is no ego when you collaborate, because everyone brings something unique to the table.

Through collaboration, I have developed the skill of being a facilitator. It’s something that I love, and it has come purely from the experience of bringing everyone together to work towards achieving bigger goals.

One of the great things about living by your values is that you continue to learn and grow, which in turn supports and strengthens the role your values play.

Sustainability, for me, is actually about balance, and about not burning out. This is achieved by creating systems and practices that provide great results in the short, medium and long-term. I have burnt out so many times in my life. I’ve had a handful of breakdowns, and each one is harder to recover from.

This ties into failing forward. The aim is to become better as a result of the mistakes you make, not despite them. In terms of my values, this means that I look at where I have gone wrong, acknowledge the failures, and ask how I can fix them.

It’s really inspiring when I bring these values together. Interestingly, these values have now also become ThincLab’s values, and this happened in a way that supports the values themselves.

I’ll never forget the day that I started at ThincLab. I’d been loitering around for two or three weeks before my official date of commencement. Throughout this time, we didn’t tell anyone that I was the entrepreneur in residence, we kept it quiet, and so the perception was that I was just a new mentor.

I wanted to have the opportunity to observe, to make connections with people, to form relationships, and to gain trust, before I began to make suggestions or implement changes.

One of the things I noticed was that there wasn’t any culture. There were about twenty start-ups at that time, but no set guidelines that people wanted to play by. Everyone sat with their headphones on and did their own thing.

I knew I had to bring energy to the lab to get the best out of the amazing human beings that were in there. The start-ups and the founders were incredible, but there was a disconnect – nothing was holding the people or the ideas together.

Rock and Tang believe that engagement is an attribute that cannot be demanded; it has to be offered willingly [2]. And one of the things that lies at the heart of engagement is values.

With this in mind, the first workshop that I ran for ThincLab was a culture workshop. I showed people how to develop a set of values to create the culture they wanted to achieve within their organisation.

The forty participants then worked together to decide on the values they believed would best serve ThincLab. The values they came up with happened to be in line with the values I had independently developed for myself.

These values are all high level. I strongly believe that it is important to have aspirational values, rather than baseline values that sit just beneath the surface. Go deeper, until you reach something that has greater meaning – strive for excellence, and define it for yourself.

For example, people talk about integrity as a value. However, if you look at leadership and excellence, it becomes clear that in order to live these values, you must have integrity. You can’t have leadership or excellence without accountability, and accountability requires integrity.

Keeping values simple is also really important. A lot of organisations go to so much effort to create values that seemingly carry such weight. They spend phenomenal amounts of time and money developing their values and generating unique sentences around them to define what they are.

Then they just put them up on their website or stick them up in their workplace, and because the people within the organisation have had no involvement in creating or defining these values, they are forgotten.

Companies that do exceptionally well often have incredible culture programs. They have values that everybody understands, shares and wants to align themselves with. The values have meaning and relevance to the organisation, and to the people who work within that organisation.

The culture and the values that were created at ThincLab, and the way in which we created them, are very powerful. It wasn’t my business, but I brought myself to the table and treated it as though it was. I believe this is what underpins your values: the commitment you make to them.

People tell me that I wear my heart on my sleeve. In fact, I wear my values on my chest. Where you can see them. I let people in, and this can mean that sometimes life is a little disappointing. You extend trust, and sometimes that trust is broken.

This has a lot to do with why people become very insular about their values, because they are trying to protect themselves. This takes us back to resilience. Resilience requires vulnerability. So how do you become more vulnerable? Display your values.

It is true that if someone wants to attack you as brutally as possible, they will aim at your values. You may not have demonstrated your values all the time, because we all make mistakes, but when you strive to live by your values, and others understand not only what those values are but also why they have meaning to you, then they begin to understand who you are.

This means that in your moment of adversity your values will resurrect you and help you through your recovery. Because at this point, other people will carry these values for you, and in doing so, they will carry you with them.

Kristian Livolsi

References:

1. Richard Barrett. (2006) Building a Values-Driven Organization: A Whole-System Approach to Cultural Transformation, Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann.
2. Rock, D. and Tang, Y. (2009) Neuroscience of engagement. NeuroLeadership.