Discovering Values: The Key to Unlocking Employee Engagement

Sarah Cirone:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to today’s webinar, Discovering Values: The Key to Unlocking Employee Engagement hosted by HRDQ, and presented by Dr. Cynthia Scott. My name is Sarah, and I will moderate today’s webinar. The webinar will last around one hour.

Sarah Cirone:

If you have any questions, please type them into the question area on your GoTo webinar control panel, and we’ll answer them as we can or after the session by email. Our presenter today is Dr. Cynthia Scott. Dr. Scott is a founding principle of Changeworks Lab, and is a recognized author and consultant with over 30 years of experience with behavior, leadership, and culture change.

Sarah Cirone:

She is the author of numerous books including Getting Your Organization to Change, Rekindling Commitment, and Take This Work and Love It. Dr Scott’s clients include LinkedIn, Charles Schwab, The Internal Revenue Service, Estee Lauder, Walmart, and more. It’s an honor to have you speaking with us today, Dr. Scott.

Cynthia Scott:

Good. Well, welcome. I am very happy to be here, Sarah. I understand that today we have a global group of people who are trainers, consultants, team leaders, and curious learners. So, I’m looking forward to sharing what I’ve been discovering and to talk about using values as the core of helping people engage, work together better, have less conflict, communicate about what matters, and align their focus with organizational performance. So, let’s go.

Cynthia Scott:

I’m very excited to share all this with you, so let’s just begin. The question that I often start with is, why do values matter? Isn’t it something that’s just packed inside you? Isn’t it something that… How do you get to them? Is there a values meter that you can stick into people and find out what their values are?

Cynthia Scott:

I began as a very curious anthropologist, and a psychologist, and a change consultant, helping organizations to figure out how to get people to want to change. So, we had to look back at their values and work backwards into that question.

Cynthia Scott:

I was writing a book about change and transition, and one of the things that I discovered, and doing a lot of workshops and seminars with people and large groups of people who are going through some pretty substantial change, was that what helped people change is that when their change was connected with some personal values that they already held. And so, this values thing began to be very interesting.

Cynthia Scott:

I was just spending time last week coaching two cofounders of a very interesting organization that is going now from two cofounders to 17. It’s really easy to align values with two people. When you begin to have 17 people, and they’re in five different offices… We had to really return to why are they doing this? What matters to them? And use that as a deep root of connection and place to do alignment.

Cynthia Scott:

So, values matter a lot. And what I want to do is help you understand why it matters, and how it matters to you and the groups of either individuals with coaching. Perhaps some of you are coaches, some of you are working with teams or groups, or whole industries or organizations to help them realign and change.

Cynthia Scott:

Values are basically the language of why, and values are what make you choose… Let’s see, Sylvia says she can’t hear. Can we work on that, Sarah? Is that something that we can help Sylvia with?

Sarah Cirone:

Yeah, we’re working with her, Cynthia.

Cynthia Scott:

Great, thank you. Okay, good. So, let me ask the why thing. Let me ask you to think of a recent choice or a decision that you’ve made. And we’ll start with you personally because if you understand how this works in you, then you’ll be able to translate it to the teams of groups and individuals that you’re working with.

Cynthia Scott:

So, why did you make that choice? What was the reason? And if I ask you why several more times, it’s like the… Simon Sinek always talks about why, why, why. And what’s interesting is why peeling back the why questions usually gets you down to a value. “Well, I made that decision because I value that we have quality in our organization, or I made that decision because I want you to trust me and I want to build that relationship.”

Cynthia Scott:

So, values provide the foundation of what you believe, and what you… then actions and choices, and then the results you make. So, oftentimes, values are at that end of that cycle. So, if you peel back, if you want to figure out why are you getting the results you’re getting? Well, because we made these choices and these actions because we believe this based on those values.

Cynthia Scott:

So, what we’ll look at is some ways of peeling back and using the values edge to peel back to the core values, which you can then… are much easier to work with and can give people more resilience when they make change. Having been working with organizations and people for a long time, I get some very interesting requests; things like, “I want a new culture. I want new values. I want my company to have values.”

Cynthia Scott:

It’s like this startup of two people. They said, “Well, what are our values?” I said, “Well, the values are coming from you, in some ways.” It’s not an outside in. And I’ve had very funny organizations that say, “Well, we want to have these five values. We’ll make cards and we’ll pass them out, and we’ll put the plaques up, and we’ll put them on our website.” And I said, “Okay. Well, but how do those values align with what you do?”

Cynthia Scott:

So, Estee Lauder, it’s like, what is the value of feeling good, of empowering women? What are the values behind all the research they do, all the careful preparation, and customer service. So, anytime you are hearing these kinds of requests, I always peel it back to values because if you don’t do that, you’re fixing the thing that isn’t really the essence of it.

Cynthia Scott:

So, if I was to say values are a way to clarify what’s important, especially the behaviors that are connected to those values, I find that’s where people get… Everybody wants trust, everybody wants honesty, everybody wants those things. And then what happens is, how do those things enact? How do people behave if we value those things?

Cynthia Scott:

People want innovation, they want entrepreneurial spirit, they want all these things. What are the values that support them? And then, what are the behaviors and the choices you have to make to get that stuff to happen?

Cynthia Scott:

So, let’s go and… What I always find, actually, is that you already have values, and it’s just taking the time to peel in and have a conversation. I think that’s one of the strongest things that the values edge allows people to do. Having developed it over many years and used it with lots of people, it gives people a way to begin to have those values conversations because it’s hard to start that from, “Tell me what values you hold.” You get something like boy Scouts pledge. It’s like top line things, but not really the behaviors.

Cynthia Scott:

So, what we’re going to do today are three things. I’m going to talk a little bit about, again, how values are formed and shaped, and how you then change them. Because if you want to create more of the innovation, entrepreneurial spirit, responsibility, accountability, transparency, all those things that people want more of, you got to go back to values.

Cynthia Scott:

Second thing is, how do values in the workplace support this kind of thing that everybody wants now. They want more purpose, more engagement, and, by the way, faster and more performance. So, how do you use values to hook and be the igniter of that.

Cynthia Scott:

And the last one is, I’m going to show you how to use the values edge to align teams and persons because how do you use the personal values as a catalyst for generating team values? I’ll share some of the experiments and the experiences that I’ve had with doing that.

Cynthia Scott:

So, let’s start out, as I said, with you. Let’s start out with… And these are, what are your top values? So, I’m going to ask you to take a moment. And you may have thought a lot about this, you may have never thought about this, there’s no wrong things to come up with. But I’m asking you on purpose because when you facilitate conversations or you coach somebody, or you’re doing an offsite and you’re talking about values, you got to start with the person; what are the personal values?

Cynthia Scott:

So, what are the four words, if you could say? I know we can’t have everyone chat in, there are a lot of people online. Actually, we could have done a poll, but… It’s very common to have some people say, “Well, I don’t know what to say here.” Or some people have been thinking about this a lot. And so, this is a start of what’s it like for you to be able to come up with your top four? Or I could have the top eight, or in the values pyramid, you have your top 15. You can’t have your top 28. You can’t have your top 46 because people can’t focus.

Cynthia Scott:

It’s like the ability to focus on that many values doesn’t give you much clarity. I took this exercise from… One of the first times I used the values edge was with a group of physicians. Good. Kindness, and I got… Let’s see. Some people are putting things in the question. So, yeah, we’ll talk about… Everyone has this range of values, but let me go back to the physicians for a minute, is I asked them… These were physicians who were in a leadership development of five-day workshop moved from being practitioners to being leaders.

Cynthia Scott:

And one of the things… I got the honesty, the kindness. Amy and Barbara, and a couple others are putting them into the question. Starting this conversation is so fun. But when I tried to do this with these physician leaders, they just looked at me like, what was I asking them to do?

Cynthia Scott:

And what was interesting is after we talked about that initial, “Oh, I don’t know,” they really got into service, and caring, and healing, and helping people. They basically had those values, but they’d never been asked to talk about them. And they put in all these years of training to develop their capabilities, but they never had a chance to talk among others in their organization, and talk about why those values make them make those choices.

Cynthia Scott:

I hope some of you… I’m curious because it looks like honesty, kindness, treating other people. We’ll talk about the values that come up with everybody, and you’ll see how common they are, and they’re not about a generation. I’m going to debunk some myths for you.

Cynthia Scott:

So, what I’d like you to do when you think about the values that you did select off the top of your head, where did you learn these? Where did you… What experiences or people… Because values aren’t put in you, in your DNA, they are learned. They come from experiences, events, turning points, stuff that happens in your life where you say, “I’m either never going to do that again. Or that’s something that really is core to me.”

Cynthia Scott:

Secondly, have they changed as you’ve grown? My guess is that what you valued in your 20s may not be what you’re valuing in your 40s, and may not be what you value in your 80s. So, values tend to shift and become fluid as you go through different life stages.

Cynthia Scott:

How long have you had these values? If you had a kid, you can see very early that the kid is more interested in this, or these things are more what they pay attention to. So, keep this in mind as we talk about values.

Cynthia Scott:

And again, what we’re doing here is we’re keeping your thoughts on your values, but as a way of understanding how to work with individuals, teams, groups, organizations. So, let’s go to the next one; how values are formed and shaped. So, where do they come from? And how do different people have different values? How come… Are they universal? What happens if we travel geographically, and people in other regions, what are their core values?

Cynthia Scott:

This chart is helpful because it really shows the connection between the relationship between values, and action, and results. What’s on the left side is all of your experiences, people, relationships, where you picked up and learned about your values. People learn them from people who they were close to. It’s usually, actually, people you have a relationship with. And increasingly, in some ways, that’s a media relationship or cultural relationship, but people often mimic or learn from others.

Cynthia Scott:

And so, your values are shaped by people saying, “No, we don’t do it that way.” Or, “That’s really important. Don’t throw your wrappers on the ground.” It’s like, don’t do this though. It’s the don’ts and the dos that then lead you to have beliefs about how you should act, whether it be in the workplace or in the community, which then leads to actions that you take, and choices that you make, and then leads to results and impact that you have.

Cynthia Scott:

So, if you’re wanting to change the results, the actions, the beliefs, go back to the values, and you go back to the experiences and the relationships. So, when you think of doing this in an organization… I’ve just been working with an organization that’s trying to have more collaboration, more transparency, all these things that everybody seems to want. But in order to do that, they have to have new experiences for people to see that it isn’t just words on paper.

Cynthia Scott:

So, they’re having town hall discussions. Some of the leaders are very anxious, and this is new for them. They’re not used to having open questions, and having 300 people. It’s very different for them. But what they have to do is have different experiences so people can see that they really do value learning, implementation, transparency, so that the beliefs change, the actions change, and the results change.

Cynthia Scott:

What’s interesting about this one group, what they’ve done is because they value, they’re building and changing their culture to have more emphasis on feedback and learning, rapid learning. So, at the end of every team meeting, they’re starting to add what they call the plus delta. Maybe you’ve heard of after action review or whatever. But basically, at the end of every meeting, they say, “What went well, and what can we change?”

Cynthia Scott:

And that’s a big change for this culture, this organization, because it was never okay to speak up or have a difference of opinion. And so, what they’re doing is they’re layering in new things in the relationships, in the workplace that begin to help the values, beliefs, actions, and results change. So, if you look at values as a source for navigation, it basically it’s your values are your judgments about what’s important.

Cynthia Scott:

And again, those things may change in your 20s, your 40s, your 80s. Different things are important. Every culture has values, even if they don’t talk about them. And oftentimes, what we’re talking about here with the values edge is giving people a chance to have a conversation, which is usually very enlivening for people, about what they value, and how it connects to their choices and their behaviors.

Cynthia Scott:

These values can be positive or negative. Again, what’s seen as positive by one person will be seen as negative by another person. So, there’s no value on the value. And they emerge at different stages of your own development. Psychologists have always been asked to basically help get people… understand the value so you can sell people more. If you have this piece of clothing, you will be liked, you will belong.

Cynthia Scott:

Marketers, we’re becoming very sophisticated at how we use values as a way to get people to change their behaviors. So, as a health educator, I spend a lot of time trying to help people figure out how to value health and wellbeing. So, let’s look here about values, basically, are caught, not taught.

Cynthia Scott:

And again, we’ve talked about you get them, you grow up with them. This picture of… Somebody here’s telling a story, and somebody is listening, and they’re listening to what matters or what is important, or they’re listening to a story that comes out of the family history. You pick them up at school, you pick them up in communities, and your brain makes nice neural pathways of these values, these behaviors. So, if you’re wanting to change a value, you have to go back and understand that values have led to habits.

Cynthia Scott:

This is the thing I find most interesting, and I love that The Center For Creative Leadership did this big piece of research. They actually interviewed 3,200 employees of various ages, and said, “What are your values?” Because there’s all this stuff about, “Oh, there’s a generation gap.” People of Gen X have these values, people of Gen Y have these values. You have to have all these different kinds of workplace options because of it.

Cynthia Scott:

What they found was all generations have similar values, they just express them differently. Now, you’ll notice the ones that came out right up at the top are family and integrity. You can say integrity, you can say honesty, you can say… Those are the big ones that come up very strongly. Now, the next group, from 48 to 38, you’ve got a whole cluster of things here, and there’s very little differences in them.

Cynthia Scott:

It’s like if you took a whole room full of people at your organization, my guess is they would put wisdom, competence, happiness, love, relationships, friendship. There would be some amount of a cluster of that would have similarity. What’s interesting is it’s how people talk about the behaviors that reflect having that value.

Cynthia Scott:

So, having a family value, what does that mean? Always baking the cookies for your kids, or being home? What is valuing the family, and what does that mean in your family, or in your community, or in your organization? So, these are words, and these are value-based words, that people make a lot of choices and have a lot of energy and feelings about.

Cynthia Scott:

Let’s look at what everybody wants in the workplace, and it’s the same thing because… I’m making a differentiation here between… I’ll go back. These are personal values, and then I’m switching to the workplace values. They’re a little different. You’ll notice that that’s an important thing because people have lives, and we’re very complex. You can hold a set of personal values that don’t have to be expressed in the workplace. That’s one of the things that I’ll talk about with the values edge experience.

Cynthia Scott:

Our simulation is that you can do the first sort for personal values. And then the second sort for those, what values do you need in the workplace? Because if you look, maybe you don’t want to have love in the workplace. Or maybe that doesn’t… it’s not the main major thing you see on everybody’s list of values in the workplace. But these things come up; trust, respect, loyalty. And loyalty is more like belonging or isn’t… People want to feel like they belong, that they are valued.

Cynthia Scott:

It’s that Gallup question. I have a friend in the workplace, somebody knows whether I showed up today. So, those kinds of things in the workplace came out of this same study. And what’s interesting is that these are things that people want, but we have to get back to the values and then the behaviors that reflect trust. What reflects trust? How would we be behaving if we trusted people? Would we still have people punching in their clock hours? How would we behave if we trusted everyone?

Cynthia Scott:

And respect is probably the one where the giant hairball goes crazy because respect means very different behaviors. But everybody wants respect. Everybody wants to be listened to, not interrupted. Those are some of the behaviors when you tease them out that people say that’s how we would know that was happening.

Cynthia Scott:

And nobody likes change. Nobody wants change. But everybody wants to learn. And that’s interesting. So, here, we have some interesting data. Oh, and there’s another thing; the myth is that nobody likes change, and that older people are really worse at change. Not necessarily true. In some cases, people who are younger in their lifespan haven’t had as much practice. They haven’t had as many trucks run over them and get up afterwards. It’s like this is the first one that’s ever happened, and this is like a big deal.

Cynthia Scott:

So, it’s interesting to… What does change mean? It doesn’t mean you’re not going to feel it, but it means that you have a little more experience with it. So, I find, actually, working with organizations, with workers in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, you’ve got lot more flexibility and agility built in.

Cynthia Scott:

So, let’s go on. Why do they matter in the workplace? And I’m going to hit the tops of this stuff because this is database, and you can go back to it. I’ll give you some of the references for it. But basically, shared values pay off. And there’s three or four, actually, research pieces, and I’ll go through each of them.

Cynthia Scott:

The first one, and this is from Kotter and Heskett. It looks like an old study. But what was interesting is they really found amazing results, and they looked at 207 large companies in 22 industries over 11 years. So, these people did hardcore research. They basically found that companies that had these strong corporate cultures, which is another word for values, and clarity, and calibration with that, outperformed. They grew revenue, they created jobs, their stock prices, they did profit.

Cynthia Scott:

This alignment was really valuable. Now, the second one was… Denison has done some interesting research globally also. He’s at NCN right now. I’ve used his organizational culture survey a lot. And what he’s found, when you have a robust culture, meaning you have a values clear culture that two times ROI, double the ROI of less effective cultures. So, Daniel Denison has reaffirmed that.

Cynthia Scott:

There’s also a new book by Anderson and… I’m sorry, Adams and Anderson, called Mastering Leadership. And they’ve done some very interesting research showing how organizations that value the more creative, collaborative, relating self-awareness, authenticity, all those achieving systems awareness… If you value those things and you manifest those, you do much better than controlling, protecting, and compliance.

Cynthia Scott:

So, this isn’t news to any of you all who’ve been organizations, you know that organizations that have this values alignment do much better. And the last one is Collins and Porras. He’s been doing this a long time, and he’s built the last research. If you build these strong cultures, which is another word for values alignment, over a period of several decades, you’re going to do better. And this values alignment is essential for success.

Cynthia Scott:

Now, you don’t get this values alignment… I’m prepared to say you don’t get it by sending out posters and printing out your values, you get it by building it through conversations with individuals, teams, and whole groups. So, it’s driven by the personal values clarification. So, for example, I teach at a graduate school, business school, and we use the values edge in our orientation for our students. Now, we’re focused on sustainability. So, everybody comes with certain things.

Cynthia Scott:

But to do this with a student body that ranges in age from 25 to 55, and to have them have a conversation about their personal values, then leads them to the conversation about what are the values they need as a cohort, as a organization, as a group of students. That leads them to be able to have a real understanding and that sense of belonging that even though somebody else comes from different country and different background, they’re an engineer, or they run a yoga studio, people in this group have very similar values. That leads to a really nice, firm level of performance in our school.

Cynthia Scott:

So, how do values motivate positive behavior? Basically, I’m talking about creating a shared language. So, if you say we value respect, well what does that mean? Saying the respect word doesn’t mean we all agree, and people have lots of different…

Cynthia Scott:

So, two things happen. Leaders express these values, and they behave like these values rather than like not the values, and their space in the organization to have conversations, whether it be with individuals, or teams, or town hall meetings, or whatever. Having this allows values to motivate positive behavior, values aligned behavior.

Cynthia Scott:

Some of the biggest conflicts I get called into are teams that want to unpack respect, or transparency, or quality. In some cases, if you’re working in a medical environment, quality means we do the right thing, we don’t make mistakes. Risk does not happen here because we hold each other accountable. So, when leaders stand up for their values… And this is something that actually came out of Kouzes and Posner’s work in the leadership challenge, people expect their leaders to talk about their values.

Cynthia Scott:

They want people who can say, “I value X.” And this is how that behavior… This is behavior that I expect in the workplace. So, giving leaders, people want you to bring your personal values. They may not want you to bring all of your personal values, but they want to know who you are. And being able to bring your personal values leads to that authentic expression of leadership that people can trust.

Cynthia Scott:

So, in all of my leadership classes, we talk about using personal values as a foundation for organizational values and leadership. So, back to the physicians in their leadership course, or the students in our MBA and MPA programs, it’s like they start by talking about their values. We start with personal values, then we learn how to share them. We learn how to talk about them, and we learn how to speak out and take stands, and engage others in talking about values, especially when values have been going sideways.

Cynthia Scott:

There’s any number of examples you can see right now in the news of organizations where it goes sideways. Helping organizations recover that, whether there’s been a big loss, or accident, or some kind of breach, leaders play a real important part in bringing that back into balance by talking about their own values and what they expect. And I found that values focus conversations using the values edge.

Cynthia Scott:

This is a picture of a merger of two cultures, and two countries, and teams that had never worked together before. This was a two and a half day offsite. This is one we actually collected the telephones because they wouldn’t stop talking. They had to… This was their first offsite. And so, we started with the values edge to give people a chance to say, “This is who I am, and this is what matters.” And then, creating, “These are the values I want us to have by bringing values from each of the organizations. And these are the behaviors that we would like to see or expect to see if we held these values.”

Cynthia Scott:

So, when individual and organizational values are aligned, job stress intention is reduced. People feel proud, they feel like they’re part of a group of people who hold the same values, teamwork, spirit. And people become loyal. I won’t say they will never leave, but they will feel that they their values are in cadence or alignment.

Cynthia Scott:

Working with individuals, if you’re coaching people, what makes people get most sideways is their values are out of whack with the organization’s values, and they don’t feel supported. They don’t feel like I’m in the right place for myself anymore.

Cynthia Scott:

So, how do you use this values edge to build an aligned team and a… Again, team comes out of personal, and so there’s no magic set. I’ve worked with people all over the world using this process, and there isn’t a magic set. What’s important is it’s influenced by the kind of business. If you’re in… Paper production is maybe different than healthcare. It’s different by industry and it’s different by the promise the organization is doing.

Cynthia Scott:

If you’re in healthcare or you’re a nuclear power, or you’re running a big utility, you’d better have safety and quality, those kinds of things. It may be less important… That doesn’t mean if you’re in food service that safety and quality aren’t important, but you may have to have speed and other things that are part of that.

Cynthia Scott:

So, let’s talk about this. I want to talk a little bit about the research that we used to come up with the values edge sort because there’s lots and lots of really good work done on values. You’ll see this as the foundation. It’s like laying the foundation. We went back to Rokeach’s work on human values. Sid Simon did a lot of work on values clarification, and helped strengthening people’s ethical ability to make tough choices.

Cynthia Scott:

And we’ve talked about Collins and Porras. What do successful companies, what do successful leaders do? Habits for surviving in a turbulent environment. And then the leadership challenge. And I’ve talked about Denison and a couple other people. So, there is no one values handbook. And when you start into having a conversation about values, you have to look at it from a broad perspective. And that’s what we did when we started to develop this.

Cynthia Scott:

We were writing about values, vision, and mission, and began to engage with organizations that wanted, first of all, something that didn’t take a lot of time and engaged people. So, let me add one more piece here about measuring organizational commitment. This is an interesting piece of research, and it came out of Kouzes and Posner.

Cynthia Scott:

Basically, you can see that having clarity about personal values melded or connected to clarity about organizational values. And this is on a scale of one to seven, so a 7.26 pretty high. If you have that kind of convergence, this is what commitment, engagement… This is where people are in their sweet spot of performing. So, this is what we’re looking for. But you’ll notice that there’s not much difference between a 4.87 and a 4.90. But there’s a lot of difference between a five and a higher six.

Cynthia Scott:

It’s like you can have clarity on your organizational values, but where you really get the leverage is personal and organizational values. So, let’s look at… So, personal values drive commitment, start with the personal values. Here’s a way of looking at how to use the values edge, and going back to the personal values, team values, organizational values.

Cynthia Scott:

Let me take you into some uses that you can do with this. And again, I’ve used it with onboarding and orienting people. If you’re onboarding to a organization, you can put it as part of your human resources onboarding process. Onboarding is more than passing out forms and signing people up for insurance. It is really about… It’s the first ritual of inclusion. It’s how people see what matters in the organization.

Cynthia Scott:

My son was just working at Tesla. It’s very interesting. Tesla’s a big manufacturing plant, but very good attention to onboarding them to the reason and the larger mission and vision of electric cars, all the sub. So, when he began there, it was very interesting to watch. What the organization does as you begin tells you a lot about the organization. So, do they value… What do they value? What do they think is important?

Cynthia Scott:

And giving people a chance to clarify their personal values is very energizing for people. People feel affirmed, acknowledged. They feel like the company is interested in the things that make them light up, so to speak. It’s also a part of leadership development. You don’t start pouring in leadership tactics, you find out what is the person made of. So, it’s the self-awareness, it’s the, have these always been your values? When did you shift a value? Why do you have these values now?

Cynthia Scott:

So, getting people to self… Especially in coaching individuals, it’s like, why this now? And where has this been challenged in your life? Team-building. I love to use it with teams. It gives them a great way to start out a conversation where… Especially when you’re starting up and you haven’t met each other, it’s a great way to take one hour to talk about your personal values. It’s really good with mergers, our culture, your culture. What’s the shared values here? What are the things that don’t come together? How do we work across that startup?

Cynthia Scott:

People say, “Oh, I’ll get to culture when we get more successful.” I say, “Well, you’ve already got a culture. You might as well tend to it now and be conscious about it.” I use it a lot in family businesses, especially to have cross-generational conversations, and finding… or even cross-generational conversations with multiple family businesses, and they say, “Oh, we thought the second generation was going to be very different than the third generation.”

Cynthia Scott:

Going back to that center for creative leadership, it’s funny, they all want the same thing. They just talk about it differently. So, I would say that there’s lots of uses for this. And this is just showing some of the components. One of the things that we did was try to make it so it’s easy to use and makes sense to people.

Cynthia Scott:

It has 56 cards that talk about the values. Again, we went back to Rokeach, lots of different places. We tried to make something that was simple. Now, the cards don’t have a definition on them. So, you’re left with just things that say integrity, or trust, or forgiveness, or health, or competence, or adventure. So, they are not defined because the definition is in the person. So, it’s the conversation of what does competence mean here, or what does competence mean to me? And then what does competence mean in our team?

Cynthia Scott:

So, there’s 56 values cards, and you’ll notice that they have different colors. On the other side, they are not colored. And so, you sort them without being colored, and basically, you sort them into three different piles. You sort them into always, sometimes, and rarely. And I’ll show you a picture of people sorting them in a minute.

Cynthia Scott:

Then what you have is you have a model, and you’ll see the colors, and it’s in the model of the logo, have clusters. And there’s seven clusters. And we chunk them so that you could have a conversation. We’re not drilling down into all the differences. Especially in the workplace, it’s important people have a way of talking across the different categories and clusters.

Cynthia Scott:

Now, let me show you how… I’m watching the time here. The first thing you do is people identify their personal values. And you’ll see this woman here sorting, and she has three black cards that say always, sometimes, and rarely. And what she’s doing, she’s taking the 56 cards, and going through, and making three stacks.

Cynthia Scott:

Now, some people find this easy, and some people find this hard. Some people want to spend lots of time working on this. I finally call time after a while, or I say, “In the next minute, let’s finish up.” Because, again, the other thing about value, you’re not choosing your values forever, you’re in a… And we actually ask people to think in the last three weeks because it’s very hard. You can’t think, “Oh, in my twenties I had one of this.”

Cynthia Scott:

In the last three weeks, how often did you focus on these values in your life? That makes it easier for people. You have to start somewhere. And it’s common that people, they have either a big stack on one of the others. And we say, “Okay, in the always stack, you have to get it down to 15.” Now, 15 is either, ‘I’ve got way too many, I’ve got 25,’ or, ‘I have three because I’m very careful about what I always value.’

Cynthia Scott:

So, people with three have to go back and add to make it 15, and the people with 25 have to thin it down. But basically, what you’re doing with people, and these are people sitting at a table, everybody’s doing their own personal sort. And then you begin to look around, and you ask people to begin to turn over the cards. Actually, I take it back. You take the 15, and you make a pyramid.

Cynthia Scott:

And the next picture, I think, shows the pyramid. There’s the person making the pyramid. You’ll see that they’re starting to turn over the cards. Now, the cards are related to clusters, and the clusters are just big chunks of values that we call things like mastery; where you have achievement, recognition, power, excellence, ambition, or you have self-expression. You have adventure, courage, creativity, curiosity, personal freedom, learning, excitement, or you have inner development.

Cynthia Scott:

You have forgiveness, and spirituality, and faith, and personal growth and self respect, and gratitude, open-mindedness, or you have lifestyle. The yellow values are about health, and pleasure, and appearance, and relaxation, and play. Or you have the traditional values which are about stability, respectfulness, moderation, conformity, consistency, security and honor. Or you have relationship values, which are about belonging, communication, friendship, teamwork.

Cynthia Scott:

I’m not reading you all of them, I’m just giving you a sample of them. And what you see is, people begin to make their pyramid, and they put the value that they most must have in their life. This is their personal life at the top. And then they put the next two, the next three, the next four, the next five, and on down to six. And then they begin to turn over the cards.

Cynthia Scott:

And what you see is there’s a difference in these two people’s pattern. You’ll see the person on the right has one of the, I think, relationship cards on the top, and the other woman has a pink card, which is [inaudible 00:49:23]. I think that’s self-expression.

Cynthia Scott:

So, different people have different sorting patterns, and these two people work as colleagues to each other. So, what happens with this, they began to look at patterns, and they were looking at the other people in the group at the personal value patterns. “Oh, you’ve got a lot of green, you’ve got a lot of red.” And so, you’d begin to look at the similarities and the patterns.

Cynthia Scott:

Then you sit next to each other and say, “How are my values similar or different than yours?” And you can have a conversation. So, it isn’t just the cards, it’s the conversation. The second step after you’ve gotten people to clarify their own personal values, you go back and you pull out team values, group or team values.

Cynthia Scott:

This happens to be a team that’s responsible for recruitment for an organization. And so, what are the values that they want to have expressed in the workplace? So, it’s a different sort than their personal values, but they could be having the same things. And so, what they’re doing is they’re bringing forward five values from all of the 56 values that they want to have in the workplace.

Cynthia Scott:

Now, here’s the next level of conversation is to say, “okay, if these are the values we want, what are the behaviors that would reflect? What are the behaviors we would be doing if we had trust here, or if we had respect, or if we had integrity? How would we know we’re doing that?” So, people are creating their own ways of holding themselves accountable.

Cynthia Scott:

I’m just going on with this. And you’ll see here is that people are putting the stickers on their card with their personal values. And then you can also write on the back of it the team or organizational values. And you can begin to identify competencies, connections, or you can say, “Well…” I often find when I’m dealing with executives that they have lots of the mastery and achievement of kinds of values, but they have very little lifestyle. They wait for a long time to get a yellow card as community, or prosperity, or relaxation.

Cynthia Scott:

So, it’s interesting. You can also then begin to say, “Well, what are the things that if these were like a model…” You’ll see the model here on the left… “What if this was like a bowl and it’s tilted, it’s tilted to the mastery level. How would I begin to…” So, it’s a self-reflective exercise as well.

Cynthia Scott:

And again, this is the model, and you’ll notice that the right hand side of the red, pink, and yellow are all inner directed. And the left hand side mastery, relationships, tradition are much more externally directed. And the intrinsic are those values that are in the middle. And those are ones that’s very interesting. Either people have a lot of those, they choose a lot of green cards, or they don’t choose any of them because they say those are just baked in. And those are things like integrity, tolerance, peace, fairness, beauty, trust, responsibility.

Cynthia Scott:

It’s very interesting. People either choose a lot of those or not very many of them because they say, “I just don’t like that. I don’t choose that. I’ve just always been that way.” So that, again, is another conversation that can be very interesting with people.

Cynthia Scott:

So, in this last few minutes, I want to give you two more examples of how this values edge… And return you to the understanding that it’s the personal values connected to the organizational values. And you can use the values edge exercise and resource material to do both things.

Cynthia Scott:

I just had a client that wanted to have these cross-generational conversations. It was a large bank with a rather large family trying to come up with its family foundation values. And then you have 35 people in the room, you have smaller groups of tables, you have individual values first, then you begin to say, “What values do we want to hold as a family?” So, that’s a way of having a cross-generational conversation mixing up the generations at each table.

Cynthia Scott:

Then I worked with a very large organization, global organization that wanted to basically… And there’s a typo here. They didn’t use it in the hiring process. You cannot hire people with values, but you can onboard them once you have brought them in and hired them. They wanted to have conversations. They wanted their employees to start talking about the values that they held as an organization, and how it was manifested in their particular teams.

Cynthia Scott:

So, if I was to summarize here in the last couple minutes that you get this alignment by not forcing it. You don’t bring out hats, cups, and t-shirts, and little cards, and things that say, ‘These are our values.” I’ve seen a lot of that, and it doesn’t stick. It doesn’t really engage people. But if you, basically, can have conversations and give people a chance to first become aware, that’s what the first sort does, and then talk to other people, you have a real open discussion.

Cynthia Scott:

And it also brings up… It helps organizations be able to call out slippage. It’s like, “We said we valued diversity. We said we would have respect, well, this happened, and I don’t think that’s respectful.” So, it gives people a language and a tool set to be able to have those conversations. There’s no specific set of successful values.

Cynthia Scott:

A startup has very different values. The two people going to 17 is different than an organization that has to have coherence around the global supply chain. Different sets happen at different times, and that’s why it’s helpful to use them to refresh, to renew, and to recalibrate. And you don’t pronounce, you build them.

Cynthia Scott:

And even if you are wanting to drive quality or drive safety… Actually, I worked at an organization that drives… they run oil wells all over the world. Explosions are not good. They start every meeting with a safety moment. That’s very interesting. And they do it… I’ve been to all kinds of geographic locations, every meeting starts with one of the leaders come up and say something about safety. Either they were on the freeway and somebody swerved, or somebody left something and somebody tripped. They talk about safety.

Cynthia Scott:

They emphasize that value every single time, every meeting. So, they repeat it. And again, I said they have different values at different times. And discovery and dialogue is where this calibration comes from. It is not forced. And when you come into an organization that has had forcing around values, you have a lot of disconnection and disheartening.

Cynthia Scott:

And my last piece is that you basically build your culture with values. Make them part of every day or week. If you have a value about transparency, or value about feedback, have a plus delta at the end of every meeting. Do something that’s… And then draw it back to your value. We value improvement. That’s why we spend time at the end of every meeting to say, “How’s it going, and how could we do better?” So, it leads to people asking about purpose, and ultimately, about impact and change.

Cynthia Scott:

So, let me give you to the last slide. And my favorite quote is from Robert Haas, who I actually got to work with at Levi’s. It’s what people believe in. Values drive business, and you’ve become successful doing that. I’m going to turn it back over to Sarah, and let her bring us home. So, thank you very much. I enjoyed this. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope it was helpful for you. Thank you for your time.

Sarah Cirone:

Thank you, Dr. Scott. That was great. We appreciate you looking to HRDQ for your training needs. We published research-based experiential learning products that you can deliver in your organization. Check out our online or print self-assessments, our up-out-of-your-seat games, our reproducible workshops you can customize, and more, either at our website or give our customer service team a call. And if you need help learning a training program or you want one of our expert trainers to deliver it for you, we also provide those services.

Sarah Cirone:

We look forward to being your soft skills training resource. That’s all the time that we have for today. If you have any questions, please send them to us, and we’ll answer them after the session by email. Thank you, Cynthia, for sharing your expertise today, and thank you for participating in today’s webinar. Happy training.