Service Snapshot: Aligning people, vision & values

To realise corporate ambitions it is vital to have a vision for advancing into the future, coupled with a robust purpose and set of values. Our approach will also motivate your people to align with them.

Challenge

We live in fast moving and uncertain times. Globalisation, technology and the need for continuous performance improvement have emasculated command and control practices. Failure can be sudden in today’s competitive, global markets. Rigid organisational structures worked well with stable markets. Now, the environment is complex and very fluid. Winners recognise that the old management styles like MBO and C&C don’t work. Today, management by values is the way for leaders to achieve goals. Encouraging and supporting cross-functional co-operation to improve performance and make work meaningful for employees.

To avoid the scenario depicted by Amin Rajan: “Many organisations have the knack of taking enthusiastic, committed and hopeful people and turning them unwittingly and over time into hostile, cynical and hopeless people,” companies need to inspire people with a vision and values they can relate to. Only then will employees deliver a greater contribution and become brand advocates. This, in turn, becomes a great differentiator that will help attract and retain employees, as well as driving customer satisfaction and loyalty.

What distinguishes winners from losers is being able to balance a core ideology – what you stand for – with a vision – what you aspire to become – and then to create alignment to preserve your values, reinforce your purpose whilst stimulating progress towards your visionary goal.

Solution

We use an innovative approach to ensure that organisations can set a vision and enable people to align their behaviours with it.

A vision is a first step in strategy creation and these should change as often as the operating environment changes. A purpose and set of values should act as the glue that binds people together and, as such, should be little changed over time.

When setting or reviewing values, purpose (core ideology) and vision, it is important to do so in a set order.

Core Ideology

Start with the values, which should number between three and five, if they are to stand the test of time. Alignment will only happen if employees can relate to the corporate values. They can be discovered through dialogue but cannot be dictated from above.

Once your values are agreed, move on to your purpose – the fundamental reason for existing. To be effective this should reflect peoples’ idealistic motivation for doing the company’s work. A common mistake is to describe the purpose in terms of current product lines or markets, as this builds in early obsolescence, whereas the purpose should last a long time.

Vision

A vision should be short, sharp and deeply compelling; a rallying cry to motivate even the most cynical.

Alignment

Defining values, purpose and vision is the aspiration. Organisations then need to be able to look at their employees’ behaviour. That's the reality. Only then can they look at how to close the gap between current reality and aspirational targets.

With alignment, first one needs to know what it "looks like" and that's something that is unique to each organisation. For instance, it may be focussed on making zero errors (e.g. producing complex pharmaceutical formulations), or around suggesting improvements to processes, or around generating innovative suggestions, etc. Once one knows what "it" is, one can list a number of behaviours that allow one to recognise "it" being demonstrated - and then measure them.

But whatever "it" is, it's definitely all about behaviour, not attitude.

Benefits

• Our methodologies will ensure you give full consideration to setting values, purpose and vision

• We know the pitfalls and will ensure you avoid them both in developing them and implementing them

• We will help your organisation avoid the most common mistake by gaining a consistent alignment of your people with the core ideology and the vision through the use of our behaviour diagnostic that we call Eclipse