Hi Reader,

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Welcome to Rev Up for the Week, where every Sunday I send you a thought to kick-start Monday.

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Over the last week, I've been thinking a lot about values. I've been priviliged to be working with the team at Oliver Bonas over the last couple of months, delivering a couple of keynotes to help them relaunch their organisational values.

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Oliver Bonas's values are also a piece of wall-art that they sell in their stores, which makes it super-easy for the staff to remember them:

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Work Hard

Play Hard

Be Kind

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(fun fact - the wall art came first, and then it just became the culture because so many of the shop staff just assumed those were the company's values).

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... and whilst I was primarily invited in by Oliver Bonas because I've spent the last couple of years writing and talking about how kindness leads to high-performing teams, those three values are also a pretty good encapsulation of my books and career: How to be a Productivity Ninja is on the surface a 'work hard' sort of book, and my business (Think Productive) is certainly all about that too, but the whole thing is delivered playfully, and with the underlying message that productivity helps you make space for what really matters (which usually isn't just work!).

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So many organisations 'do' values badly. By that I mean that they set up committees to come up with a bunch of words that don't mean very much; and then, more importantly, they don't put the values into action - they don't use those words to guide their behaviour or decisions. Chances are, if your company has six or eight values, you'll remember two or three at most. And I've lost track of how many times I've heard generic words like "commitment", or "equality" or "collaboration" listed as values. There's nothing wrong with those things, of course, they're just "motherhood and apple pie" - impossible to disagree with, but so uncontroversial that they tell you so little about the personality or expected behaviours of a company culture.

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In 'KIND', I talk about clarity. As Brene Brown says, "Clear is kind, unclear is unkind". Creating a super-clear culture is such a powerful short-cut. When you have clear values at your core, they make half of the decisions for you. Sometimes that's possible to do across a whole organisation. Oliver Bonas is a great example of that - a tonne of smart people, great camaraderie, a clear purpose and a sense of taking the work much more seriously than they take themselves. But when organisations get too big, or too disjointed, perhaps the better way to think about values and how they shape culture is via smaller teams or a particular set of role models, via things like team values statements or the personal mantras of leaders.

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When I've facilitated strategy sessions with organisations in the past, one of my favourite exercises around vision and values is to continually and persistently ask "why?". For example, someone might say they think a value of their organisation is to deliver their product on time. When I ask "why?" they talk about meeting customer needs. When I ask why meeting customer needs matters, they might say it's because their product helps solve a health issue. When I ask why solving the health issue is important, we finally start to get closer to the thing that is the actual value, which is something like "stopping suffering" - now we have something to get out of bed for, and maybe even a compelling vision that will inspire everyone for a long time.

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So let me ask you "why?".

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• What are your personal values?
  • What really matters to you?
  • What inspires you?
  • What makes your blood boil and what's the opposite of that?
• What are your organisation's values?

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• And then for each one of those... why? Why does that matter? And then why does that matter...

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And if your organisation's six values are things like "commitment", "equality" or "excellence", then maybe it's time to ask your team why you're really doing what you're doing, and establish something clearer that everyone can get behind.

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Have a great week,

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Graham

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