Increase:
- Alignment Between Leaders
- Alignment With Staff
- Healthy Conflict
- Decision-Making Speed & Accuracy
Talk to one of our experts to learn if your values have what it takes to create value in the modern workplace.
According to MIT Sloan Management Review, 80% of companies have a published set of Values Statements on their website.
Task Conflict is, 'any disagreement about the goal or content of the work.' Low levels create Mistakes as work is not critiqued. High levels enable Performance as work is continually refined.
Relationship Conflict is, 'any disagreement about beliefs or ideologies.' High levels create Mistrust as people feel personally attacked. Low levels enable Peace as teams feel more cohesive.
Fear of Conflict becoming Relationship-based is what prevents teams from having enough of it.
Few companies know how to quantifiably assess Culture fit during a hiring process, leaving Competence as the primary benchmark used.
This prevents them from being able to Target A Players while hiring, forcing them to Tolerate C Players once they hire.
So, how do you quantifiably measure Culture in an interview?
Ask someone if they believe in integrity or teamwork and they'll say yes. That's because saying no is obviously the wrong answer. Ask someone if loyalty is better than cooperation, or if logic is better than adaptability, and they're forced to answer with their beliefs. This is the only way to test if they are aligned with your Values, or if they simply know what answers you're looking for in an interview. This is why you need two sets of Values (Functional and Frictional), not just one.
Functional & Frictional ValuesTM leverage the science of Social Identity Theory. When belonging to a group creates a part of a person's self-identity, serving the group becomes their primary motivation.
This is known as In-Group behaviour; actions that promote solidarity with the group. Out-Group behaviour by contrast; defines actions the group will forever struggle to accept.
We define both sets of Values-based behaviours for you, creating choice. These choices are used to both assess prospective hires, as well as to performance manage your existing team.
First, we gather your leaders and any other members of your team that fully embody what you want your culture to be.
We meet together, in-person or online, to facilitate the session.
Whether online or in-person, each person will bring their mobile phone to the session. Using a text-based polling software to ensure anonymity and therefore validity, each person will be asked both how they would most commonly respond, and how they would never respond, to specific sets of workplace triggers. Common answers reveal your greatest points of alignment.
Those points of alignment become your Functional & Frictional ValuesTM.
We then build a custom online assessment based on your unique benchmark, and assess the rest of your organization against it. You will know in mere days exactly what areas of your team you must focus on in order to thrive.
Not only will you know the degree of alignment in your current team, your custom online assessment can be converted into a hiring benchmark as part of our HireEQTM service, allowing you to determine how well prospective hires fit...before you hire them.
Values are meant to increase people's ability to make decisions that are aligned with the needs of the team. That can only happen if they can recall those Values, on command, in key times.
Dr. Nelson Cowan of the Working Memory Laboratory discovered the brain struggles to keep more than 4 things in mind at once. Companies with more than 4 Core Values, inadvertently limit their people's ability to recall them when needed.
Not only do we only generate 4 sets of Values for the companies we help, those 4 sets of Values are uniquely tied to the 4 emotional triggers (Responding to Feedback, Providing Feedback to Others, Responding to Chaos, Responding to Pressure) that force people to decide whether to put the team's needs ahead of their own.
We not only help people know what Values to live, we help them know exactly when to live them.
If your Values were chosen because they rhyme with one another, all start with the same first letter, or fit some form of acronym, your bias toward this may be doing a disservice to your team.
The sole purpose of your Values is to ensure your people meet the needs of your organization. Yet still we see leaders trade function for 'cleverness' by forcing words into their Values statements that fit a grammatical framework instead of a business one.
Functional & Frictional ValuesTM are designed to address the only four problems a business will ever have: Money issues, People issues, Information issues, and Time issues.
In building a set of Values around each of these problems, and ONLY these problems, we remove any and all ambiguity around what 'living your Values' actually entails.
The most fatal flaw of all however is only having ONE set of Values.
Again, Values are meant to improve decision making. The brain struggles to make decisions without being given choice. Without choice, we will continue to think about things, we will continue to feel about things, but we won't take any action.
This is why we create BOTH a Functional AND a Frictional Value for each of the measures above.
It is only by contrasting these two choices that people are able to instantly see how their short-term behaviours will impact the long term health of the team, and correct their behaviour accordingly.
Whether we are working to grow our client's leadership through ServantEQTM, improve their hiring effectiveness through HireEQTM, or create more engagement through WorkplaceEQTM, Functional & Frictional ValuesTM are the essential first step in each program.
Depending upon the number of participants and whether we are building your Values from scratch or converting existing Values into this framework, the session itself runs between 90-120 minutes.
Building Functional & Frictional ValuesTM is not a standalone service.
It is included within each of our 3 core products: HireEQTM, ServantEQTM and WorkplaceEQTM.
There is no 'bad' time to build your Values. However, a few essential times where it should be a priority include when you are hiring (to measure fit), and/or if you are experiencing any employee engagement issues that may be a result of Values misalignment.
No. your Core Values will remain intact. This process simply allows us to take those values and convert them into a framework that allows your people to actually 'live those values' by removing any unintended ambiguity in them.
No. If you don't already have Core Values, we will work with you to define your Functional & Frictional ValuesTM to do all of the things conventional Values do as well.
Yes. It is a myth that the Values of an organization never change. The Values that get you from point A to point B may not be enough to get you to point C. Every growth plateau your company hits, should be a sign to revisit your Values and see if they need tweaking.