Everything begins with values; with the top three highest priorities in an individual’s life. These are the source of that person’s primary purpose and the underlying determinants of their perceptions, decisions and behaviours.
In the context of managers wanting to help their teams to develop mindsets geared towards connection, conversation and experimentation, within a healthy environment, the process must begin with value determination.
Advice for managers
Here are my 10 tips for managers wishing to build real engagement:
- Write down the job duties that your people actually have: Their current, accurate, and most up-to-date daily action steps.
- Spend some time determining what their values are. You can use the free online tool on my website – www.drdemartini.com
- Once you have determined your highest values (the three things that are most important to you in your life, where you demonstrate your greatest discipline, reliability, focus and productivity), you’ll need to find the links between employees’ job duties (Step 1) and their highest values. This is a very specific and detailed step, unpacked below.
- The question to ask is, “How specifically will performing this particular job duty help me to fulfill my current top three values?”
EXAMPLE |
Let’s say one of your team members is a payroll administrator. Her job duties might include: checking how many hours employees have worked; calculating and issuing pay; deducting tax and other benefits; processing leave and expenses; calculating overtime; answering staff queries; and giving advice.
Let’s presume one of her top three highest-order values is her children. The way to connect what she does with what she values is to ask questions like these, in order to make links and help her see them in context:
- Does working with numbers help you teach your children to pay attention to detail?
- Does making calculations help you help your children with homework?
- Does knowing the art of fair exchange give you a lesson to teach your children?
- By doing your work, are you earning the income you need to fund your children’s education?
- If it’s tedious work but you don’t give up, is that good role modelling for your children?
- Does knowing about money management, and sharing this with your colleagues, help them to help their own children?
- Does advising others make you better at giving your children counsel?
- The magic number to shoot for is 20 links, not seven. Once you get to 20, for some reason, it ‘clicks’ and people can see that what they do every day is (or can be) valuable and meaningful. Be aware that some links are harder to find than others. Some are obvious; some, more tenuous.
- Look for fluency. If the employee hesitates or can’t answer the question easily or at all, this is a sign that the job duty is incongruent with their highest values and they are not going to be inspired about that particular duty. (In this case, keep asking them how that specific duty would or could help them to fulfil their highest values, until they can see a connection.)
- This is a big job. Value determination and link creation can take a whole day or more, the first time you do it, depending on the size of your team.
- To create better connections between your people, use the same process to cross-link others’ three highest values with your three highest values. Go through the entire team, making a list of values across everyone you manage. Look at the common threads. This will help you achieve more equitable leadership, better management and healthier relationships.
- For better work conversations, remember that dialogue comes from equal values (or else you simply have alternating monologue). Employees must know each other’s values. You, the manager, must master the skill of communicating your high-priority intentions, expectations and delegations in terms of each employee’s top three values.
- Intrinsically, people love solving problems that align with their values, so fulfilling their values will give them the courage to experiment.
Remember: People go to work every day to fulfill themselves, not for the sake of a company. For this reason, managers must enable their people to explicitly connect their own values with their everyday, real-world job duties, so that they become engaged, feel grateful for their collegial support system, and are inspired to go beyond the call of duty and to innovate.
