Category Archives: Values

Five actions for living your organisation’s values

One of the most significant challenges that staff struggle with is how to “live” their organisation’s values and behaviours. People often say to me, “I’m sick of ‘hearing’ about the values. No one does anything about them.” I then ask, “Do you believe in the values and behaviours yourself?

A typical response begins with, “Yeah, but…”.

This pattern indicates that the real challenge that staff face is that they don’t know ‘how’ to have conversations about the values with their peers and managers. This article will share five actions of which you can use one or more to increase your contribution to your organisation’s values in a positive, constructive manner.

Continue reading Five actions for living your organisation’s values

A Little Perspective – Act On What Really Matters

Yesterday a good friend and colleague of mine passed away after a long battle with cancer. He was in his mid 40s and leaves behind his wife and four young children, the eldest of whom is just 13 years old. Andy had successfully created several multi million dollar businesses. At the start of 2010 he quit all the work he was doing and drove his family around Australia for six months. This was before he knew he was sick. 

Andy would often tell me that he believed that life should be lived to the fullest because you never knew what could happen. He also believed that everyone should do their best to develop the talents that they have and that success always included your close relationships.

This July I have already paid for a trip for my entire family of seven to visit with my twin brother and his family who live in the USA. Irrespective of the state of the economy these trips are never cheap. But I want to spend time with my brother and his family; time that honestly can’t have a dollar value placed on it. Just like Andy’s trip around Australia with his family can’t have a dollar value placed on what that was worth to him.

What are you potentially postponing when it comes to creating shared experiences with the people dearest to you in your life. If you would do things differently if you found out that you only had a certain time to live well, guess what, you do only have a certain time to live, you just don’t know how long it is. So don’t postpone those things that really matter because life might not wait for the ‘right time’ to come along.

Rest in Peace Andy.
 

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com

Managing High Performing Culture Breakers

A recent article When to Fire a Top Performer on the HBR Blog Network by Eric Sinoway caught my eye. In the article Eric classifies employees into four categories based on their performance and their alignment with the organisation’s values and culture.

Sinoway’s four categories include:

  • Stars are the employees we all love — the ones who “do the right thing” the “right way” .
  • High potentials are those whose behavior we value — who do things the right way but whose skills need further maturation or enhancement. With training, time, and support, these people are your future stars.
  • Zombies fail on both counts. Their behavior doesn’t align with the cultural aspirations of the organization and their performance is mediocre.
  • Vampires are the real threat. These employees perform well but in a manner that is at cross-purposes with desired organizational culture. 

The ‘Vampires’ as Sinoway calls them can cause untold damage to your organisation, despite the appearance that they ‘get results’.

Reading the article reminded me of a framework I had learned from Jack Welch while he was CEO of GE.

In this matrix, the vertical axis refers to ‘on the job performance and the horizontal axis refers to alignment with company values. Welch argued that so called high performers who didn’t align with company values hurt the company in the long term, despite their short term ‘performance’ results. 
Welch’s view was that these people damaged both internal and external relationships and as such would damage the company in the long term, which is why he fired them.
Folk who were aligned with the company’s values but fell short on ‘performance’ were worth a second chance. Of course those who scored well in both areas were the company’s stars and should therefore be promoted and their opposites, those who neither ‘performed’ nor shared the company’s values were asked to leave.
The beauty of these models and approaches is that they provide us with a framework for conversations and decision making.
How does your organisation manage the dilemma of a high performer who doesn’t align with the company’s values?

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com

Great Service The Fijian Way

Recently I had the great pleasure to take my family on a vacation to Fiji to celebrate a relatives wedding. We stayed at the Outrigger on the Lagoon which is located near the small town of Sigatoka on Fiji’s main island.

The resort is on land that is owned by the two local villages and the vast number of staff have been recruited from those villages. From the moment we arrived until the moment we departed the resort we could not have had a more wonderful time. My wife and I, our five children and nearly 60 relatives and friends were not only impressed by the physical standards of the resort, but more importantly the staff who were always smiling and happy to please.

The talented Erami leads a water aerobics class

Despite talking about ‘Fiji time’, a reference to taking time to get things done, our experience was that requests of staff were always met by prompt responses and action, something that service and hospitality organisations here in Australia could learn from.

The culture of teamwork and the desire to create a wonderful experience for guests was self evident for our entire visit. Due to the genuinely friendly nature of the staff you could not help but make ‘friends’ with them. One of the staff with whom I had the pleasure to speak with at length was Moses Saukalou, one of the hospitality managers with vast experience who managed a large team of staff.

When I asked Moses about what drove the staff to be so friendly and willing to work, despite their relative poor pay (by Australian standards) he told me that the answer lay in their culture of respect.

“Respect is something that we value and it is taught to our children from a very young age. That is why it comes across as being genuine – because it is!”.

The staff work six days per week and many of them were multi-talented, being able to speak several languages, do public speaking, take water aerobics, weave baskets and hats and serve incredible cocktails as well as singing. And what I have just described is the skills of a single employee!

Singing good-bye on our final morning

When the staff heard of our imminent departure during our breakfast on the final morning of our visit, they gathered in front of us and sang us a good-bye song. While the staff were singing to us another team member came forward and explained the meaning of the words to us. We were being thanked for visiting their land and they were wishing us a safe journey home. It was very moving and once again was not contrived – it was genuine. We really felt like we were leaving special people. My brother, who was with us with his family mentioned how emotional he found the experience, a comment that was uncommon from him.

It was really us who should have been saying thank you, or as they do in Fiji, “Vinaka!”.

There is a lot that can be learned from the Fijians with regard to how important it is to have respect for other people at the heart of your approach to delivering service excellence.

And ‘deliver’ is exactly what the staff at the Outrigger on the Lagoon in Fiji certainly did!

Gary Ryan saves you time by helping you to know what to do to raise service standards in your organisation

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com

Understanding the relationship between leadership and values

Many great questions have been asked in the various leadership development programs that I have been facilitating recently. One of those questions was, “Why have personal or organisational values?” On a personal level, living a life that is consistent with our personal values is one of the ways to live a happier life compared with someone who does not live such a consistent life. This is irrespective of material wealth.

Life has a habit of creating difficult situations through which we must navigate and the path that we choose to take can be guided by our values. If, however, you don’t know what your personal values are, then it is very difficult to choose a path that is aligned with them. Some might suggest that it is easier to not have values. I’m yet to experience a value-less person. By this I mean that everyone has values; their behaviours indicate what they are. The issue is whether or not the person knows what values they are portraying. It is easy to preach a certain range of values; the challenge can be living them.

Ultimately a simple metaphor can help with this idea of values. Irrespective of your role in life, at the end of each day when you are home and look at yourself in the mirror, are you proud of the person staring back at you? In 1934 the editor of the New York Post (a monthly magazine at the time) was sent a letter by an 18 year old male. His letter contained a single question, “Why be honest?”. The editor thought that it was such a great question that he published it the next month and asked the readers to send in their replies. He promised to publish the best response.

The following poem was adjudged the best response. While written in 1934 I think the essence of the poem has significant value to this day. Many of you may not have heard of the word ‘pelf’. It means, “money or wealth, esp. when regarded with contempt or acquired by reprehensible means.” In other words it is when you acquire wealth no matter the cost to others.

Dale Winbrow, the poem’s author, was not a poet. He simply penned this poem in response to the 18 years old’s question. If you would like to learn more about Dale Wimbrow visit http://www.theguyintheglass.com/gig.htm. This is my favourite poem and has been since I was introduced to it in 1996.

The Guy in the Glass

When you get what you want in your struggle for pelf,

And the world makes you King for a day,

Then go to the mirror and look at yourself,

And see what that guy has to say.



For it isn’t your Father, or Mother, or Wife,

Who judgement upon you must pass.

The feller whose verdict counts most in your life

Is the guy staring back from the glass.



He’s the feller to please, never mind all the rest,

For he’s with you clear up to the end,

And you’ve passed your most dangerous, difficult test

If the guy in the glass is your friend.



You may be like Jack Horner and “chisel” a plum,

And think you’re a wonderful guy,

But the man in the glass says you’re only a bum

If you can’t look him straight in the eye.



You can fool the whole world down the pathway of years,

And get pats on the back as you pass,

But your final reward will be heartaches and tears

If you’ve cheated the guy in the glass.


Ultimately living a life in which we behave in a way that is consistent with our values across all our various life roles provides us the best chance to be happy when we look at the person staring back at us in the mirror. It is possible to be lauded as a great person but not be happy. This can be because, at the end of the day when we are alone and looking at ourselves in the mirror we may be aware that we have not been true to our values or ourselves in the way that we have behaved during the day.

So what does this have to do with leadership. Michelle Hunt (Dream Makers) suggests that formal leadership roles carry a great weight of responsibility because they involve a serious meddling in other people’s lives. When we hold positions of leadership within any organisation whether it be for profit, not for profit or government based, our decisions can have a direct impact on many people’s lives. Performing our roles in the context of our personal values becomes critical for both personal happiness and organisational performance. If we are working full time, we spend too much time at work to behave in a way that is not consistent with our values to think that there would not be a negative effect on the rest of our lives. (You can find out more about Michelle Hunt by visiting http://www.dreammakers.org/)

A business reality, particularly in difficult economic times may involve reducing staff numbers. A question worth asking before taking such action is, “Have we truly exhausted all other options?”.

Another consideration is, “Did we have the foresight to prepare for more difficult times when times were good?”.

If we still have to make staff redundant, our values, and in this case our organisational values can guide the way we go about performing this process. As our values are an element of our vision, should we decide to ignore our values in the way we would perform such a task we guarantee, in my view, in ensuring that our vision will NOT be achieved. Is that a price that we are willing to pay for the sake (usually) of saving a few dollars and maintaining our dignity (and the dignity of those being made redundant) when such a decision is made?
While your experience may be such that not many organisations are true to their values, I suggest that this is NOT an excuse for you to do the same. You are not monkeys, so you do not have to do, “Monkey see, monkey do”.

Taking action in alignment with organisational vales can take courage. A few years ago The Herald Sun Sunday Newspaper in Melbourne published front page headlines and alleged photographs of prospective Queensland parliamentarian Pauline Hanson one week before the Queensland State election. The photographs were of a sexual nature and were reported to have been from an earlier time in Pauline’s life. The authenticity of the photographs was immediately questioned.

A week later after public outrage about the photographs and evidence that clearly indicated that the photographs were not Pauline Hanson the Newspaper published a public apology (interestingly buried on page 68!). While a noble act, the behaviour of the paper cannot be undone.

To me the values of the paper’s editors were obvious. Sell papers at any cost. I wonder whether that was the true value set of the editor? This is one of the reason’s that organisational values are so critical. Without them organisations are at risk of behaving in ways that can taint the brand of the organisation and reduce trust in the organisation by its customers.

If your organisation has a set of values and you have a leadership role within that organisation, then it is your duty to be able to explain how you have used the values in your decision making processes. It is through sharing real stories and examples that staff within the organisation develop their understanding of the values in action. In this way the values help create the results that you desire. So, if your organisation is about making money (which, by the way, has nothing inherently wrong with it) it can do so while also having a clear set of organisational values.

In the case of the newspaper, imagine if it held the value of integrity. If such a value were alive and well in the way that decisions were made at the paper, then the photographs and the article would have never been published in the first place. The paper would have had systems in place (systems that had been created to support their values) to ensure that the appropriate checks on the story had taken place before it was published.

You may be in a situation where your organisation has values but you can’t see how they are lived. You may even hold the view that ‘those at the top‘ are hypocrites. Maybe they are. Your challenge is this. If you actually believe in your organisation’s values, is your behaviour aligned to them? Are you able to explain your decisions in the context of your organisation’s values? Too many people say something like, “Well the leaders don’t live by the values, so why should I?” 

Why would anyone base their own poor behaviour on someone-else’s poor behaviour?.

There is no doubt that living your values can be challenging. Doing so within an organisational context can be even more challenging. However it can be done.

The only person who will know how you are performing in the context of living your values is you. So, when you look in the mirror at the end of each day, what does that person have to say back to you?

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com

Personal Values Enhance Organisational Commitment

Many of us already knew this to be true. The more clear a person is about their personal values, the more able they are to commit to an organisation. The more committed you are to an organisation the better you perform for that organisation.

James Kouzes and Barry Posner, famous for their Leadership Challenge series of books have provided the evidence that awareness of personal values matter as they relate to organisational commitment and performance.

In The Truth About Leadership (2010) they show the result of their work with thousands of participants.

As the illustration highlights (where the highest possible score in any one box = 7), their is no significant difference between the commitment of employees who have both clarity of personal and organisational values compared to those who only have clarity of personal values.

There is however a significant difference in terms of both of those two groups compared to employees who have low clarity of both personal and organsiational values and those employees who have high clarity of organisational values but low clarity of personal values (once again there was no significant difference between these two scores).

So what does this mean in English? It means that it is worth assisting your employees to gain clarity about their personal values. How many organisations do that? Not many from my experience. And while there appears to be no significant difference between just having clarity of personal values and having clarity of both personal and organisational values, it makes sense to me to have both if you can. But the starting point is personal values. Help you employees to know them.

The reality is that it isn’t very hard to help people to clarify their personal values. You just have to know what to do and how to do it.

Within my online community (The OTM Academy) I have a six minute video that helps people to clarify their values, or you can simply follow the instructions laid out in my book What Really Matters For Young Professionals!

Are you clear about your values?

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com

Honesty Does Pay!

Recently after having concluded a ‘Getting ahead as a Young Professional’ workshop (which is part of a leadership development program for the Faculty of Law at Monash University in Melbourne Australia) one of the students, Steph Wallace, shared a story regarding the power of honesty with me and I’d like to share her story with you.
Steph had applied for a clerical assistant role for a law firm and the role was due to start mid December 2010. At the time Steph had a year to go to complete her degree and was aware that graduate positions going into 2012 were going to be few and far between. As a result of this knowledge Steph had hoped to gain the clerical assistant’s role so that, after the firm having experienced the quality of her work throughout 2011 she would be well positioned to obtain the graduate position in 2012.
From my perspective this is a very sound strategy.
Steph successfully negotiated the first round of interviews and was invited for a second interview, this time with the person to whom she would be reporting if she gained the position.
It was at this point that Steph confronted a dilemma. Her father was ill overseas and Steph had already booked a 6 week visit to spend time with him. Her trip commenced the second week of January, a mere three weeks after she was to start the position. As there was a lot ‘riding’ on getting this job in terms of increasing her chances of obtaining a graduate position, Steph was unsure whether she should reveal in the second interview that she would be away for 6 weeks three weeks after starting her new job, or wait until being offered the job before revealing this information.
What would you do in this situation?
Well this is exactly the question that Steph asked her friends, family and colleagues. Interestingly the majority of people said, “Don’t tell them in the interview. Get the job first, then tell them.”
Steph’s mother had a different view. “How would you like people to treat you if you were in your future bosses’ position?” she asked.
After their conversation Steph decided to go with her intuitive response to this dilemma. “If I didn’t get the job and I bumped into this lady in five years time, I’d want her to remember me for being honest.”
At an appropriate time in the second interview Steph shared her dilemma with her potential boss.
“I know that what I am about to tell you will probably kill my chances of getting this job, but I feel that it is important that I am honest with you.”
Steph then went on to explain her situation.
The outcome: Steph got the job, and has been mentored in the role ever since.
Given that our conversation was nine months after Steph had successfully gained the job I asked her if she had repaid their support.  
“Many times over Gary! I really do everything I can for them because they were so supportive of me, even when they didn’t even know me. I now participate in Subcomittees and try and give that extra bit of work/ effort whenever I can. From the IT team to my boss, to the Chairman they are both supportive colleagues, friends and mentors in a variety of ways.”
What I have found fascinating is that I have shared this story with many people. The vast majority have said that they would not have told their new boss about the trip until after getting the job.
If you stop and think about the mental models underlying this response one that keeps popping up for me is that people have a theory that if they are honest, bad things will happen.
Hopefully this story will help to challenge this theory.
In this case, honesty was rewarded and well done to the organisation for having the courage to do so.
What are your experiences of honesty in the workplace? Does it pay?
Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com

An Introduction To The Discovering Your Personal Values Activity

As a result of an impromptu request from audience participants after his TEDx Talks ‘Plan For Personal Success’ keynote, Gary Ryan facilitated an exercise to help staff identify their personal values.

This short video includes the introduction piece to this activity.

Please Contact Us if you would like to speak with Gary regarding discovering more about personal values or facilitating a program for your staff.

The complete exercise is included in Gary’s new book What Really Matters For Young Professionals!

Length: 6 mins

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com

If ‘Everybody’s doing it’ does that make it okay?

The revelations of the systematic cheating by the Melbourne Storm Rugby League Club raises issues that extend far beyond Rugby League and the club itself. Assuming that the reported statement by the Melbourne Storm Chairman Dr Rob Moodie that Brian Waldron, the accused architect of the cheating strategy, told him that he had done what he had done because, “Everybody’s doing it!” is accurate, it raises an issue for all of us. (Please keep in mind that at the point in time of writing this article there is no evidence that Brian Waldron’s statement that everybody else is doing it is accurate.)

As appalling an excuse as this excuse sounds, my view is that many people do use this excuse for their behaviour. Whether it be taking illegal drugs, drinking too much alcohol, backstabbing another person behind their back, not telling your manager or direct reports the truth, people claim that their behaviour is okay because other people are doing it.

To me, leadership starts with yourself. If you can’t lead yourself, then you are going to struggle to lead other people. As we have seen with Brian Waldron many people would have considered him successful up until Thursday afternoon. After all he had guided the Melbourne Storm through a period of apparent on-field and off-field success. This story highlights that there are consequences for not taking a stand for doing what is right. It may be true that if Melbourne Storm had played according to the rules then they may not have won their (now lost) premierships. We will never know. We do know that their brand has been damaged and two major sponsors have already cancelled their arrangements with the club due to the clash of values that has come to the surface as a result of this exposure. If you have ever wondered whether there is a financial cost for lacking integrity in business, here is your proof!

This is why I always laugh when people talk about developing the ‘soft skills’ of management. To me, the so called ‘soft skills’, which include acting with integrity, are the hardest skills to master, which is why so many people struggle to properly develop them. The term ‘soft’ somehow suggests that they are easy. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

To me leadership starts with doing what is right from a personal point of view. This means that many people will never know when you have shown true leadership, because the vast amount of leadership takes place when no one is looking. I suspect that there are a lot of good people at the Melbourne Storm who possess high integrity. While this must be an extraordinarily difficult time for them I suspect that many will stay to rebuild the club’s integrity. In many ways, providing the people running the club at all levels honestly embrace the opportunity that they have before them, they could use this terrible event to create an organisation of the highest order. On many levels I hope that they can.

The final message for each of us from this story is to challenge ourselves not to do any behaviour just because we believe that other people are doing it. If our moral compass tells us that something is wrong, then we should listen and take action that is guided by that compass. It is far better to be able to look in the mirror and be happy with the quality of the person staring back at you, rather than seeing a smug person who is hoping they never get caught for doing what they know is wrong.

Please feel free to comment on this article.

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com

Storm Damage – Why leading with integrity matters

While this article focusses upon the revelations of the systematic cheating by administrators within the Melbourne Storm Rugby League Club, the article is about organisational leadership and not sport.

The Melbourne Storm is a multi-million dollar business. It is in the business of elite-sport, television and entertainment. The deception not just a sporting deception, it is a business deception and legal investigations may result in charges being laid. Time will tell.
Today many thousands of people will wake up feeling betrayed and disgusted by the behaviour of a small number of people. Michelle Hunt from www.dreammakers.org suggests that leadership involves a serious meddling in other people’s lives. Many people will have their reputations tarnished simply because they work for the Melbourne Storm. If that doesn’t highlight the serious impact that poor leadership can have on other people, then I’m not sure what does!
On the morning of Thursday 22nd April 2010 I was compelled to add a comment to an article posted on the The Age website. I was unaware of the Melbourne Storm issue that was to unfold later in the day. The article was titled, “Congratulations you’re a manager….now what?“. I was drawn to the article because it mentioned a series of tips for first time managers. However, one of the sentences in the article’s introduction caused me some concern. The sentence was, “Is honesty always the best policy when managing up?”. I thought to myself, “Why wouldn’t it be?”. If you are honest when managing up and you got into trouble for that, then my view is your organisation is not worthy of your commitment and you have a choice to make.
The ‘war for talent’ still exists so if you have a strong and clear sense of your values and a good work ethic, then my view is that you have choice regarding where you work. Working for organisations that aren’t worthy of you commitment is therefore a choice.

To me preparation to become a leader starts well before a formal leadership role in an organisation is offered to you. It starts with becoming clear about your values and practicing them every day in all your life’s roles. Vision without an understanding of your values can lead to behaviour, such as systematic cheating, that is inconsistent with the vision. I don’t know the motives of the senior Melbourne Storm administrators for their behaviour. I do know that conscious development and mastery of your personal values takes time and is important for people to have mastery of their values before they commence formal leadership roles. It is my view that not enough people are clear about their values and how they are reflected in their behaviour at work. Are you clear about yours?

Please feel free to comment on this article.

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com