How Your Values Connect to Your Company’s Values

Workplace Culture Change Starts with You

There’s often pushback from employees who don’t understand why they have to focus so much on themselves; they say, “Isn’t this about the company?” When that happens, it gives me the incredible opportunity to educate and empower them in understanding that workplace culture is created by the behaviors of every single one of us. Our behaviors are a reflection of our values. When we take the time to honor our core values and understand where they were born and enhanced, we start the process of not only knowing but also owning our values. Values are far from a matter of superficial box-checking, but again, they often are presented that way.

We could just jump straight into the values of the company, and that would likely be more comfortable for most organizations. However, comfort is not what makes us grow and gain greater, more profound wisdom about ourselves and our community. When we skip the personal knowing, we pass over the opportunity to understand how unique yet similar we all are on a human level. We skip the realization that by knowing ourselves better, we understand our organizational culture better and can be better advocates for the values that motivate us individually and collectively.

Values work is deep work. If we were doing surface-level work, we wouldn’t be doing the work that was required to make meaningful shifts within the culture. Although workplace culture consultants can illuminate, measure, guide, advise, coach, and support the change, you and your people must take responsibility and ownership of the culture—and the only way that workplace culture can change is when people have self-awareness and accountability.

When you understand what your personal values are and where they came from, you can better understand how you are showing up in or out of alignment with the company’s core values. From that place, you can then empower yourself and ask others to hold you accountable to these core values, knowing what kind of environment you want to create with others.

Culture work is some of the hardest work because it’s the people work. It’s the emotion work. It’s the self-awareness work. Each one of us is such a complicated and unique human being. When we take the time to know who we ourselves are, it gives us the opportunity to know other people.

Often we look to others to do the work; we think workplace culture is someone else’s responsibility. It’s the CEO’s job, it’s HR’s job, it’s the leadership’s job. Even if you have a chief culture officer, I’m here to tell you that it’s still the job of each and every person within that company to intentionally gain self-awareness and feedback to see what work exists for them in terms of how they’re creating the organizational culture every day. The leadership can surely set the tone, provide the coaching, and ensure that guidance is available, but an aligned workplace culture exists only when everyone understands and owns their role in crafting it each day.

Whether you feel like you’re in complete alignment with your core values or you have no idea what they are, this work will serve you in knowing how you—and therefore your organization—can step up in more authentically living your core values. Self-awareness of our intrinsic motivators, sparked by activation of our core values, enables us to name and get curious about the experiences, behaviors, and conditions that are required for a sense of personal alignment, purpose, and productivity each day.

Although this work might be uncomfortable at first, remember that you are a conscious leader who’s choosing to dig in and gain wisdom from the discomfort.