These days there’s a lot of focus on organizational culture in terms of its ability to attract and retain employees in today’s shrinking labour market. Naturally, any discussion of an organization’s culture also includes an examination of its values, which serve to articulate what that culture looks like in action.
And yet, despite this growing focus on organizational culture and values, we continue to see example after example of companies outwardly claiming their organization stands for one thing, but then being caught doing the exact opposite.
So how can leaders not only adopt but promote organizational values that impact every decision, choice and behaviour made in the workplace, as opposed to simply being these lofty ideals we simply pay lip service to? That’s the focus of this episode and my conversation with brand and change management expert, Mory Fontanez.
Mory Fontanez is the founder and CEO of the Eight 22 Group, a consulting firm that describes their focus as being around value-based transformation. Using her expertise in reputation and change management, Mory has worked with several Fortune 500 companies including Hewlett Packard, Mars, Inc, Royal Dutch Shell, AstraZeneca, J.P. Morgan Chase and GE. Prior to founding her own consultancy firm, Mory served as Managing Director of Global Client Strategy at Edelman where she worked with clients to help develop strategies to achieve their reputational, cultural and marketing objectives.
Over the course of this episode, Mory and I discuss:
- Why an organization’s values might not be as clearly understood as leaders might think and what to do about it.
- How to transform your values from being merely inspirational to actionable ones that become touch points in how your organization operates.
- How to avoid that issue seen in many organizations where they claim certain organizational values only to be caught violating the very behaviours they claim to be driven by.
- How leaders can co-create organizational values with employees to ensure these values connect and resonate with what matters to employees.
- How creating values focused around purpose-driven work can help foster greater diversity and inclusion, something that’s known to drive innovation and overall growth.
- How to balance using organizational values as being cardinal points that direct the way we act and behave against giving room for people to experiment, fail, and learn to help the organization stretch, evolve, and grow.
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