Lecture The Importance of Values
It is often said that employees want to know what their leaders care about before they care about what their leaders know. Staff respond more to character, integrity, and reliability than they do intelligence. They want to work for a leader they can trust to treat them fairly and respectfully and keep their interests in mind while also prioritizing organizational goals. It matters a great deal what the quality of the person occupying the corner office is.
STOP AND REFLECT How would you describe the character of the person you work for. Is she a role model for you? Do you admire her? What traits of hers would you want to emulate?
Kouzes and Posner ( K & P)report that the organizations with the highest level of employee commitment are those led by individuals who have taken the time to make their own personal values clear to employees. Where employees feel a sense of alignment between those values that mean the most to them and the values demonstrated by management, they are likely to feel most productive and satisfied.
How should these values get communicated? Here again, well done is better than well said. While it is important for organizational leaders to take the time to explain to staff – preferably face-to-face-those ideals that they most want to hold to, their actions will ultimately count for much more. We all have known of instances where managers espoused one set of values but acted on another.
Each day, managers have a chance to take an action – even of the most minor sort – that will send a message about what is important to them. Visiting workers on the line, sending a note to a sick employee, joining the discussion in the lunchroom. Calling an employee who did an especially good job – these actions will illustrate the leader’s values very powerfully.
And values work! As reported by K & P, “organizations with a strong corporate culture based on shared values outperform other firms.” Relating this to the pubic sector, they add that “studies of public sector organizations support the importance of shared values to organizational effectiveness. With successful agencies and departments, considerable agreement is found , as well as intense feeling , about the importance of their values and about how these values should best be implemented.
The American Society for Public Administration has declared a set of principles which they ask their members to commit to. The following is a list of those principles:
