The Importance of Core Values for Organizational Success with Brenda Boyle

In any business, organization, or educational institution, there are core values that guide its operations. These values are crucial not only for establishing a sense of purpose and direction but also for aligning everyone's mindset towards a common goal. But in reality, many organizations simply stick to the script instead of actively following their values. How can we define our vision, mission, and core values and guide our employees and the whole organization to success? Today, I am thrilled to have Brenda Boyle, the founder of Fireheart Coaching, as our guest. We will be diving deep into the importance of core values for organizations, how they can be identified and defined, and how they can be used to drive success. With her Master’s Degree in Organizational Leadership, Brenda’s expertise lies in creating value-based leadership that is ideal for the rest of your team. Whether you're an entrepreneur, business leader, or simply interested in organizational leadership, this episode is for you! --- Listen to the podcast here: The Importance of Core Values for Organizational Success with Brenda Boyle Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We’ve all found ourselves in this situation, maybe you’re in an organization at a job and that organization will express a certain set of values that they live by and they love to put it on their website, they love to show it off whenever they can, but then when you actually do the day-to-day job, when you enter a situation where those values are put to the test, well, what actually happens doesn’t always match those values and it can be a little bit frustrating when you say to your employer or wherever you are, “Well, you say that you value people first,” or whatever the common phrase is but then when the situation actually went down, the way you were treated, the way that people responded, the decisions that were made did not seem to actually match those values. My guest today, Brenda Boyle, is all about helping organizations live up to those values with her company, Fireheart Coaching. --- Brenda, welcome to the program. Thanks so much, Stephen. Appreciate being here and excited to connect with you all today for this conversation. Yeah, it’s a wonderful conversation to be had because I think we’ve all experienced this or --- well, I’ll just rephrase it that if anyone out there listening has not experienced this, then you’re a really lucky person, but a company, I think the most common thing is, “We value innovation,” but then when you come with a new idea, they say, “No, just stick to the script or stick to the process and procedures manual,” or whatever it is. I know this takes on a lot of different forms. So, my first question would be why do you think that is? Why do you think so many organizations don’t live up to their values? Say something and then do something else? Short answer, it’s hard. Two-word answer. I think it takes a lot of intention, strategy, communication, and perseverance/consistency in communicating those but it doesn’t necessarily often trickle down or throughout the rest of the organization, particularly if the team is growing really big or going through a rapid period of scale, hiring, transitions. The values might start with one particular leader or leadership team but how does it grow from there? And then when things change, like a global pandemic, what do your values, your company values look like throughout that time of change? I think those are two distinct but really hard questions to answer and we’re not necessarily taught that in school or taught that in other places. No. In school, you’re mostly taught how to get the answer right. Exactly. Like from memory, which seems weirder and weirder in an era where everyone has a device where they can easily just look up something. We’re not taught how to like, first of all, figure out what our values are, because I think that’s the first step in the process, right? Definitely. Starting from that point of self-awareness is so important for any leader in any organization, to think of where have I come from, where am I now, where do I want to be, who do I want to be, and so one piece of advice for anybody thinking through right now, oh, geez, I’m listening to this great podcast with Stephen and I’m not quite sure what my own ideas are, that can be an intimidating question to answer just off the bat. So a piece of advice I like to give folks is think about other people you admire. They could be friends, family members, other leaders or colleagues you see in your community, and think about why do you admire them. What specifically do they do? And what I’ve found working with folks is if you think there are a few of those examples, you start to notice patterns. Everybody I admire, they all are very honest or they all are really creative or innovative, to use your example, so you can start to notice some patterns there, looking through folks around you or other people you’ve encountered that you admire. And then when you determine what your values are, is there a process by which you should express them properly? Because I just think of a value, such as people first, and that phrase to me sounds quite vague. It sounds like, okay, what does that really mean? How does that really manifest? Does that mean that like if you’re driving down the road and you think you’re about to hit a deer but you’re worried that if you slam on your brakes, you’ll kill the person behind you? Well, people over deer. So it kind of sounds a little bit weird and vague. Does someone need to, once you figure out what your values are, express it in a way that people at the company in all these levels of the organization will understand it? Definitely. And I like to say you have to behaviorally define your values. So, going back to the example that you brought up earlier about value of innovation, I value innovation, so that looks like dot, dot, dot, and think through --- I find it easier to start thinking through different phases of operations. What does that look like in the hiring process? The onboarding process? General team meeting facilitations and your monthly department or all staff meeting? Okay, what does innovation look like there? What does it look like when you’re trying to make a decision? What does that look like in a feedback conversation? And so think through specific bodies of work or processes that you do in your day-to-day job and then figure out how does this value apply there so then you actually know what it looks like in practice, one, to hold yourself accountable and then, two, especially if you’re leading a team, to share that with other people. We can all say we care about innovation or honesty or inclusivity but we all probably would define that in a different way, just like oftentimes, when I ask folks what does being a good leader mean to you, what does that look like to you, so many different answers and so you really have to explicitly define something in more than a sentence with specific examples. And then how often do you demonstrate it? With the example of innovation, does that mean that at your monthly staff meeting, maybe you start out with a 10-minute shout-out to someone in the organization who innovated? I think that’s a great example of how to do that. In terms of your question, how often do you demonstrate that, my response would be always in an ideal world. A lot of times, I like to use a metaphor I learned from my training. They shared the metaphor of cinnamon raisin bread. If you say you care about value and you apply it in only certain situations, thinking about it like the ingredient of the raisins, if you give somebody then a slice of your cinnamon raisin bread and they don’t like raisins, then you just pick the raisins out, ignore the raisins. But if you really infuse or just constantly demonstrate and embody the values, you’re treating that like the ingredient of cinnamon in the cinnamon raisin bread. You can’t pick out the pieces of cinnamon or eat around the cinnamon, it’s just really baked into everything that you’re doing. Essentially, that’s how it works in an organization, right? So, if you’re treating it like a raisin value, someone who doesn’t share your values could easily stay in the organization and just kind of dance around. If someone doesn’t value innovation and they don’t want to be an innovative person, they could just dance around it and pick it out. But if it’s treated like the cinnamon in a cinnamon raisin bread, a person who doesn’t share that value, they’re not going to be able to like avoid it, essentially. Say you’re a team lead and you’re hiring for folks to join your team, explicitly connect how the values of your organization show up in that job description for each particular role. “Your job duties are X, Y, and Z. This is how that connects back to us, our organization embodying these values. This is how it’s gonna show up as part of our performance review process. This is how it’s gonna show up in our team building activities that we do. This is how it’s gonna show up in how we run our meetings.” Again, thinking through all of the specific examples so you can have it be the cinnamon instead of the raisins in your organization. And then when it becomes the cinnamon rather than the raisin in the organization, does that mean that an organization is less likely to fall into those pitfalls that you mentioned in the beginning where certain stressful situations cause you to lose sight of those values and then people start observing what we’ve all observed of, okay, they say they value this but that doesn’t really show up in the day-to-day work? Uh-huh, and that’s why I think values can’t just live with one person or one team,...