Behaviors Are a Necessary Part of Values

I have a Board meeting this week, and a major part of the agenda will be discussing and defining the values by which our Board needs to operate if it is going to successfully govern our association and ensure the successful execution of our strategy.

It was not my idea to have this conversation (although I heartily support it). It was my Board chair who felt the discussion was necessary. From his view, the Board has the other two legs of its three-legged stool nailed. It understands its governance role and has developed a unified and effective strategy for the association. What it needs now is more intentionality about its culture and the values that define it.

As we've prepped the agenda we've looked at multiple culture systems and examples for Boards, for-profit and non-profit alike. We're actually bringing in an outside facilitator to guide our Board through this landscape, and help it select the words and definitions that make the most sense for it and its role in our organization.

It's been an interesting experience for me. A few years ago I guided my staff through a similar process: identifying the values that we needed to embrace at the staff level in order to better drive the success of our organization. We came up with some important words then; words like Leadership, Enthusiasm, Integrity, and Teamwork. Those are good words to frame your values around, and they may or may not be the right words for our Board. But when it comes to values statements, there is actually something more important than choosing the right top-level words to describe your values.

You have to describe as accurately as possible the behaviors by which you'll know that the values are or are not being lived.

It's one thing to say that your Board members need to display Courage when they gather around the Board table. It's another thing to say that your Board members display Courage when they challenge each other's assumptions, when they speak up as a lone voice of dissent, and when they ask questions until they truly understand the stakes of each decision they are asked to make.

Our staff values document is full of these behavior statements: observable actions that define the practical meaning of our values. Without them, the values are just words open to anyone's interpretation. Without them, our values statement has no clear purpose in our organization. Whatever direction it provides is unfocused and probably counterproductive.

So when my Board gathers later this week for its discussion, I'm going to focus less on the words they want to choose and more on the Board table behaviors by which they will define them.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source
https://planningengineer.net/culture-and-people-behavior-effect-on-working-environment/