Last week, in Behaviors Are a Necessary Part of Values, I wrote about an upcoming discussion on values at my association's Board meeting. I said then that, in my experience, when it comes to values statements, there is actually something more important than choosing the right top-level words to describe your values. That you have to describe as accurately as possible the behaviors by which you'll know that the values are or are not being lived. And that my focus at the meeting was going to less on the words they wanted to choose and more on the Board table behaviors by which they will define them.
Well, now that discussion is in the past and that's exactly what we were able to do.
We started broad. Our outside facilitator laid some essential groundwork for the values that are most often associated with high-performance Boards and teams. But when it came time to discuss what those values might mean for our Board of Directors, we were able to shift the focus from the abstract concept of each proposed value to the concrete actions by which our Board either had or would like to live that value in practice.
Again, 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.
But here's the best part. When the Board meeting was over, and we were enjoying a quick and casual lunch before people began darting off to catch their flights home, more than one Board member said that it was the discussion on behaviors that made the critical difference for them.
I was worried, one Board member said in a comment typical of others. The information the facilitator presented was interesting, but I was suspicious of its value for us and our Board. But once we started talking about how we wanted to live those values, everything just clicked. This was one of the most useful conversations we've ever had around our Board table.
It was great. Our work on values isn't finished, but we've made a tremendous first step. And grounding the conversation in the behaviors that we wanted to exhibit made all the difference.
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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
http://johnmcnamara.ie/2017/06/01/are-you-living-your-values/
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