The truth about values and company culture:

Culture refers to a group of people who have similar values, a joint purpose, joint goals, ideas and similar social behavior. If the leader does not create the culture the followers will. You create culture by knowing how your individual values fits into your group’s values.

Our values are who we are, reflected in our behavioral patterns or personality, and our values is what we long to have for our future. In other words, our vocation and life purposes (yes plural, purposes) is build on our values, since our values is what is most important to us and what we are deeply looking for. For most companies, the following sounds like the perfect solution and plan. To only hire people with similar values as what the company sets out to have. But here is a very big catch that most professionals and business owners don’t make provisions for in this plan. This plan only works in a perfect world, where everyone has a high EQ (Emotional Intelligence) and are self-aware. In other words where the talent you wish to recruit knows themselves very, very well. And in my experience, even business owners lose touch with themselves from time to time and don’t even know their personal values, let alone have the capacity to identify it in their employees or their customers.

So how does one determine your own values:

1. The first most logical ways are to ask yourself what is most important to you and why?

2. Then I recommend looking outside of your immediate self-knowledge to for example personality analysis and look for the word descriptions in your test results you feel matches what you would call your values.

3. But these can be circumstantial to a degree, in other words, influenced by your mood and life events. So, therefore I then recommend looking at what you spend time on, what you love and hate doing, what you spend your money on and lastly what your talents are. Locked within each of these are the most real clues to your values.

4. Build your business values on your own values. (or your groups combined values)

5. Ask yourself how you can implement these values practically into your business (it’s true that customers don’t buy your product or services, but they buy you)

6. Write core values and policy’s and principles or rules and guidelines according to your groups values.

7. When you are hiring you can look for values within your candidate that lines up with your own values but remember that candidate probably don’t know it themselves.

8. Also, for fun, consider, in your top values there are usually contradicting values e.g. 1. Loyalty vs 3. Freedom. You can for these write down a policy for dealing with the contradiction. There are also lesser values that needs examination e.g. 6. Humility. Then I also saw we all have a “anti- value” system as well, in other words, things that are of no value to you or your group what so ever. It is just good to know what they are and reflect on why.

Once the leadership of a company has established their values, mission and business plan, and what the company culture should look like (I can recommend a brilliant business coach to help with this, Mr. Claudio Camera from Action coach) and they have setup a proper HR system, complete with their policies and procedures (here I can recommend Mr. MJ Jonker from Litigo), Ameliorate Self-development then helps companies to create a positive culture by training your company’s wage earners on Emotional Intelligence. (Self-awareness, interpersonal skills, motivation etc). the level we train this on is appropriate to minimum wage earners in other words building up to Emotional Intelligence by training on personal ethics e.g. Respect, Self-awareness, mindfulness, stress management, Self-care, personal finances, vocation or purpose finding etc. and on business practices e.g. Time Management, conflict management, Motivation, goal setting etc. Training a whole group or workforce on the same topics especially emotional intelligence creates a unity mindset in the group and builds a positive culture.

Keep Improving

The Ameliorate Team

#companyvalues; #companyculture; #emotionalintelligence; #values; #selfdevelopment