“I had chosen to use my work as a reflection of my values.”
Sidney Poitier
Companies often talk about “values”. But all too often, the company’s “Value statement” is dreamed up by the leadership team in cahoots with a consultancy, and then languishes in the company handbook having no effect on the day to day organisation. In this article (for the first time ever) I’m going to walk you through how we “do” values in Team Clarity.
Here’s how it goes: We’re a virtual organisation, but each month, we meet up in person for the day. After we spend a few minutes connecting with each other and getting fully “into the room”, we start talking through our Values Statement (see image). We have seven core values as a team, as follows:
- Grounding: We eat our own cooking.
- Leverage: We are an exponential organisation.
- Heart: We’re family; we’ve got each others’ backs.
- World Class: We play at the highest level.
- Care: We care passionately about our clients, and they know it.
- Spirit: Ego doesn’t matter; the people and the mission matter
- Results: We say what we’re going to do and we do it.
So far so good, but these words and phrases are just “pleasant chat” unless we can actually make them more operational. So we get even more specific, boiling each one down into a handful of elements. For instance:
Care: We care passionately about our clients, and they know it
- We blow our clients’ minds by creating world-class experiences.
- We transform our clients lives and their results.
- We build lifetime relationships with our clients.
- We assume a fiduciary responsibility for our clients and earn “trusted advisor” status
- Nobody gets left behind.
- People judge books by their covers, so we create experiences that look and sound as amazing as they feel
This second layer of “sub-values” helps us get clear on exactly what we mean by our high-level values. It allows us to shine a light on the different aspects of the value so we can act accordingly. Each month when we get together, we spend a big chunk of time on the values:
- Uncovering anything we’ve missed and adding new elements
- Tweaking and adjusting the existing values and sub-values
- Finding specific examples of where we are and aren’t living them fully
Where are we and aren’t we living our values fully?
Finally, we dive down to a third layer. For each of the sub-values, we look for examples of where we’ve demonstrated this value, and (just as importantly), where we haven’t. Here are a few examples:
We blow our clients’ minds by creating world-class experiences.
- Our Head Coach, Jonny Bowden, sent flowers to one of our clients when she was in hospital.
- Our Tech Guy, Dzidek Sabat, went above and beyond to create an amazing live-streaming experience for our clients attending the Clarity Coach Training virtual programme (even doing 3D virtual reality streaming!)
We transform our clients’ lives and their results.
- Our Project Glasswing programme has helped numerous coaches, therapists and other transformation professionals to transition to a “coaching package” model and increase their income.
- On the flip side, we also look at any examples where people didn’t get the result they’d hoped for, and use that as an opportunity to a) improve our programmes and b) further support the client in getting what they want.
We assume a fiduciary responsibility for our clients and earn “trusted advisor” status
- This is proving to be a very helpful one for our team. We can each give numerous examples of where we’ve lived this sub-value, but the real power has been on the flip-side. We’ve ended up using this as a “hard-line” to help us decide who we will and won’t allow on programmes, based on readiness, how good a fit they are for the group, or whether they’re in the right financial position to do it.
Our values are evolving
You see, our values have evolved. The first version of our values statement didn’t look anything like this. They’re evolving as we evolve, and helping us inform our systems, our processes, our culture and our behaviour. They also help us to grow our team; we use our values to make decisions about hiring and firing. In fact, almost everyone on our team has found their way to us because they started out as a client on one of our programmes. By definition, our clients resonate with our purpose, vision, mission and values. While they may not recognise the exact words, the “feeling” of our company is an expression of those elements. As a result, our clients are the people most likely to be a good fit for our organisation as team-members. One of our values is Grounding: We eat our own cooking. Everyone on the team is committed to having a deep embodied understanding of the principles behind clarity. Obviously the best place to find people with that level of grounding is in our own client base.
And this is the beauty of it. By creating a team where we truly live the values we espouse, we attract clients who resonate with these values. This resonance does a huge amount of the “heavy lifting” for us as an organisation. If you want to see the full Team Clarity Vision, Purpose and Values, you can find a printable version here: http://jamiesmart.com/values.pdf
If you want to join me and my team on the 2016/17 Certified Clarity Coach Training Programme next monday, the early booking discount expires on 31st August. The programme is by application only, is available via live-streaming around the world or in-person in London. If you want to be considered for one of the places, check out the details and find out how to apply now at https://www.jamiesmart.com/clarity-coach-training-sh/
To your increasing clarity,
Big love
Jamie