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!
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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.
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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.
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, values live with everybody across an organization and are upheld or viewed as important by everybody. You’re going to hear feedback, and that’s a great thing. Leaders, we need feedback.
We need those feedback loops back because we’re human, we’re not going to get everything right 100 percent of the time Click To Tweetso when we start to maybe act out of alignment with the values, we need the rest of the team to know these are what the values are, this is how they show up and, wait a minute, I’m confused, there seems to be a discrepancy here so I’m going to share that or call it out, almost sort of serve as checks and balances, if you will.
Yeah, for sure. Now, I think a lot of people at certain types of organizations, certain jobs, might be a little bit afraid to do that, depending on how your organization, what the environment, what the work culture really is. You’re saying that in an ideal work environment, everyone, no matter what their job title is, would feel empowered to point out to anyone, regardless of what their job title is, when they’re acting in a way that does not match their values.
Uh-huh, and you bring up a really important point about psychological safety because that has to exist in order for feedback for it to be safe and for folks listening who may not know what psychological safety is yet or have heard that term but haven’t really explored it, it basically means if psychological safety is present in my workplace, I can bring my perspectives, my ideas, and my questions to the rest of the team without fear of being humiliated, belittled, or some sort of retribution happening. And that’s a very general statement. Amy Edmondson, if you want to look for that, she’s sort of the queen of psychological safety, where it all started from, if you want to go down some research rabbit holes, but that is — I’m going back to a food metaphor, an essential ingredient in order for feedback loops to actually exist or be effective. If people don’t feel safe sharing their ideas, “Maybe we could try embodying the value of innovation in this new way,” or, “I don’t actually think this is correctly aligned with how we’ve collectively defined innovation,” there needs to be that sense, that element of safety to be able to share those thoughts.
Psychological safety is a wonderful thing to be the queen of, even if it doesn’t sound as like badass as all the other things that you hear people announcing that sort of thing. If an organization is low on psychological safety, if they’re in that situation where people don’t feel like they can speak up, someone’s going to yell at them, humiliate them, is there a way to turn that around?
This is everyone’s favorite answer, it depends. And so I think if people in positions of the greatest power are on board, are truly receptive to hearing the truth about what’s going on, hearing some feedback about how to improve then, yes, it can be turned around. I think if leadership isn’t on board, doesn’t see that same reality, or, frankly, just doesn’t care, then it can be a lot harder for somebody, say, in a middle management position or an entry-level position to turn things around. And so in those situations, I think the questions that come to mind for me are what’s in my realm of control? What do I have some sense of autonomy or control over? If my immediate team of the four coworkers I work most closely with on a daily basis, maybe we can adapt some new behaviors or practices that work for us. And sometimes that either isn’t the case or that’s not enough and then that can be a really tricky situation of being a part of an organization where there isn’t a sense of psychological safety or there’s a misalignment between values and actions and that can be a really tough place to stay as a worker, as an employee.
That’s one of the toughest conversations as well as thought processes in your head about when it’s time to just move on because there’s no fixing this, there’s no way, my values don’t align with theirs, I thought they had these values, now they’re not. I have been in that situation, I really don’t envy it. So, hopefully, we can all figure out where we are and what we’re meant to be. But one of the other things I wonder is that you often work with organizations that are scaling upward. Does the challenge become different between, say, a company where you have a dozen or two dozen people where it’s easy to check in on every single person about how the values are being kind of acted upon throughout the organization to when the company becomes a hundred plus and now, all of a sudden, you have more layers of leadership and the possibility of different divisions within the organization creating different subcultures?
Definitely. I think with the smaller teams that I’ve worked with, especially where folks are all in the same geographic location or, say, the founder CEO is able to personally know each of the 10, 20 employees, you can successfully embody values in an organization more informally. When you start to grow and get to a point where your senior leadership doesn’t have those personal relationships with everybody just because there are now hundreds of employees, now we’re across six different sites in different stages, a matter of just logistics and the realities, then you really need to build the infrastructure in your organization so that others can really understand the values. If they don’t see you on a daily basis as a leader modeling that value, who are they seeing? Are those people, have they been equipped to model in the same way, have that same understanding? It becomes a lot trickier. And so I think of the difference between a 10-person startup where you’re all in one location and a 200-person team with multiple offices, I really like working with clients transitioning from point A to point B because it can be so difficult to put together that infrastructure, that systemic infrastructure for culture. It’s very nebulous. It’s much different than, “Hey, we have an SOP, a standard operating procedure, for expense reimbursements or decision making even,” it’s a lot trickier and nebulous, again, this is the word that comes to mind there.
Yeah. It’s less linear, it’s less cut and paste, it’s more figuring out every time. Tell us a little bit about how you work with your clients.
I will work with individual leaders to, one, figure out what their values are, like we talked about in the earlier point in our conversation, and then, two, work with them in navigating through specific situations. It could be a merger acquisition. It could be, “Hey, one of my VPs isn’t embodying these values. What do I do?” It could be, “We think we might completely change the strategic direction of our startup. What does that mean for us?” And so talking through those decisions and trying to marry the big picture with the more in-the-weeds daily realities of folks. I like to help leaders think through how they can build systems that will kind of keep the organization in check. So we talked earlier about feedback loops. That’s one of the things. We talked about checks and balances so I like to connect everything from the onboarding to the performance reviews.
Because there is going to be that customization or adaptability element too. I could go on and on on this question forever, but I’ll stop there.
Well, yeah, no, I mean, I basically asked you what it is you do and one of the things that I love about hosting this podcast is that I always say I hate that question, “What do you do?” and I think part of the reason for that is that if you ask two-thirds of all people, “What do you do?” they probably just don’t want to talk about it. Most people, I just saw this post on Instagram today where someone was wearing a t-shirt that said, “If I die today and went to hell, it would take me two weeks to realize I’m not at work anymore,” and I was thinking that’s the attitude a lot of people have. In fact, that’s part of the reason I started this podcast was to inspire people who are in that situation where they hate talking about their work because they just hate it so much or they’re so uninspired by it to go out there and get something different. And so I always love, at the types of events I’m at and the types of recordings I do, people who really do love talking about what they’re doing because it’s what they want to be doing, it’s what they feel passionate about. It aligns with the values and so it’s like, “Yeah, this is something I really deeply care about and I could talk about it for two hours, three hours, five hours,” whatever the amount of stamina you think you’d have before you need to eat something, drink something, or go to the bathroom is, so that is quite amazing. And if anyone wants to know about your coaching services, what would be the best way to get a hold of you or check out what you got to offer?
The best way to learn more about me and my work is my website, fireheartcoaching.com. You also can find me on LinkedIn. Again, my first name is Brenda, last name is Boyle, and I’m based here in Denver, Colorado, so that can help you filter. My tagline is the values and culture lady and instead of that question of, “What do you do?” I like to ask, “What brings you joy?” or, “Why do you do what you do?”
And, for me, what brings me joy is helping leaders translate their values into simple, specific behaviors so that they create the types of teams and groups and communities they want to see. Click To TweetEverything underneath that brings me so much joy so would love to connect with any listeners out there on LinkedIn or my website, fireheartcoaching.com.
Now, do you oftentimes encounter people who know what their values are but, for some reason, their behaviors are not matching them?
Yes, and that happens when folks are overwhelmed by so much on their plates. I’m thinking about one current client in particular who cares so deeply about being an empathetic leader and her team’s tripled in size in the last three months as a result of organizational changes. She recently had her first child and so she’s working 60, 70 hours a week just to almost stay afloat, keep her nose above water, and so I think a lot of this values-based work, it takes time and energy and it’s really hard when you feel like, “Oh my gosh, there are 12 different fires coming to me asking to be put out and now I’m gonna take a step back away from that to do some reflection.” And so that’s a very real challenge, being overwhelmed, and that’s a tough spot to be in to balance the short-term needs versus, “Okay, if I take a step back, think a little bit longer term or a little bit bigger picture about values, how does that then impact my choices, my priorities, my time management so that I’m more aligned with who I wanna be, where I wanna be?”
Yeah, and then does this also carry on to other parts of life? Because I know you mostly work with people at work, we’ve mostly been talking about work, but people have values in how they interact, like once you leave work, you’re not suddenly a different person, unlike that one TV show people watched a couple years ago.
Severed, I believe, with Adam Scott. Yeah. Or Severance.
And so it feels like the struggle would be the same struggle in other parts of life and how you engage your community, your family, your friends, your whatever else you’re involved with.
Definitely. And I got into this during a period in my life where I had sort of pursued a dream, achieved it, realized, “Oh, no, I don’t actually think this is for me or where I’m supposed to be, where I wanna be,” and then it felt like the chalkboard I had been planning and dreaming on for years and years and years was just wiped clean and so that was when I first started to think about my values to use as the foundation for everything else, both personal and professional, from who am I choosing to spend my time with, my friends, significant others? Where do I want to live? What line of work do I want to be in? And so thinking through, there are so many choices and so many options for everything that you could do, again, personal or professional, and so to have the values be your guiding light is a little cheesy of a phrase but it’s almost a calibration tool. Am I staying true to who I am, who I want to be?
Can the people you spend the most time with, whether it be co-workers, significant others, good friends, communities, hinder that ability? If you have a certain value and you have a lot of people around you who either don’t exhibit that value or don’t seem to find a way to respect those values, can that really make it more of a struggle and actually cause you to like lose those values from time to time?
Definitely. For example, if one of your core values is honesty and the people around you, for whatever reason, aren’t open or receptive to having candid conversations, again, could be personal, could be professional, that’s going to be really tricky. And some folks in our lives, we have more choice over who we spend time with, thinking more like friends versus others, like family members, we don’t get to choose family members. Again, what do I have control over and how can I choose things as much as possible to align with the values, with the qualities, with the priorities that I desire?
Yeah. And have you ever had a client describe their values or determine their values and had to tell this client, “These are terrible values,” say, if someone says like, “Well, the most valuable thing in my organization is getting revenge on my former co-founder who negotiated a terrible exit,” or something like that?
So far, I’m going to knock on wood on my desk here, no. I think that people are attracted to reflecting on their values. Themes I often see are empathy, authenticity, learning, joy, and so I have not I’m going to say yet encountered that. That would be an interesting career milestone and I would want to go a little bit deeper, ask some probing questions to that person. What do you mean by that? Where is this coming from?
That would be a crazy scenario. But they do often say that people tend to attract the type of people that value the same thing or are thinking about the same thing or curious about the same things. Whatever energy you’re putting out into the world is just not bringing you back the person who’s starting a business out of revenge for someone who did them a dirty before.
Yeah, and that makes me think of another sort of piece of advice. Earlier, I mentioned if you’re trying to figure out your values, think about folks you admire, what are their specific behaviors, traits, qualities you admire, what are the impact of those. Another exercise that folks could do is to ask the people that they do spend a lot of time with or are close with from different life chapters and say, “Why are you friends with me? Why have we kept in touch? What you value about our relationship?” And then maybe they’ll say something, “Oh, because we have these things in common.” Okay, you have many things in common with many people, what is it about me and just keep asking why and peeling back layers. And that’s an exercise I did, gosh, eight years ago with folks from different life chapters and it was interesting to see similarities in what folks who had known me from junior high, say, to folks who had just met me in my 20s at that point and what had changed. That can be a fun exercise if you want to recruit some of your closest people to help you discover and explore your own values.
Wow, that sounds like an amazing exercise and I know I’m probably not the only one who’s had this thought cross my head, like what does everyone really think of me? You’ll be in a circle with your friends and you’ll be talking about someone and you’ll be thinking about like, “Oh, this person, I know this person is always the one that does this. This person always has crazy ideas. This person is always the one that makes the most ridiculous joke of all time,” but then it’s always like, well, you’re never in the room when everyone’s making the comment about you so you have to find a way to ask people who are willing to give it to you candidly.
Definitely. And I think in addition to the questions of why are we connected, why are we friends, r why have we kept in touch, other questions that sort of dance around the issue are in what environments do you see me really thrive? In what environments do you see me struggle more or do you see as challenges for me? And that can also help surface some themes, especially too, we were just talking about what if you find yourself in a situation where your personal values and your organization’s values may not align in theory or in practice, what do you do? What would be a better fit for you?
Yeah. Well, it’s amazing that you went all the way back to junior high because my impression is that junior high and high school people all have the same thing, like, “Well, I really value music and dancing and hanging out with my friends,” and you’ll just hear that like 50 times in a row if you asked a bunch of freshmen in high school that same question.
Yeah. I was visiting my parents and they had pulled up some childhood photos and poems I apparently read or wrote rather in junior high and one of the lines in a poem was, “I wonder what happens after we die?” and some of my good — apparently, I’ve been asking that question constantly from the childhood friends to some friends I made here in Denver when I first moved about three and a half years ago. My current fiancé, you know, date one, “What do you think…?” it’s interesting, something about myself I didn’t notice or a pattern but that, to me, speaks of curiosity, a sense of wonder that apparently has been a constant thread throughout my life.
It’s interesting that we have these constant threads and then, of course, we have some things that change over time.
Yes.
And I bet you’ve observed quite things that, okay, I valued this 10, 15 years ago but now I either don’t care about it or I’ve determined something else I care about more.
And I’m so glad you brought up that point because values aren’t static, especially when there are significant and emotionally impactful events, that could be something on a global scale, like 9/11, it could be something on a more personal scale, like a divorce or the death of a loved one or a marriage. Different life events will likely bring to the surface different values and they could be the same but maybe they’re different in terms of priority or which one feels most present or they could completely change, and so all of that is to say too this practice of reflecting and grounding our actions and our values isn’t a one and done thing. I always encourage folks to revisit what is really important to me right now or what value do I really want to bring forth and highlight or lean on in this moment.
And is there a signal that you’ll get in your life, a warning signal that maybe the value that you’ve been living by for the last 5, 10 years suddenly isn’t something you value anymore, that something about your circumstances changed or you reflected on something and now you need to update your behaviors for a different priority?
A constant sense of frustration is a great red flag. Is there a misalignment? Has something changed? I think the same thing about feeling constantly drained or overwhelmed, again, something’s out of whack here or something that was maybe once something that filled my cup, now may no longer do so or could even be draining my cup of energy or motivation. And so feelings of frustration, lack of energy, overwhelm, I think, are more of the negative indicators. The positive indicators could be just, “Oh, my gosh, I have an abundant sense of joy right now,” or there’s something about this that could also be a positive indicator as well. “Hmm, let me take a step back here and do some reflection. What is it about this experience that feels different or is landing differently and how can I tap into more of that?”
Yeah. That makes sense, so it can happen in both the positive and negative sense. And I’m guessing the negative one shows up more often, because frustration, we all get frustrated by something. I personally get frustrated with just trying to figure out things on the internet because sometimes I just get tired of being on the internet so much. But that’s something that’s like very different from, whatever, so long ago, when everything was way more new to me and everything was way more, “Oh, this is interesting,” this is a new thing you can do and now more like this is my 30,912th password I’ve had to reset this week. Every site has its own login and password, even if I just bought a churro. You get that level of frustration versus something where it’s like I went to this activity with an open mind but I didn’t expect much of it and I just really enjoyed it a lot, like this was really fun. I had just the best day of the of the season today out of nowhere. And that’s another situation where people should go back and explore, be like, “Well, what was it about this that I really liked? What can I do to bring more of it into my life?”
Definitely. What did I decide? Why did I decide those? What strengths did I use or lessons did I use that I want to carry forward? If I had to do this, again, wave a magic wand, go back in time, what would I have done differently? So it is that telling me, I think especially for leaders who want to be authentic and aligned with their values after big decisions, after periods of change, specific time capsule moments to go back and reflect on those to be able to help you identify the strengths that you want to celebrate and continue building on to be able to capture the knowledge that you’ve learned so it doesn’t just sort of sit vaguely somewhere in the back of your head but it’s explicitly named and front and center. Telling stories is so powerful in that sense as well.
And a lot of this seems to involve some form of observance or awareness, being present in what’s around you, whether it be what’s happening to yourself or whether it be what you’re seeing in other people. Is there certain tips that we have in order to kind of be more present, something that doesn’t even take more time out of our schedule if we have busy days, a little bit, not too much bandwidth, but there’s definitely ways you can be more present, be more observant, be more likely to notice it, be more likely to understand, “Oh, I’m feeling this,” or, “Oh, she’s acting this way and I really appreciate it”?
That’s such a great question and how that looks for me has a lot to do with body awareness or somatic practices. So an example of that being whenever I step into a conversation or a meeting, I’ll literally press my feet against the floor to say I’m going to literally ground myself, I’m here now, let me try to be present here now. I try to be aware of my breathing or also just say, you know, “I really wanna have a sense of openness. In this conversation, I want to be here to receive whatever this person wants to share with me,” I’ll do that before coaching sessions. And so how can I just take a moment to connect the ideas that are living so much in my head, my forebrain. And so those are things that don’t necessarily take time or I can do in the conversation. If I’m holding my breath, let me release so I’m open to hear and receive, like I want to be present, let me ground, push my feet against the floor, a couple of practices like that.
And those are the types of things that will prevent you from letting your mind wander to another topic or picking up these devices that we always have all around or searching to that website, all the things that we have readily available to us that easily distract us and make us less present with what we’re doing.
Definitely.
Presence is just such a gift to offer people, particularly as a leader. Click To TweetFolks are coming to you a lot of times when they’re frustrated, they’re anxious, they’re scared, there’s a challenge or a problem and so, to be fully present, all those nonverbal cues are really important and they can be truly effective rather than, “Oh, I’m gonna manage by walking around,” to use sort of an old school phrase, but I’ll ask you, “How was your weekend?” but not stop and just keep walking by. That being fully present is a great point to emphasize so I’m really glad that you brought that up.
Yeah. And does this also apply to people who aren’t in leadership positions? Because I know it’s a little bit different in that your co-workers, you tend to be more likely to be joking around or to be like, “Okay, we need to figure this out,” rather than like, “This person said something mean to me,” or, “I can’t believe we have this policy,” and stuff like that but I’m guessing this presence and this being authentic applies to anyone, even if they aren’t officially in a leadership title.
Of course, definitely. And my view of — I know some people define managers, people managers versus leaders differently and my perspective is we’re all leaders in our own way.
We can inspire and contribute and create impact and momentum as leaders. Click To TweetAnd so whether it’s with a co-worker, with a friend or a family member, that presence can apply to anybody, any interaction, the cashier at the grocery store.
I know a lot of people are thinking about the remote/hybrid work that became popular during the pandemic and some people are trying to walk back on that, other people are trying to lean further into it. I know also there’s been a lot more talk about these things that we’re talking about now, regardless of whether you’re working remotely or in person about rather than the old-school top-down hierarchical leadership, “This is your job, I’m your boss, do what I say or you’re gonna get fired or not gonna get a raise,” or something like that to something where it’s a little bit more human-to-human connection, purpose fulfilling and stuff like that. What do you see — do you see any of these things actually making a big difference in what our work culture looks like now, what it looked like 10 years ago, and what it’s going to look like 10 years from now?
I think in terms of, topic number one, the remote/hybrid culture, finding ways to have those human-to-human connection points, “Hey, how’s today going?” even if you’re not physically present, that is huge for relationship building, for trust building, so that we can have that foundation of psychological safety we were talking about earlier that builds these values-based cultures. Another topic that often comes up with folks is a lot of teams have four different generations, all a part of the same team, which means different communication styles, conflict over specific behaviors and I find it’s helpful to peel back the layers, like, “Okay, let’s go from behaviors to action to what are the underlying beliefs and assumptions to those and what are the underlying values to that.” I’m pretty sure anyone in any generation values respect in the workplace but how that shows up behaviorally can be very different from a Gen Z team member to a baby boomer team member, so how can we start the conversation by connecting over a shared ground of some kind of shared value? Similarly, another topic of conversation that comes up a lot is people with different work styles or personalities or approaches to work and so finding out, I think if I had to distill my philosophy of leadership, I would say, one, it starts with awareness of our own values and who we are, then it goes to number two, building an awareness of the values of those we’re in relation with, of those that we’re working with, because if we don’t know our own values and if we don’t know the values of other people on our team, how do we identify common ground? How could we inspire a shared vision or mission so that we can collaborate or get the project done on time or things like that? And so I think this philosophy of values-based leadership very much applies to today’s workforce even more. How are we going to handle an increase in artificial intelligence in our workplaces? What decisions does that impact? What our values? Let’s go back down to those and start from there first to inform whatever decisions or know that we’re being aligned with what really is at the core of what we’re all doing, who do we want to be, why are we here. That’s all about values.
Yeah. Well, that’s something I really hope happens more because it seemed like in the work culture of the past, everyone had to be the same person and that we’re expected to work the same style and now we’re making space for people to be more aligned with who they are but finding that touch point where everyone can be aligned with who they are but we can still accommodate one another so we can have a cohesive team, which involves I’m guessing just a little bit of compromise in that, like you can’t just do whatever you want whenever you want but you can still find a way to be more aligned with your values. And that can even be just finding that organization that aligns with your values because they’re being communicated more directly and they’re being acted upon more consistently.
Definitely. I think the theme of work is there’s no one way of being a, quote-unquote, good employee. There’s no more one way of being, quote-unquote, professional. There’s no more, “This is the one and only leadership model.” And so to have the fluidity across and the ability to connect across all of these differences, again, using values as the common grounding tool, that shared space.
Well, that is wonderful. Brenda, I’m so glad that you were able to join us today on Action’s Antidotes. I’m so glad that you were able to find that place where you’re living according to your values and doing stuff that fills your cup and makes you feel that you’re, I guess, in alignment, for lack of a better way to put it, with whatever you’re feeling like you’re supposed to do and embracing that curiosity and embracing that interest in helping people live better lives.
Well, thank you so much, Stephen, and always a work in progress.
Always a work in progress and the thing I’ll say out there to all your listeners besides thank you for listening again and hopefully you’ll listen to more episodes is you are a work in progress and so whatever is going on in your life, if there’s something going on that’s not ideal, remember, you’re a work in progress and your life’s a work in progress. You can always make the decision right now to be more present, figure out what your values are, and figure out a way to live in closer alignment with them, whether it be being around the right people more often or finding the organization that matches your values.
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About Brenda Boyle
Brenda Boyle (she/her/hers) is all about helping leaders and teams translate their values into specific, simple actions! She spent years in the non-profit and social impact sector. Working in such values-focused spaces, Brenda saw over time that there can unfortunately be a disconnect between the ideals of leadership and the reality of daily work. So she set out to learn how to fully align behaviors, processes & group cultures with core values. Brenda earned a masters degree in organizational development and leadership, became a certified change management practitioner, and started her own consulting firm called Fireheart Coaching & Consulting. Brenda is here to help you align your team’s processes & culture with your core values so that you are equipped as an authentic, inclusive leader to build your dream team.