Often when organizations decide they wanna give giving voice to values a try,
though think that the first area that they want to address
is working with middle level or lower level employees.
That is- those are the folks that they feel need the support and the help with,
in the rehearsal with effect- more
effectively raising and voicing and acting on their values.
However, after these organizations spend a little bit of time with GVV they
realize that it's actually very useful and important for senior leaders as well.
But there are some particular and slightly different ways that
the challenges that senior leaders face can be addressed by GVV.
So, we've identified three areas where GVV can
be most effective for work with senior leaders.
The first one is that although senior leaders will often say,
"Look, I don't need to practice speaking up,
voicing my values, I would never have made it to this point in
the organization if I was retiring and unable to speak up."
But, the fact is that often the values issues that
a senior leader will encounter requires them to speak laterally,
to speak across the organization to their other senior peers as opposed to
necessarily the way a middle manager or
lower level manager has to learn to speak up in the organization.
I'll give you an example of this.
I was working with a large,
global consulting firm and they wanted to build GVV into
their leadership training and I did a program with a group of their very senior partners
and I introduced GVV to them and then I
gave them some scenarios to work on and when they came back
to debrief after they'd worked on the GVV scenarios
the most senior individual in the room raised his hand,
first right off the bat, and said, "Well,
I took a look at the scenario and I thought this is silly.
I know what the right thing to do here is,
why do I need to practice this?"
And then he said, "But then I realized that this scenario would require me to talk
to my peer who is at my level and he's somebody that I need to retain,
a collegial and cooperative relationship with,
I need him to work with me and to help me to accomplish my goals.
And so communicating with him about this values based issue is not all that easy,
even though I'm very clear about what the right thing to do is."
So he realized that the rehearsal, the practice,
the peer coaching and the pre-scripting could be useful,
especially when you're talking to your senior peers.
The second challenge specifically or perhaps a
greater challenge for senior leaders is that they are also very
responsible for creating and maintaining a culture that
will enable others to voice their values effectively.
So there's lots of ways to think about this but I think
one of the most important ways is to think,
how does this organization handle mistakes?
In other words, are people encouraged to speak up early,
right away when they recognize that there's been
an error so that it can be addressed effectively,
so that people can train around it,
so that they can avoid making that mistake again?
And are they encouraged to do this in a way where although the mistake is
acknowledged they're not necessa- there's
not necessarily a process of killing the messenger, you know.
Or are they sort of implicitly pressured to just keep their mouth shut. Hide it.
Sweep it under the rug because they know they're going to
get penalized if they raise this challenge.
Of course that means that the error will compound and
the potential negative implications of
whatever- whatever ethical infraction occurred will just get greater.
So senior leaders are import- are very important in that process of making it
safe and also making it feel appropriate to raise values based issues.
But the third challenge that's specific to the senior leaders,
and probably the one where we get the most traction when we're talking to senior leaders,
is that senior leaders need to learn to listen for values,
to respond effectively when others voice their values to them.
If they give the wrong signals this will actually
shut people down and if they give the right signals,
it will empower people to raise these issues more often.
And there's two components to this.
There's a part of that which is around self management.
Of course these issues never come up at a- at a good time,
at a convenient time, you know,
they always create stress and sometimes they're expensive,
so this can be an emotional reaction to them.
So the first thing seniors leaders need to do is to rehearse how they might
respond to this in a self-management capacity which means,
you know, learning to take a breath,
perhaps having a couple phrases at the ready that allow you to buy time and think
about responding more effectively rather than
responding off the top of your head and perhaps a negative way.
The second component to this learning to hear and respond effectively is about
the literal rehearsal pre-scripting and practice and peer
coaching around how to respond when somebody raises these kinds of issues.
So, you know, often somebody will raise
an issue and you're not- you're not gonna necessarily say, "Oh, that's fine.
I'll just take care of it. Thank you."
You're gonna wanna do your own due diligence because just because somebody
raises the values issue doesn't mean they're correct and you need to figure out,
did they have all the data and was this in fact a problem?
But you also wanna communicate that you're gonna
take that time to do the due diligence in
a way that the employee who raised
the issue doesn't feel like they're just being brushed off,
doesn't feel like they're not being heard.
And so you wanna be able to literally create scripts and rehearse ways to
respond that allow the individual to feel you're grateful that they raise the issue,
you're thanking them for it and you think it's important and
now you are going to go on and do your own due diligence around this issue.
So those are some of the ways that GVV can be particularly
useful and adapted for senior leaders in an organization.
Mary GentileCreator/Director, Giving Voice To Values and Professor of Practice
