Now let's take a look at five of
the most common and most important challenges that organizational trainers and
managers face when they try and talk about values-driven leadership in
the workplace and then how GVV can help to address those challenges.
The first one we want to focus on is time.
Time is a precious commodity in organizations and they usually only have
a short amount of time for
that precious in-person training sessions and communication sessions.
It's not necessarily a time that is best used for simply
presenting rules and preaching to your employees.
That's not going to be that effective.
It's more important to think about how can we communicate
the rules and the content and the relevant policies perhaps through
print material and through online material and then use that precious
in-person time for literal practice and rehearsal in action with your peers.
And that's how GVV can help to address this GVV helps you to
use that precious time in the way where you're going to get the biggest return.
The second challenge that we face in organizations is consistency.
What I mean by that is that employees will often feel
that these values and ethics trainings are perhaps a
little bit hypocritical because they will be communicating
the rules and the laws and saying and this is what you should do.
But the employees all know that when they're actually
in the press of everyday work and there's
time pressures and there's pressures to meet goals and
objectives that often it feels like their managers,
their colleagues, their customers may be less concerned about those rules.
And so it may not feel as if this is really quite sincere.
The way that GVV helps to address that is because it is
an honest approach that focuses not on let's
preach and pretend but rather on asking
people how could you actually get this done given the real pressures?
We use positive examples to share
the sense of possibility and people actually focus on action.
The third challenge that we often face in an organization is what I'm calling source.
On the one hand we might bring in external trainers who are in fact skilled
facilitators and familiar with the content but
they may not have that much credibility within the organization.
They feel like outsiders who are parachuted in.
On the other hand if you use internal managers who have the credibility
within the organization they may not be that comfortable simply communicating rules,
they may not be that comfortable facilitating
this type of discussion especially if it feels like it's a debate.
And so the way that GVV can help to address that concern
is that in fact the managers who are leading this who have
the credibility within the organization are
focusing on GVV style scenarios that are post-decision making.
So they're not trying to facilitate a debate about what's right,
a facilitation process they may not be comfortable with,
rather they're simply working on problem
solving and developing effective strategies and tactics and scripts.
This is the kind of thing that managers are good at it's why they became managers.
It's simply that they are now applying those
well developed problem solving skills to a values challenge.
The fourth challenge that we often face is one of relevance.
What I mean by that is that the employees will feel that
the rules don't necessarily relate to the real world,
on-the-ground pressures that they're experiencing.
And the way that GVV helps to address that is that in corporate settings and in
organizational settings we try to use company specific,
or organization specific case examples,
GVV style case examples.
And we actually give the people a chance to look at positive examples of people who found
creative ways to address those challenges in
this organization or in similar organizations.
And finally the fifth challenge is one of impact.
It's very difficult to figure out how to assess and measure the impact of
any kind of development program especially around soft skills like leadership and ethics.
And often all that people measure is how many people went through the programs,
how many hours did they spend,
what did they say in terms of how much they liked
the program on the Post Post course evaluation.
GVV is a little different.
It gives us the opportunity to think about
impact in different ways because it's focused not
on trying to decide what's right and learning the rules but rather focused on action,
we can ask questions like how many ideas do you have
for how to address a particular reason and rationalization?
How many tools do you have at your disposal for trying
to act on your values in this particular kind of scenario?
How comfortable or confident do you feel now in raising these issues?
Do you have new tactics at the ready?
The other thing that we've learned is that some of the organizations that have used
GVV over a number of years have started to try and look at the impact.
One very large global organization over 100,000 employees built
some questions into their employee surveys to try and assess
the impact of their GVV training and they found a couple of things.
One thing they found was that yes, in fact,
people did seem to be raising issues more
often but they were raising them in a different way.
Rather than simply going to the ethics and
compliance officers at this organization and saying there's a problem,
here I'm dumping it in your lap, I'm done,
you take care of it,
you're the ethics police.
They were finding that the employees were coming to
the ethics officers and saying look there's an issue in my organization,
I think it could turn into something problematic,
I would like to address it,
but can I work with you to develop a script and
an action plan and to rehearse it that's likely to be effective.
This organization was very happy with
this outcome because they felt that it was a measure of
true culture change rather than simply encouraging people to report to the ethics police,
people wanted to take responsibility for acting on their values themselves.
And the other nice side effect of this is that the organization said they
were finding that when people actually did
bring an issue to the ethics officer that required investigation by
the ethics officer it was more likely to be a true investigatable situation.
There were fewer false positives, if you will,
where people were bringing an issue and complaining
about it just because they didn't know where else to go.
So these were all impacts that this organization was quite pleased with.
So these are a few of the ways that GBV helps to address the challenges
of leadership and values development within an organization.
Finally, I would just say if you are an individual manager in
your every day management decision making meetings and conversations.
You can apply the GVV approach by simply
shifting the conversation when you come to a values driven concern.
So rather than saying,
is this something that we can get away with or is there or how
can we avoid the negative impact of this particular decision?
Simply asking what if we wanted to act on our values in this situation.
How could we be effective,
how could we be successful?
How could we, in fact,
meet the needs of the business and still stay within our values and our ethics?
In other words engage your employees in a problem
solving GVV style thought experiment conversation.
This signals to your employees that you actually care about that and it also will
trigger the kind of creativity and innovation that you want. So give it a try.
Mary GentileCreator/Director, Giving Voice To Values and Professor of Practice
