Whether you’re trying to build your company’s values, identify future leadership, or looking to promote and encourage the right behavior – it helps to find the right people.
Supervisors and managers see the environment through a very specific filter, but they rarely truly understand the real story. Talk to your boots-on-the-ground, the ones who are fighting through the veritable trenches with each other.
If you want to check Bob’s pulse, measure Bob’s pulse…not Sally’s.
It doesn’t matter if Sally is Bob’s representative or supervisor.
Do you know of a single medical professional who would just take the word of someone who isn’t their patient to make the diagnosis? There’s a word for that: malpractice.
Nobody would be shocked to hear that there are a lot of workers in great companies who are just there for the money. Some supervisors spend more time prepping for their next interview than actually developing or growing their team. Some managers build structures which reward mediocre workers and interfere with their hardest workers’ ability to perform or heaps extra work on high performers without equivalent rewards.
Our business culture prides itself on being able to identify the best options for a promotion…but industry standards are based solely on productivity. Industry standards don’t have any metric for measuring for values alignment.
So how do you identify people who live by your values? How do you find exemplary behaviors in a formal corporate environment? Peer feedback.
Who in your present team do you trust the most?
This line of questioning identifies your exemplars and captures hard data on “soft” value-based behaviors. But remember: this is only one dimension to a multi-dimensional factor. Don’t go making decisions based solely on this one thing.
Who makes you feel the safest in your team?
Who is the best example of demonstrating and living our Core Values?
This method will instantly identify real values-driven exemplars in your company, and it will naturally sort out a manageable set of individual actors. Whether you wish to build a cohort of values leaders, identify and measure team engagement or motivational fit during interview processes, or actually reward and measure exemplar individuals…now you have a set of data.
Important Note! Even with this data, you still must be cautious to use it ethically: any and every set of raw data has the potential to be abused. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and data is easily abused. Don’t let this attempt to strengthen your Values end up undermining them.