Staying True
'Trust is one of the most important assets of a healthy organization. And the foundation of trust lies in ethical behavior - values lived out by the organization's leaders.'
- The Institute for Global Ethics
Staying True is about standing up for essential values and standards of conduct.
Over time all other things may change – an organisation’s people, finances, beneficiaries – but its values should not. You must never give ground when they are threatened. Courage is therefore integral to the leader who stays true.
Values are the specific beliefs about what is right and wrong around us. What culture do we encourage? What are the principles that should underpin the team’s efforts?
If these are allowed to degenerate, it no longer has any unifying core. Hold true to them: these are the things upon which you should never compromise. Communicate with total conviction when you speak about or enforce these values.
Ten fundamental values of good teams are:
- Listening to each other with an open mind without interruption
- Sharing knowledge, information and experience with those who can benefit
- Taking key decisions based on reasoning not rank
- Expressing concerns only to those responsible for dealing with them
- A responsibility culture not a blame culture
- Basing work on the customer's needs and wants
- Striving for continuous improvement
- Behaving with integrity
- Positively challenging dishonesty or destructive behaviour
- No ego
The Green values are about involving people, and ensuring decisions have a broader base of expertise. The Red values are 'results' values. The Blue values are about ethical and cohesive behaviour.
These are all fundamental to creating a culture where people want to work. Time spent on these ten core values is time well spent.
The 'weather-vane leader'
How many times have you heard words like these:
- "They’ve gone back on their word."
- "I feel like the rug has been pulled from beneath me."
- "It’s a knee-jerk reaction."
- "He’s too easily led."
- "She echoes the most recent person she’s spoken to."
- "He’s inconsistent."
If justified, these comments are all signs of a leader not staying true. Your task in this respect is to ensure people can never reasonably say any of these things about you. The ‘weather-vane leader’ tries to be all things to all people. Instead you should stand by people who exemplify the team's values, and stand by reasonable directions, when pressured to change: ‘If you can keep your head when all around you are losing theirs…’ Rudyard Kipling, 'If'
Staying true to your vision for the organisation, when under pressure to change or when greeted with scepticism, is likewise essential to leadership.
Among the Six Keys to Trust, if Reasoning is one part of competence, Staying True is the other.Together they are the habits of setting a direction and values that people explicitly seek from leaders.
Consistency in these areas is therefore vital if you expect people to work hard for the collective goals. More leaders fail to achieve highly, and lose trust, because of inconsistency than the seemingly more major failings of malice, dishonesty or destructive behaviour.
Dealing with difficult people
Positively challenging destructive or dishonest behaviour is crucial if you are to avoid creating a permissive culture where anything goes. You owe it to every member of the team to positively confront issues of dishonesty, destructive criticism, or inexcusable laziness. If you do not, the team will lose its unifiying core of collective effort.
Follow these steps to positively challenge destructive or undermining behaviour:
- Gather the evidence and confront the behaviour by privately explaining your concerns
- Listen to the person’s justification
- If you feel there is no justification, you must not give ground on the team’s values, and you must proceed
- Describe the desired behaviour that should rather happen
- Do not threaten, but instead, promise: explain implacably and with moral certitude the consequences of any repeat of the undesired behaviour. You are then handing self-reliance back to the person.
- If the undesired behaviour is repeated, you owe it to the organisation and to every other team member to carry out the promised consequences.
For as long as the person remains in the organisation, do not divulge your discussions with their colleagues or subordinates. Your aim should be to try to bring the person back into the fold. This means giving them a chance to take responsibility without publicly losing face.
Follow these steps in conjunction with the appropriate Personnel advice. By doing so, over time most people will understand that you are protecting the positive values of the team.
'All virtue is summed up in dealing justly.' - Aristotle
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