How Are Our Top 2 Values Impacting Our Lives?
Have you ever thought about your top 2 values? Or your values in general? I was somewhat clear that I have values, but never thought much about what they were. And definitely not about how they were impacting the (work) life I am living. In situations where they probably tried to make themselves known, I just did not associate the frustration or dissatisfaction, I was feeling, with my values.
That changed with one of those eye opening moments one hopes to experience, when reading a nonfiction book. At least I do, ever since my first eye opening moments while reading “Radical Candor – Be A Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity” from Kim Scott. That book kept my eyes wide open for the entire time it took me to read it. You can find it here on Amazon or, I am sure, in your local bookstore or maybe even your library.
Kim Scott gave me a lot of valuable insights. Yet my eye opening moment regarding values and their impact happened when I read “dare to lead” from Brene Brown. I have to admit her writing style was not equally engaging to me as Kim Scott’s. Just a completely different style entirely. But I did learn a whole lot from Brene’s book, that I was able to apply in my day to day as a people leader. And in the process also spent time looking into my own values.
Brene, in her workbook, provides some questions to answer as a team or by yourself. The first is to select your top 2 values. She provides a list of values on her website to download. I followed her workbook and instructions when I read the book, but made this “my own”, when doing some exercises with my team as a team building event. You can find the “dare to lead” website here and download most of her material for free. I do highly recommend reading her book as well. The Amazon link here. (I do not get paid for those links!).
As an empathetic people leader I quickly realized the power of knowing and understanding my team’s top values. And most importantly the behaviors and reactions those might be causing in our interactions. It has also proven to be invaluable when attempting to understand, how to best navigate those impacts.
Just recently I organized a team building session with my team of Junior Managers. I have been working with my team for a while and, thanks to the pandemic, we also got to know each other on levels that I would not have expected before 2020. These Junior Managers are my so called “skip level” team. They are reporting to the Managers in my team. I love those opportunities to meet and learn. And there were definitely some interesting conversations to be had and lessons and details to be learned.
As a pre-work I provided the list of values and asked them to do two things before our session. First I asked them to select all the values that they felt were speaking to them. Next I tasked them to narrow that list down to their top 2 values and think about why they selected the ones they did. Since we were going to discuss our top 2 values in the session, I asked them upfront if it was ok for everyone and gave them the explizit ability to decline with no reason. But everyone was up for the fun. And while we had some serious conversations about it, we also had a lot of fun, too.
Discussing our top values allowed us to learn a lot about ourselves and our colleagues. As a next step, we discussed what those values meant for us in our personal and in our work life. Everyone had great examples. All of them were positive. I then challenged us to think about potential negative impacts our top values could have and why. This one was a lot trickier but we were able to collect some great examples.
Some of my colleagues have “family” as one of their top values. And all of them confirmed they consider their closest colleagues family, too. This value made them feel more connected to their colleagues, made them care and engage with each other. All very positive.
However with family as a top value, family (should) takes priority. So when the workload keeps us away from family, it can make work even more exhausting. We are feeling dissatisfied or otherwise impacted. And we realized it was good to be aware of this, so we could develop strategies how to deal with it.
Some other colleagues, including myself, have integrity as one of our top 2 values. And on a positive note it means, we are striving to walk the talk whenever possible. People around us do appreciate us for it without even knowing that it’s one of our values. They just simply appreciate the way we are acting. However life is not fair and we will encounter situations where walking the talk will be difficult. And if that happens we feel torn between what we must do (work order) and what our value wants us to do. It’s important to understand this will happen and have a strategy to deal with it, too. One strategy is, to think twice before we talk that talk. See my latest LinkedIn post about that topic here and share your thoughts!
Another value of mine is care & ownership. For me, those two have to go together. One would not work without the other at all. I am sharing my thoughts about care and how that goes along with ownership and integrity in this older post here. Still worth checking out!
When success is one of our values, we will put in the work and try to pull everyone around us with us, to achieve success. That can be very energizing and motivating. However if others are not at all focused on the successful outcome but are rather “enjoying the journey” there is a huge potential for conflicts in a project team. Being clear about what drives us and ideally what drives others can help translate and compromise for a successful outcome and a process everyone can get on board with and enjoy.
Thinking about our own values and candidly discussing them with others can be such a great tool for a much better collaboration. Our top values drive our actions, behaviors, reactions, attitude and so much more. The more we know about ourselves and others the better we can align, accommodate or decide to confront. Whatever we choose, we are making an informed decision. I highly recommend it. The personal stories discussed in my team building event will be cherished forever by everyone that participated. Our lives are better for it, what more can you ask for?
I did go one step further though, knowing that awareness is not yet a strategy on how to control our attitude. As much as we’d love that to be the case, not everyone will honor our values. Living and working means, something or someone will go against our values eventually. And we will not be able to control that. But we can prepare ourselves with a strategy and plan, so that we do have control over our reaction and attitude about it.
As a team we came up with these strategies and plans, feel free to copy, enhance, develop and make them your own:
- Understand when something is not sitting well with us or makes us dissatisfied, annoyed etc. it might be because of it going against our values. Worth clarifying first, if that is the case.
- Take a step back to allow our brains to catch up with our emotions before we react.
- Try to understand the “other side” and ideally assume positive intent.
- Have an open conversation about “the story we are telling ourselves” to reality check what’s happening (vs. assuming).
- Instead of showing a reaction, try to get back in the “driver’s seat” by influencing change.
We had a great discussion about how that could look, when one of our top values is growth yet we are working with someone that is apparently avoiding any learning opportunities and feedback that is offered. This can be super frustrating for someone who is driven by the eagerness to grow. Instead of exploding (which actually happened), we discussed that taking a step back, acknowledging the “attack” on our top value and then having an open conversation would work.
“We have asked you to join our monthly feedback session for a while now. These are a great opportunity to learn and grow. You might not know this about me, but growths is one of my top values and that makes it hard to understand, what is holding you back. The story I am telling myself is, that you are not interested. And I would really love to hear your side, to make sure I am not completely off and wrong.”
Much better than an outburst that could damage the relationship for good. Being open about our own values and vulnerable enough to talk about how something makes us feel can be tremendously powerful.
Opening up about our top values can also expose us to manipulation. For example if kindness is one of our top values, people might attempt to test how far they can go with us. We need to be aware that we are not going against our value of kindness, if we are also firmly standing up for ourselves and showing our boundaries. They are not exclusive.
Whatever our top values are, if we are aware of them and also know, how these are driving us and how someone going against them impacts us, we can use them to our benefit and have a strategies to navigate the rest. We will be in control.
What are your top 2 values and how are you making sure to use them to your advantage?
Please share in the comments!
Take care!
Nannette
