Values

You'll know from your personal life that your values are very important - they inform what you do and what you don't do. It's the same for a business too - but it can be hard to work out what your business values are - or what you want them to be.

Even though it can be hard work (particularly at the start) we'd encourage you to do some work on deciding what your values are. One way we've found useful is the following:

Imagine your business as a person. What are they like? Describe their personality? Do they remind you of anyone - fictional or real - living or dead? How do they deal with people? What's their tone of voice like? What are they known for?

Try doing that exercise with a group of people, writing down words on flipchart as people come up with them. It will probably be quite amusing - and may well get the creative juices flowing.

Once you've written down a number of words, have a look to see if there are any common themes. You could also ask people to choose their top five - and then you could discuss the most important values. Why are they important?

Another useful exercise is for people to have a think about what their personal values are. Again, this may help to generate ideas for the values which will be central to your business. Given that you'll be running a social business, and given that people who are involved are likely to be driven by a desire to "do some good", you may well find similarities between individual values and business values.

Here are some values from a few organisations, to get you thinking:

WRVS
The Furniture Resource Centre
Guiding principles from SEMCO (click on the management model link)
Innocent Drinks
John Lewis Partnership - they call values principles It might be worth watching reading about what they call the Partnership Spirit - there's a video about it too.

Comments

[mike chitty]

Community Links did some great work on this and produced a report called Living Values that has lots of good ideas for helping third sector organisations to strengthen their values and their impact on their behaviours and projects.

Earlier this year we ran a conference with the authors of Living Values in Hull to help third sector organisations to engage with the report. You can find out more about the conference and get a link to the report at:
http://tinyurl.com/yqmf42

One of the real challenges here is that it is behaviours that count rather than the values we espouse. You learn most about personal and organisational values from reflecting on actions and decisions. For organisations to work effectively with values there must be a robust ongoing process to help individuals and groups reflect on their actions, priorities and decisions against the context of the espoused values.
Very few organisations, in my experience, have any such robust process in place.

[David Fleming]

Hiya Rob
Thanks for sharing.

Having done a few things in the area of values and utilisations of values. You might find some mileage in focusing in on Valuing.
It makes it more active and enables you to address that level Mike Chitty's pointing to when he discusses robust process'

'Valuing' addresses the process rather than content level in this area.

The how rather than the what