If your company has a mission, vision and/or values and you are curious to find out if your employees are living them each day, there’s a simple way to find out.
And for the purpose of this post let’s say that one of your company’s values is integrity. To find out if integrity is practiced in the way that you have defined it, try this:
Invite a group of 5-10 employees to attend a meeting at which you ask them to respond to this request:
“Please tell a recent, truthful and specific story about a time you saw a colleague practice integrity.“
Give them a few minutes to think about it and then sit back and listen.
Stories are the fastest way to the truth of what’s going on. If there’s a compelling story to be told, you have compelling evidence of the existence of that particular part of your cultural aspiration. If not, it doesn’t exist…or at least not how you hoped it might.
And that leads to your second request of the group:
“What ideas do you have about how to bring integrity alive in our organization.What would make it more likely that you would have more stories to tell?”
Repeat the conversation with another group and then another and another, until all leaders share the responsibility for being collectors of stories and facilitators of the ideas that will bring your culture to life.
DAVID BERRY is the author of “A More Daring Life: Finding Voice at the Crossroads of Change” and the founder of RULE13 Learning. He speaks and writes about the complexity of leading in a changing world.
