BUSINESS INOVATE

Creativity, innovation and change begin with the top team if possible, i.e. the leadership group. All individuals in that team need to get clarity about their own beliefs and values and the role they wish to play in life, be it work life or home life.

Behaviours need to align with those personal values and beliefs; otherwise you can’t function as a human being. In business, behaviours need to model personal values and beliefs consistently; otherwise the other people in the organization will simply get confused, and low levels of trust will be created.

Communication strategies such as mission statements, vision statements and statements of values from an important part of this process. However, they are only labels and as such are superficial. The important part of these statements is how they are represented inside people’s minds. The top team’s representations of those messages will be communicated through behaviour. Once the senior team has completed this initial task of establishing their own sense of themselves, and modeling this in the context of the business, the journey rolls on to the next layer.

The next layer in the business needs to do the same piece of work, identifying with clarity their own beliefs and values and the behaviours that support these. This will be done in the context of their home life and the business, and in the context of the messages being delivered from the leadership team. Everyone in the next layer will identify their way of making the values of the business real, and it will be communicated through their behaviour. Because the sense of understanding of what the business and its values are about will be very deep and internal to each person, it means that individuals can have flexibility to communicate message differently. However, these differences will all be aligned within a core context of business values.

The leadership team can have confidence that people will be working in a common way yet with flexibility so that, instead of robots, you have heroes who can use their talents and capabilities.