Are Company Values Meaningless? Lead through your OWN values

Episode #10 // Leaders tend to talk glowingly about their own values, and every organisation has an advertised set of them. But how many actually behave in accordance with their values? In this week’s episode, we’re going to talk about how to get this right.

In addition to talking through why corporate values are so often meaningless (with a few fun real world examples to prove my point) I’m going to cover:

• A really interesting perspective from Denise Lee Yohn who wrote a brilliant HBR article in early 2018 about the five words that should be banned from corporate values statements
• Some of my rules of thumb for how we should view the corporate values statement
• A great example of a company who I think walks the walk in terms of their company values - they have built their values into their DNA and I’ve seen this first hand
• How leaders can lead through their personal values even if they are different to those values that the company sets (first step to getting this right: you’ve got to eat your own dog food!)

The punchline of this episode is simply to pay attention to your values, and the leadership brand that you're creating for yourself. Company values have a place, but ultimately, it’s more important to develop and live by your own personal values - that’s what will turn you into a person that other people will follow willingly.

You want people to aspire to be some of the things that you are already, in their own unique way.

To help you with this, I put the key points into a PDF download for you ‘The 7 Ways to Set Values & Lead Through Them’ which you can get at www.yourceomentor.com/episode10.

When you’ve had a chance to go through these points, I’d love to hear what your values are so send me an email at hello@yourceomentor.com or send me a message on LinkedIn.

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