**Organisational values are one of the most under-utilised leadership and culture shaping tools. They can be meaningless ‘corporate speak – a ‘tick the box’ exercise. Or they can be the key tool in defining the ideal workplace culture, building accountability, and coaching team members.

In this episode we are joined by Stuart Hamilton (CEO) and Shelley Williams (Ops Manager) of R & J Batteries and we chat about how the creation of their values "The R&J Way" has helped shaped the organisational culture within R & J Batteries. You can view the "The R & J Way" Values video here**.

• Values are critical in your ideal culture for two reasons
• First, they help define it – if you have values, and whether you are living those values or not, at some stage they represented an aspiration of the organisation – the way you wanted to conduct yourselves
• A great question to ask is whether they are still relevant? Do they represent the ideal culture you want to have now – or one that is outdated?
• The second role they have is in bridging the gap between your ideal culture and the one you want to have
• The gap exists because what the organisation actually does is aligned with the actual culture not the desired one
• A challenge is for organisations to communicate to its members exactly what the ideal culture looks like – the bigger the organisation, the harder that can be. An even bigger challenge is explaining what that might look like in the day to day choices and decisions that people make
• Values are a way of decoding the ideal culture and stating it in plain expectations about the way people interact in the workplace

Some tips for establishing or refining the values

• Values work best when they are set by all team members and not imposed top down
• Values are both a right and an obligation – everyone has a right to be treated in these ways but everyone has an obligation to treat others in that way
• Values must be lived – if they are going to adorn a pretty plaque, make the annual report look impressive, and then gather dust – forget it. They are a waste of time
• By lived, we mean they must show up in the everyday behaviours and systems of an organisation. For example, if one of your values is Inclusivity, but you have policies or processes that are unreasonable barriers to flexible work arrangements, the value is not authentic
• This doesn’t mean there will never be inconsistencies – it is about the way we respond to those inconsistencies – either, oh that’s just the way it is OR that isn’t consistent, so we need to address it

Values aren’t always comfortable or convenient

• Authentic values must apply even when it isn’t uncomfortable. We can’t have some people (because of their status or technical performance or length of services or prickly character) who get away with treating others in a way that isn’t consistent with the values. The behaviour you walk past is the behaviour you accept
• There is a huge onus on leaders here. You need to be more accountable to the values than anyone because your actions are magnified. They are seen as endorsement of poor choice or an example and expectation of good choice
• Leaders are seen as the benchmark. They model for others what is expected of them. Your direct team will be influenced by you – through modelling and coaching – and they then reflect that influence in their interactions with their own teams
• The greatest thing you can do for the values as a leader is to model the way to accept values feedback from a team member – when one of them comes to you and says, I don’t think you were consistent with the values – how do you react? Is it defensively and hierarchically? Or is it authentically and consistent with the values?