Changes We Had to Make

As we developed more clarity around the values of the clients we enjoyed working with the most, we found more and more opportunities to challenge them on how to tie those values to nearly every conversation they had with their teams. This didn’t require major changes in what they were already doing; just a touch of intentionality in the message they shared. With each of those clients, it was fairly routine to discuss their team members’ performance - specifically, how that performance contributed to the overall productivity and profitability of their organizations. The slight change we were able to make in those conversations was to press each executive on how they could connect the employee’s behavior, which contributed to or pulled away from that productivity and profitability, to any of their stated core values. While this initially took a bit of prodding, mainly because it hadn’t been something they ever really considered in depth before, it quickly became second nature - at least when we asked them about it specifically.

Making the connection when pressed during a one-on-one conversation and communicating those connections with the team member in a real life scenario proved to be two very different things. One of the first things I learned during my initial training on behavior-based safety was the power of habit. Depending on the source, it generally takes 21 to 30 days to develop a new habit or change an existing habit, assuming we’re able to perform the behavior tied to the desired habit routinely without slipping back into whatever we had been doing previously. Whether that’s biting our fingernails, smoking cigarettes, or intentionally connecting a team member’s behavior to our values, making a change once doesn’t equate to sustaining that change. Through our conversation with those clients, we realized that we’d need to be just intentional about finding ways to help them maintain their slight changes as we were in working with them to make the connections to begin with. Since that time, we’ve rarely had a conversation with any clients, existing or perspective, without discussing their values.

While we were developing a clear understanding for how to best support our clients in keeping their values visible throughout their teams, I can’t say that we had the same clarity around our own values. After more than two decades of marriage, being involved in several business projects together through that time even before launching Dove Development & Consulting, Cindy and I had a strong sense of what we valued most. That said, we had only discussed those in generalities for ourselves and in how we related to the words or phrases any particular client listed as their values. Unfortunately, even with what I felt were some deeply held personal values in mind, I hadn’t taken the time to specify them or detail what behaviors would be required to practice them daily. 

We’ll look more at the specifics of this later on. For now, just know that the simple act of putting our values to paper and outlining what someone should see us doing to model them was significant. Doing this also helped us be even more effective in supporting our clients as they worked through the same process. Before we begin working through any of those steps in detail, I’ll share a quick example of how we’ve seen closely held and consistently communicated values have a direct impact on a business’s bottom line.