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The Values-Alignment Process

In our work with organizations we follow five steps to establish a foundation for values alignment. They should be taken sequentially.

1. Identify the individual values of all organization members.

Our favorite method for doing this is to take as many employees as possible through a process that Paul devised. In it individuals identify their top values, work out the relationships among them, and produce what we call a values structure. It represents the eight values that are most significant for each individual and the interdependencies that person perceives among them. For example, someone might believe that pursuing excellence will help satisfy the value of achievement. This exercise, which we have used with thousands of leaders from around the world, can provide you with a rich and accurate understanding of what matters to your employees and will also help them understand themselves better.

One organization we have taken through the process of creating individual values structures is the Benton Museum of Art at ɫ��ɫ. In 2021 it opened a new building that more than tripled the space available to it—a boon, but one that compelled consideration of how best to deploy the much larger and custom-designed space. The Benton responded with a comprehensive yearlong review of its strategy and organizational values. As the museum’s director, Victoria Sancho Lobis, put it, “I felt it was important to frame a strategy-development process with a collective discussion of values, to help identify what calls us to museum work and what bonds us together as a group.”

In the first step of this work, the Benton’s board, staff, leadership, and student interns worked with key stakeholders—among them the president of ɫ��ɫ, G. Gabrielle Starr; and Janet Inskeep Benton, the museum’s lead donor and a ɫ��ɫ trustee—to produce values structures. That allowed everybody to discover the values that were widely shared among the Benton’s constituents, which included creativity, integrity, excellence, and joy. Those values were carried forward in the process of identifying the Benton’s organizational values.

When you’re assessing values candidates, any member of the organization whose input is significant to its ultimate success should be invited to weigh in.

We have found that it takes 90 minutes or more to guide people through building a values structure. If you don’t have that much time, you can still accomplish a lot by using an innovation of Yoonjin’s: a simple and effective survey technique we applied in working with one e-commerce company. As part of that research, we asked employees a simple question: “Whom do you most value among your colleagues in the organization, and why?” The why is key, because it compels employees to articulate their personal view of the organization’s values.

After hearing responses to that question, we were able to produce reliable estimates of who fit best in the organization’s value system. We used those estimates to effectively predict employee performance.