Happy New Year
You don’t have to believe in making New Year resolutions to use this time to reflect on who you are and where you are going in business.
Life can often lead to compromise. In the day-in day-out routine, what if you have a Jerry Maguire moment?
In this film starring Tom Cruise a sports agent has a moral epiphany. Jerry Maguire muses:
“Breakdown? Breakthrough. It was the oddest most unexpected thing. I began writing what they call a Mission Statement for my company…What started out as one page became 25. Suddenly I was my father’s son. I was remembering the simple pleasures of this job…I had lost the ability to bullshit. It was the me I’d always wanted to be.”
It’s easy to find yourself way off track in business or your career. Going against your values can cause deep anxiety. Doing or being someone you’re not, or acting in a way that gives you sleepless nights means it’s not time to make resolutions, but time to take a good look at your values.
“A value is an enduring belief upon which a man acts by preference” (Allport 1963)
Mission, vision and values statements only become real if we live and breathe them. The New Year is a time to refresh our business mission (what do we do), our business vision (what do we want to be) and our values (the way in which we will do this).
In all our communications work at Cicada we focus on behaviours; reinforcing or changing certain behaviours depending on the client issue. Values drive behaviour, so it’s important that we have consistent values that support a consistent experience for all our clients. Most importantly though we need to bring those values to life through our own behaviour.
We recently sat down as a team and refreshed our own Cicada values. We decided we needed these to say what’s important to us as an organisation; they guide us when we look at how we should make decisions and help us to collaborate. They are in essence the core of our Cicada culture.
Our new stated values are: to be strategic, professional, accessible, creative, and driven. We hope these will form the basis of all our relationships we enjoy with clients, colleagues and suppliers alike. They are the motivators for our collective behaviour and the building blocks for our team.
It all starts with recruitment. When interviewing new candidates for a job, why not consider going beyond skills mapping to conducting psychometric tests that match personal values to corporate values. If there is a close match you get a well aligned employee.
It’s always worth taking the time to step back and assess your values as a business, a team, and as an individual. There’s probably no more powerful driver than values – ill-fitting values can lead to a staff member causing disruption in a team or turn an employee into a loyal advocate of your brand. Get your respective values aligned, and you’ll have the right kind of success