So, you’ve aligned your strategic mission and vision statements. But where do your trust’s values fit in? This article will outline the importance of using a set of well-defined core values to guide your trust’s growth and development.
Your trust’s culture is its personality. And it is created by the values, attitudes, and behaviours of your organisational community. This personality is what attracts and keeps great talent, as well as helping to build long-lasting relationships with stakeholders and schools.
But a good culture doesn’t spring up out of nowhere. It requires intentional and thoughtful identification and deployment of the core values your trust is built upon. Everyone knows what values are: principles or standards of behaviour that your trust holds in high regard. But there’s a difference between having a few inspirational words on your website and having truly well-crafted and unifying values.
Last month, we discussed how a well-defined mission and vision can positively direct your trust, but it’s also essential to identify and codify your team values.
Here’s how you can identify whether your values need reconsideration:
1. Review your mission and vision to ensure alignment
Do your current values reflect your mission and vision? Since your trust culture is closely tied to its mission and ultimate vision, it’s important to define where you’re headed early on the values definition process.
2. Assess the effectiveness of your current values
Find a starting point to build upon – are your leadership team and trustees demonstrating your values? Are they reflected in the rest of your trust community? And are they used to guide decision-making at every level? Organisational culture begins at the top and flows down. Review your management approach and ensure that your values are useful for both reflection and strategic decision-making.
3. Decide if your values need to shift
If you’ve followed the process to this point and decide that your values are still a perfect fit for your organisation, that’s great! But perhaps you’ll decide to go ahead and develop a new – or revised – set of values. In this case, be sure to involve as much of your trust’s community as possible in the process and decide on a set of values that you need to reach your strategic goals.
Assessed and decided to develop your values? Here’s a 3-step process to establish and embed your new values to ensure maximum impact:
1. Determine the behaviours you want to encourage in your community
Now you have a clear picture of where your trust is right now, as well as the direction you’re headed, it’s time to define your values in this context.
To achieve your mission, what kind of community do you need within your trust? Consider the type of trust you want to be and how you’d like to achieve your mission. This will act as a filter to attract the kinds of schools (and the right talent) to create the community you want.
2. Define what your chosen values actually mean.
A value is not just a word, or a mantra. It must be clear what behaviours and processes are supposed to be followed to honour this value. Members of your organisation need to have a definitive understanding of how to put each value into action.
3. Put your values into actions and processes
Finally, your newly defined (or refreshed) values will need to be integrated into your operational processes. This includes the addition of new schools to your trust community, as well as the talent lifecycle.
A solid foundation of clear and well-defined values will not only help you attract the right people and schools, but also build a genuine and impactful community.
If you’re still stuck for ideas, here are a few of our favourite values from our very own mission, vision and values statement:
1. Relentless improvement
We encourage our team to call out improvements wherever they see them, regardless of whether it’s their area of expertise or control. Improvement always trumps hierarchy, and we’re our own competition.
2. Proactivity
We want to positively surprise customers with what we do. This means never doing only what we can get away with and helping customers with things unrelated to our product wherever possible. Our default answer is ‘yes’. Everyone has a different idea of what good customer service looks like, and this is ours!
3. Do
Short and snappy, this value is about getting stuff done! It’s easy to procrastinate so we encourage our team to start and iterate rather than chasing perfection. Perfection doesn’t exist, so why wait?
We hope you find something valuable in this guide (no pun intended). And if you missed our previous post all about mission and vision statements, you can check it out here.
Keep an eye out for our upcoming sector insight report all about mission, vision, and values in MAT finance.
