388: Why Values Aren't Enough

Well, you know, I want to start with your reaction when we spoke the first time and I shared with you how I opened my podcast with this statement about values on the wall.

And your immediate response was, we're saying the same stuff.

So I want you to start out telling me and my audience, what did you mean by that?

The easiest thing a company or any organization can do is come up with a set of values host them send them out and stop right there and that's what many really do but what values should be doing is having an impact on behavior and when you talk about having an impact on behavior most frequently for things that really matter you're talking about setting or changing habits.

And you cannot do either unless you do more than post things in writing.

Now, I have a story that you and I shared briefly, and I'll tell you about it.

And basically, I had started my business, as you said, in 1986.

I'd previously been a trial attorney with the EEOC, an investigator while in law school for the commission before that, Then I defended employers for 10 years and I was a Parker and had started doing training, teaching people what to do and what not to do.

And I started realizing that the issue is not teaching them what to do, but overall getting them to do it.

And that's the hard part.

Now I had been in practice, and in my own business for a combined amount of over 20 years when I had an assignment at an organization, a great organization that I just refer to as Hospital X.

Hospital X was an extraordinary hospital with a national, international reputation.

I never say its name and you'll see why in a minute.

I was asked to work with a group of cardiac surgeons seven of them extraordinarily talented.

And when I went to work with them, what I was asked to do was to speak to people about their experiences working with this group of surgeons and also to learn about what the hospital had done in terms of developing standards of behaviors.

Now, let me just say they had values that had been in place a long time.

They were posted all over the place.

They were posted all outside of the operating room area.

You walk through the hospital, they were there.

You couldn't miss them.

So what was the issue? Even though these values stood for respect and teamwork and collaboration, What I found, and I'll just give you a couple of quick examples that have stayed with me for over 20 years.

I sat down and two nurses were across the table from me, surgical nurses.

What's it like for working with these doctors? They identified two people.

Here's what they said in summary.

One said, every time I go in that OR, I feel like I'm reliving the worst day of my life over and over again.