Why do we need guiding principles

Values are universal. We all know what makes for a good life — be it personally or organizationally. There will be one or two in your list that makes your team uniquely you! Now here is where the rubber meets the road. This step gives you the edge of having a bunch of listed values that may or may not get used and values that inspire improved performance. Once the small groups have created their answers, then come together as a larger group and decide upon the final list. This may take a skilled facilitator to bring together for you, but it is definitely worth the time.

It is important that ALL team members have the chance to take part in describing the behavior Step 3 of this exercise. When team members are given the time to discuss and ponder the meaning of a value and how it will be applied in their day to day, and the results that can be expected, they will be more committed to seeing to it that the value is used. Author: Nancy Zentis, Ph. As a consultant in the field of OD for many years, she has developed Talent Management and Leadership Development Strategies for many leading organizations.

Interested in learning more? Related: Need Strategy Training? Take our course, The Secrets to Facilitating Strategy. Examples of guiding principles follow. Contact us about having a facilitator work with you on your strategy. Contact Me About Facilitation Strategies. Looking to get help with strategic planning? Our team of experts can help! Host a Public Class Contact.

We seek continuous improvement. When a mistake is made, not only do we correct it, we seek to understand why the mistake occurred and what we need to do to prevent it from happening again. We conduct our business in a socially responsible and ethical manner. We respect the law, support universal human rights, protect the environment, and benefit the communities where we work. We will not forget that our customers are our bosses, and that they pay our wages.

We believe to be effective industry leaders requires investment in innovative ideas. Therefore, we will: Interact with our customers to understand and respond to their changing needs. First things first, guiding principles are central to having an agile strategy.

So when we say guiding principles, another way to think about the topic is guidelines for decision-making for your team. So, what do you do about that? One way to address this issue is by having an agreed-upon set of guidelines or guiding principles that help keep your strategy alive and agile. Guiding principles are not values, as values are behaviors. It takes too long. It's far quicker just to tell people what to do".

Even though I empathized with him, I was able to have a discussion with him that went something like this:. As you know, we believe our Values drive our business results. One of our Values is Flexibility. We chose this Value because we know that it powers the behaviors, that enable us to more rapidly and readily achieve our goals.

Some of the guiding principles around Flexibility that we identified were:. If we were to stop involving people in the decision-making process, and keeping information up to them, we might risk diminishing the value of Flexibility. In the short term we may not notice a difference, other than decisions get made faster.

However, over the long term we'll definitely have team members who are less engaged, committed and involved with the business. I probably wasn't quite as articulate or formal as that -- but that was the intent of the conversation! But it also took any heat out of the conversation, because we traced it back to something that was solid