Leadership: Are Your Organizational Values Just Words on Paper?

How often have you heard that a leader needs to align the organizational values with employees so that they can be followed and practiced? The bottom line is that organizational values are just words on paper, and the leader must remind employees of their existence when trying to solve a problem, reach a goal or create a sense of unity.

The reason why organizational values have become just words on paper and seem not to be practiced is that employees are unlikely to abandon their personal values and solely adopt the organizational ones, creating a gap in their practice. Effectively aligning organizational values with employees requires a bottom-up leadership approach of aligning employees’ personal values with the organization, not the opposite. This allows team members’ collective personal values to drive the organization, which is more likely to lead to successful practice, because it’s personal and has meaning to people.

Aligning values

Common themes on aligning organizational values with employees are defining and communicating them clearly; integrating them into daily operations; recognizing and rewarding values-driven behavior; and leading by example. These are essential and correct measures for leaders to implement, but the problem is that employees simply might not practice an organization value if it isn’t one of their personal values and it has no attached meaning for them. For fire service leaders to create change, they must first lead their firefighters to identify and internalize their personal values and then help them to align those values to the department’s organizational values. Bridging this gap also might require the fire chief to adjust or adopt new organizational values for the department.

Aligning personal and organizational values in a department can increase employee engagement, commitment, and excellence in serving and protecting the community. It also can create shared meaning and camaraderie among team members, to boost unity between operations and the fire administration. When personal and organizational values are aligned and celebrated, it helps to guide team cohesion and decision-making. When they aren’t aligned, it can create a disconnect between team members and the fire administration regarding expectations of behavior and actions. However, personal values vary among team members and are most likely subconscious, whereas organizational values are selected consciously by the fire administration, operationalized and written in policies.

Personal values

Personal values drive an individual’s thoughts, words and actions. They also help people to learn, grow and develop. In these ways, they are important to a firefighter’s career.

Personal values are ingrained deeply in people and usually are attached to a major life experience or event, whether people consciously are aware of it or not.

Individual values indicate what’s most important to that person, influencing how the individual interacts with others, responds in situations and solves problems.

Examples of personal values are professionalism, civic duty, fairness, honor, legacy, trustworthiness and integrity. Examples of organizational values are accountability, preparedness, responsiveness, innovation, prevention, teamwork and respect.

Organizational values usually also represent the citizens’ input and expectations of the fire department.

Personal values can create stronger bonds among team members than organizational values can create but also can do the opposite. Differences can create tension and conflict when someone unintentionally violates another’s personal values. An example is a firefighter becoming irritated at another team member if the first person perceives the second as not acting professionally enough on an emergency call, not putting the citizens first or treating someone unfairly because their deeply held personal values might be professionalism, civic duty and fairness.

Tabletop exercise

Since personal values likely are subconscious, team members might not know why they feel so strongly about a value or get offended by things to the contrary. For this reason, it’s wise for fire service leaders to know each team member’s personal values to understand each person better and to learn how to align those personal belief systems with the department’s organizational values.

To bridge this gap, fire chiefs must lead firefighters in identifying and internalizing their personal values. Then, using the data that are collected, chiefs must align their team members’ collective top personal values with those of the organization.

Step 1: Identify personal values. The fire chief should direct the captains to pass out sheets of blank paper to each team member while at the kitchen table and ask them to write their top five personal values and a few sentences about why they chose each one. Ask them to think critically about why that value came to mind and whether there’s a major event, experience or special meaning behind its importance. Thinking critically about our values helps to bring them into self-awareness, where they become consciously driven and understood in daily actions and behaviors. Captains must ensure that everyone has enough time to contemplate each value and that no one feels rushed to write something down.

Step 2: Internalize personal values. After everyone wrote about the meanings behind each of their top five values, they must as a team share and discuss what they wrote. Having to explain personal values to others helps them to become internalized. It might take more than one shift for everyone to have the opportunity to share.

Sharing personal values and their meanings allows team members to learn more about each other, to form deeper connections and to look at each other through a new lens of understanding when tension or conflict occurs. Firefighters might tell stories about their values of professionalism, because they take pride in presenting themselves with a yes sir/yes ma’am attitude, which shows respect to the citizens. They might share that a parent served in the military, where civic duty was an honor and practiced as a family value. They might have a story about when they experienced unfairness and wanted to protect their teammates from it happening to them.

Sharing personal values and the stories that are behind their meaningfulness might influence another team member, who might internalize that personal value, to create shared meaning for that shift.

Step 3: Align personal values with organizational values. The captains should collect the sheets of paper from all of the team members and give them to the fire administration. The fire chief then can create a data set with each team member’s discovered personal values, ranking their order and frequency.

There’s a high probability that some of the team members’ top personal values align with the organizational values or might be similar or close in definition.

Team members’ collective top personal values should be represented and included in the organizational values. All other differing values need analysis to understand whether their rank and frequency are significant enough to add or replace existing ones.

The fire chief should create meaning for the remaining organizational values by sharing stories and experiences to help team members to internalize them. Bridging this gap ensures that the organizational values truly represent the team’s collective personal values, which increases the likelihood of their practice daily. Now, when the fire chief speaks of the organizational values, team members can be reminded that their collective top personal values are represented and individual stories behind their meanings can be shared to help to create unity.