How to achieve that your principles become the guide and inspiration of a company?
Iciar Sanz, partner and facilitador of Madavi The YES Company
The principles of a company are and should be the values that work as a guide and inspiration for the activity and mark the work lines of that company.
Those principles determine what is most important for a company and should be shared by all the people in the organization, given that they are the pillars of the corporate culture.
In the last years, most companies talk of corporative principles and their importance for growth and the strategy of the company as well as its employees. They are included repeatedly in their annual reports, in their manuals of Social Corporative Responsibility and in their internal communication memorandums.
The mangers and their teams continually talk of principles but very few would know how to define clearly which are the ones that rule the day to day of their company, and far fewer actually identify with them as their own. Does that happen in yours?
Sadly, in many companies their principles are merely phrases which no one interiorizes; they are posters that only serve to decorate the walls of the offices. They are something that exist, but no one pays them much attention.
For Madavi, principles are fundamental in any organization; they are values that are impregnated in the corporative culture and mark the direction of a company.
Treat the principles from abundance
It is important to treat the principles from abundance, not from scarcity; that is to say that instead of analyzing the behavior of that person you inquire into what is already good in him or her and give value to it, appreciate it.
How do you achieve that the principles of a company become more than just a poster?
For these principles to be worth something one needs to link to praiseworthy behavior each of these principles. For example, let us take confidence: “Think of a moment in your professional life in which you felt especially proud, in which confidence was the key. What happened? What were the circumstances? What people were involved….”
And so forth with all the principles of the company.
Because if it is something real, something that has happened to you, arising from your own experience, and not an intellectualization it makes the person believe it and, moreover, really think that he or she can actually do it.
A change based on strengths
We are talking about a philosophy of change based on strengths; we are talking about «Changing the way in which we change», a form of change based on two principles: Abundance and Simultaneity. Abundance is to see the best of what is in order to do it more and better, and Simultaneity is to keep in mind the whole system or a representation of the system to achieve an objective.
