The hard way: expressing your values and expectations in a formal presentation

Last time we talked about one of the most important things you have to do as a new leader in charge of a team: set the tone, or general atmosphere, that you create in your workplace or for your team.

There are two approaches to getting this done.

The easy way, and the other way

You can work it organically, person by person, by structuring your interactions with individuals and taking advantage of teaching situations in which you don’t simply render an opinion about something, but you explain what values motivate your decisions as you render opinions.

The other the way to go is to work it up front: have a presentation or some other mostly formal session where you outline what’s important to you and why. As we said last time, this can be tough to do, and sometimes you can pick which path you want to take.

If you are suddenly assigned to an organization in which you have had no previous leadership role, or you are taking over an organization and radically changing the management style, you almost have to have a formal session where you introduce yourself and your values to your new team. In this case you’ve got to do it the hard way.

The hard way

This is the situation in which I found myself after I took charge of the executing team in my organization.

I had been a part of the organization for about eight years, but my only official role on the executing team up to then had included responsibility for a group of one (not counting me). Most of the team knew me, but only as a familiar face. They didn’t know what I stood for, or what my goals for the center would be. There was a lot of uncertainty in the center about the new young guy in charge, and uncertainty causes discomfort and distraction.

I decided to call an all-hands meeting and talk about what was important to me, what people could expect from me, and what I expected from them. I’m very comfortable talking in front of groups, and I’m also fairly comfortable talking about what’s important to me, since I’ve spend a fair amount of time thinking about it, figuring it out for myself. But the talk was still not one I was looking forward to, because it was very personal. Talking about new computer technology is one thing. Talking about what I believed is a whole new thing altogether.

I felt strongly that it needed to be done, however, since I was taking over a situation in which morale was not growing because of a management style that did not focus on creativity or on creating and nurturing teams. In this context it was especially important for me to state up front that there was a new guy in town with new values and ideas about success.

So I got over not wanting to do it.

The talk

I focused the talk around my core values: respect, integrity, honesty, and teamwork. To help my message stick, I created an acronym around these four values: RIGHT. It was more than a little corny to add the acronym, and I debated for a long time about whether to use it (in fact, I thought about deleting it from this article!). It did give people something to walk away with, and got them talking about my message. Even if the conversations started with “Can you believe how lame that was?” at least some of the hall talk I heard then continued on to the core of what I said.

In the end I think the details of what I said were less important, in the specific atmosphere I inherited, than the fact that I said something about my beliefs. The impact you have will vary depending upon the prevailing mood of your team.

Overall, the talk went fairly well, with lots of questions about how I would translate my values into specific, concrete changes in the organization. Some were hostile, “Just because you say you value teamwork doesn’t mean you will.” And some were less so. I didn’t convince everyone that anything would change, and I didn’t expect to do so.

Helping people recognize change

But what I did accomplish was to give everyone a mental list of how things could be different. As they saw real examples of my values being put into action, these examples would register against the mental list, and slowly everyone would recognize the change in culture that was occurring. If I hadn’t given the talk and planted the list in everyone’s head, many people wouldn’t have been “watching” for the change, even if only subconsciously. These people would have kept working the old, anti-team way, because they weren’t primed for change.

Putting yourself on record

It’s your job to set and maintain the tone your team needs to create the kind of success you can all be proud of. Sometimes you have a choice about how you do this, and sometimes you really have to get out there and do it the hard way.

I will say this in defense of doing it the hard way — having the more formal setting in which you actually outline your beliefs all at once and set the boundaries within which you expect everyone to behave — it will put you on record with a public commitment that you won’t be likely to break.

This post is inspired by material in my book, The Only Trait of a Leader.