Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

The BHO Group is a management consulting practice, specializing in leadership and HR development. The BHO Group exists to encourage leaders in business, education, and government with the vision that trusting relationships among staff can co-exist with a healthy bottom line. We believe that a healthy organization is a productive organization where respect, trust, and service flourish.

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Building Healthy Organizations

Trafford Publishing

Contents

Foreword.........................................................iiiPreface..........................................................vAcknowledgments..................................................ixIntroduction.....................................................xiSection 1 Defining Organizational Health.........................1Chapter 1: What are Values?.....................................5Chapter 2: Value................................................15Chapter 3: Aptitude.............................................29Chapter 4: Learning.............................................45Chapter 5: Unity................................................57Chapter 6: Empathy..............................................71Section 2: Building Healthy Organizations........................87Chapter 7: Finding the Balance..................................93Chapter 8: Organizational Checkup...............................111Chapter 9: Measuring Personal Values............................121Chapter 10: Value System Alignment...............................127Section 3: Maintaining Organizational Health.....................145Chapter 11: Promoting the Values.................................149Chapter 12: Building a Road Map..................................163Chapter 13: Maintaining a Proper Focus...........................175Conclusion.......................................................187Afterword........................................................193Endnotes.........................................................195Appendices.......................................................197

Chapter One

Every one of us has a value system that shapes who we are. The decisions we make every day are guided by our values. Some of those decisions are deliberate and easy to explain. Some are difficult to articulate, because they're related to intuitive, gut-feel reactions. Companies have value systems that shape how they do business and treat their customers and employees. Communities have value systems that establish what's accepted as "normal" and dictate how people are expected to behave around one another.

Building Healthy Organizations is about discovering the value systems that shape the interactions between the people who make up an organization. Initially, we wondered if this should be a book about individual value systems or about corporate value systems. It seemed like it was an important question, but in the end, we're not sure that it makes a difference. Why? Watch a leadership change take place in a company. Notice that it doesn't take long before the company seems to pick up the personality of the new leader; a strong leader's personal values are quickly adopted by the organization. When there's a clash between the new leader's values and the values already entrenched in the organization, there are big changes coming! People who can't embrace the new values become more and more uncomfortable, their stress levels go up, and they become unhappy. They might become so unhappy that they leave or so irritating that they're dismissed, or they might just sit there like a festering sore that needs attention. When new leaders aren't strong enough to survive the transition period and instill their values into the organization, they will be the ones who experience increasing stress and either leave or fester.

Where value systems match, people will find that they fit. The less their value systems match, the more discomfort they experience. When there's little in common, there's little to provide a bond. People who don't share the same values misunderstand each other's actions and often end up in conflict.

Understanding Values

Individually, people express their value systems in a different way than organizations do. Our personal values are a collection of preferences, beliefs, and boundaries that shape our decision making and help define our responses to pressure or stress. An organization's values are expressed in the policies, principles, and expectations that direct the behavior of its employees.

Preferences

Preferences are things that are pretty much negotiable. All of us have ways that we'd like things to be done and ways that we'd like people to relate to us. For the most part, we're pretty flexible about these things. Preferences can change over time with the slightest motivation. One day, we discover a different soft drink in the machine down the hall, and we have a new favorite! Sometimes we change our preferences on purpose-if we discover that we need to adjust our preferences to suit someone else's style, we can make that sacrifice with a little effort. That's not to say that preferences aren't important-they are. They tell us quite a bit about ourselves, but they're not very deeply rooted. More important, they are rarely the underlying cause of conflict nor are they the glue that bonds us to others.

Organizations have preferences that are described by their policies. Policies, in effect, spell out how the organization wants its staff to act in a given situation. Like a person's preferences, an organization's policies are important, but they do change over time. A new situation comes up, and a revision to the policy comes out to address it.

Beliefs

Our personal beliefs go much deeper than our preferences. Beliefs are some of the building blocks that define who we are and why we do what we do. Beliefs have a profound impact on our character, outlook on life, and reactions to life's bumps and surprises. Consider how our beliefs define our answers to life's difficult questions: Where do we come from? Why are we here? What happens to us when we die? Why do things happen the way they do?

Beliefs aren't necessarily based on facts. Sometimes they have more to do with perception than reality. For example, a person might be perfectly capable of doing something. They have the aptitude, skill, and strength to do it. But, if they believe that they can't do it, then, for them, that belief becomes reality: they can't do it. Belief becomes a limiting factor. It works the other way too. People do amazing things just because they believe they can, without any experience, training, or apparent qualification, because "I just knew I could!"

While beliefs are close to values, they're still not the foundational building blocks of our character. Beliefs change over time. We grow, experience, and try things. Repeated failure has a way of making us believe that what we'd hoped to do is impossible. On the other hand, success has a way of expanding our horizons and making us believe that a whole new arena of possibility exists where we'd previously seen limitations. Beliefs shape our faith, self-image, and ability to trust and love. What we believe can either empower us or hold us back.

Organizations have beliefs too, but they're expressed by the principles that guide decision-makers. Often those principles, like a person's beliefs, aren't written down anywhere-they're a commonly held ideology that shapes the way the organization writes its policies and expresses its goals, but they're difficult to articulate or describe. Leaders in an organization are referring to principles when they talk about the way the organization likes to do things or when they make choices about what they will...