“Values are fluffy, weak, tacky. Success is all about mission, strategy and execution.” At Herculean Alliance, we don’t agree with that statement at all. In fact, looking at the past years, we only hired and fired by values, never by skills.

Values define how you expect to regard your customers, community and suppliers, how you want to behave toward each other; and what will have priority, as well as the lines you will and will not cross.

If values of the organisation match the values of the individuals, chances for a successful collaboration increase. We have experienced that if just one of those values doesn’t match, chances for failure increase even more.

We even experience that when values do not match well, chances for individual burnout increase. In our burn-out recovery and prevention programs, we often come across these issues. We also help organisations embed their values within the organisation.

Values reflect our assumptions and beliefs. Values serve as a decision-making guide and a source of energy for the organization. Values shape the behavior of the people in an organization. They determine how people treat each other, how they approach their work and how they interact with others.

Recruiting people who already have values that are in alignment with the organization’s core values is important to actualize the mission and vision. You can easily train a person on how to do a job, but it becomes much harder to train a person to have the same values as your organization so pick wisely.

Likewise, when it comes to firing someone usually it is a value-related decision.  “They’re just not the right fit,” you hear often.  What they mean is that the organization has a set of values and beliefs and the person being let go doesn’t align with those values. It doesn’t mean the person of the organisation are “bad” or that the values are “bad”, it just means that the magic wasn’t there given the circumstances and that the relationship isn’t meant to be.

When people look at Herculean Alliance they easily associate us with “wow”, “fun”, “great”, “yeah”, “cool”, “wanna be part of this” but 99% of the people forget the hard work, the struggle, the suffering… behind the scenes. It’s not because we run a very cool company, that we don’t face the same challenges as any other company.

So no, values are not some mushy, feel-good literature we put around our organizations.  They are the determining factor of who gets on our bus, who needs to get off our bus and where we plan to head once the bus is going full steam ahead.

Need some help on those values? Contact us.