This episode we meet Emma Canter to chat about leadership and values. Emma launched her business Mind Values Leadership around 4 years ago following a long career in HR at British Gas.
She supports both individuals and businesses in understanding more about their values, how our mind works and how that shows up in leadership.
How do we understand values?
Values shape who we are, what we care about, and inform decisions that we make.
Culture is often spoken about, as though we have complete control and can design it around our values. Emma argues that it is in fact a collection of different people coming together and behaving a certain way, although it can be influenced from the top down. As humans, we want to belong and prove to people we are doing a good job, and so the mimic factor comes into play here.
Part of Emmas role is to hold the mirror up and make leaders aware that how they express themselves influences the organisational. It’s really important for leaders to drive the values to promote the culture that they want.
How can organisations thread the values into an organisation – should it be process driven?
Emma talks about how it’s more about connection which is much more important than process. An example she drew on was performance management – there are many processes out there but this can over complicate when all that is really needed is a simple conversation.
“Connection and relationships take more time and effort than processes, but there’s greater reward and more of a long term strategy behind it.”
How do HR make this better?
To challenge this Emma’s asked – is this HR’s responsibility?
“There is an expectation that HR are the drivers behind this but it may be fairer to say their role should be more influencing and motivating leaders and teams to all take responsibility.”
We round up the podcast with Emma’s top tips that you can take back to your organisation to help influence leadership with the values piece.
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