Values based… everything

Now that everyone is back in full swing after the festivities, I wanted to use this week’s blog to introduce one of the themes we are going to discuss across the remainder of January and that is “values based”… We have all heard of values-based recruitment and next week Neil Eastwood is going to make his promised guest appearance to share his experience, amongst other things.

However, there is much more to values; clearly we need to include them in the recruitment process and Neil will outline why next week. Values can form part of our leadership style, values ideally will inform our day-to-day practice, but sometimes values can feel like rules and possibly feel restrictive. Can values be “right” or “wrong” and is that helpful?

Let’s start with a definition: Google says values are principles or standards of behaviour or a judgement of what is important in life. Now the last thing we want to do is make values “judgemental” or good and bad.

Perhaps an alternative view (credit to Susan David) for opening my eyes is that values are not “rules”, but qualities of purposeful action. Above all a value is something you can use, to guide you in the right direction.

One person’s or organisation’s set of values will naturally be different, relevant to that setting and the people they support; neither of those sets of values will be right or wrong, but hopefully qualities of purposeful action in that setting.

So this week I am really keen to hear what your values are, what guides you in your setting?

How do you use values to inform your practice or leadership?

What qualities of purposeful action do you seek out?

We will delve a bit deeper as the month progresses, not least of which looking at “values-based leadership” and the modules in the Skills for Care, Well Led programme.