Yellow Flower - Aoru - FlickR CC

As we move out of the worst of the recession, and the US showed a 5.6% growth for the latest quarterly released figures from the Treasury, we should be able to ask what can we do to accentuate the positive.

A good intelegant approach is to push the vision up the agenda - give people a “totem pole” to gather round and the tribe will be more cohesive. The most important part is that values and strategy work together well.

There has been lots of recent thought around this area. Authors such as Richard Barrett, who created the Values Center, with it’s emphasis on vision and values, I have been a fan of a longtime, have been working on this theme for a long time and it is one that more organizations need to take seriously.

In the current era of cost-cutting and expediency it is tempting to push values and vision to the backburner and simply focus on bottom line top line issues - however while it is easy to see the folly of this it is more difficult to drive it forward in the real day to day cut and thrust of commerce.

The best companies take values seriously, our core values and ethics make us feel more surety, as well as more professional and more creative: and those are not bad attributes to want in employees in tough times…

On sure way to do so is to run some Appreciative Inquiry workshops. They are a very resilient way to approach long-term motivation by linking real, proven past successes and those stories, the tribal myths, if you will, with the future positive hopes of the teams. This not only brings continuity, it also reinforces messages of success, and creates a success culture. A side note here would be that AI is also good for encouraging openess, transparency, and clarity when success eludes us, as it emphasizes a culture where failure is discussed without attribution.

Values are not trivial or expendable. They should be the core of our thinking. And with clear values comes the elimination of the negative.