Values as a Decision-Making Tool
Why your values need to evolve as your business does
Photo by Angela Knox, The Divine Group
Earlier this year I started Brené Brown’s ‘Strong Ground’ (I got about halfway through and had to take a nonfiction book break and here’s my sign to pick it back up). In the book she mentions this idea about operationalizing your values. It means that value needs to have actionable language attached to it so that individuals can clearly understand what it means to be within that value, and what it means to be in contradiction to it.
During the brand strategy process, I’ve known the inherent value of having strong values and making them actionable. In fact, I used to use an I pulled from Pamela Slim’s ‘The Widest Net’ and include always/never language to make the values actionable. But her words around ‘operationalizing values’ really resonated with me and caused me to pull different language to bring action to values; I now use phrases like ‘we do this by’ or ‘in practice this looks like’.
It wasn’t until two things happened recently that rubbed me the wrong that I realized the irony - I’m a brand strategist who whole heartedly believes in the power of brand values, except I hadn’t done the work for myself.
I got there because both situations were client-adjacent and created a specific kind of discomfort where something feels off but it’s hard to put your finger on exactly why. I kept turning them over, trying to articulate what was actually bothering me, and I couldn’t quite get there.
And when I went back to my values, realized I didn’t really have anything updated, and had a good laugh at my expense because of course I hadn’t done the thing for myself that I help clients with regularly.
This post is part of the ‘Behind the Business’ series. You can read the rest (plus gain access to the archives) by becoming a paid subscriber. This series is an every-other-week post sharing personal thoughts, comments, strategies and tactics about the ups and downs of building a people-first, service-based business, as a mom and wife.
