Alexandre Dumas wrote a classic tale on the adventures of d'Artagnan after he leaves home to become a guard of the musketeers. Throughout their adventures, the Musketeers lived by the motto "all for one, one for all", and this creed was their foundation. Through this value, regardless of trial, they knew they were not alone and were able to focus as a team aligned to their purpose.
In 2011, we are challenging all of our coaching clients to help drive alignment for their organization by highlighting one of their values, adding it to everyone’s development plan, and measuring progress throughout the year. Whether you have a team of 2, or an organization of 50,000, imagine the power of everyone having a consistent value that will be discussed in every 1:1 progress meeting and reported on in every year end performance review. This value will be all for one and constant for all.
Here are three tips for making this challenge a success:
- Win as individuals and as a team: create opportunities to celebrate success from multiple angles
- Reap benefits through consistency: there is power in highlighting one value. It does not mean your organization ignores the others, but highlighting one for a limited period of time ensures consistency.
- Align to the business strategy: highlight a value that is important for leveraging a core strength or improving an overall capability that will directly affect the business strategy
An additional benefit with this challenge is that you fully empower your team to “call you out” if you aren’t aligned to the value (nothing like real-time coaching!). If you decide to take this challenge what is the one value that you and your musketeers will align around for 2011?
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