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The Values-Driven Organization: Cultural Health and Employee Well-Being as a Pathway to Sustainable Performance
Values-driven organizations are the most successful organizations on the planet. This book explains that understanding employees’ needs—what people value—is the key to creating a high performing organization. When you support employees in satisfying their needs, they respond with high levels of engagement and willingly commit their energies to the organization, bringing passion and creativity to their work.
This new edition of The Values-Driven Organization provides an updated set of tools to assess corporate culture, new case studies on cultural transformation and additional materials on sustainability, measuring cultural health at work and the specific needs of the millennial generation.
The Values-Driven Organization is essential reading for students, researchers and practitioners of organizational change, leadership, HRM and business ethics.
This new edition of The Values-Driven Organization provides an updated set of tools to assess corporate culture, new case studies on cultural transformation and additional materials on sustainability, measuring cultural health at work and the specific needs of the millennial generation.
The Values-Driven Organization is essential reading for students, researchers and practitioners of organizational change, leadership, HRM and business ethics.
304 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 26, 2017
15 people are currently reading
29 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 1, 2018
This is a great book that not only talks about values in vacuum, but puts it in context of personal development, leadership, and culture (mainly organizational but touches upon societal culture as well).
The book is centered around the "seven levels of consciousness" which can be viewed from different perspectives yielding the same meanings. The perspectives are individual, team, organization, and community/society. The seven levels are: survival, relationship, self-esteem, transformation, internal cohesion, making a difference, and service.
As I said, each level can be viewed and interpreted slightly differently based on the different perspectives. Where are values from this model?.. this is the defining moment: different values map to the different levels of the consciousness which yields to a powerful and simple model for measuring and analyzing values for personal, team, organizational, and societal development and/or transformation.
With that, I cannot say the book was a perfect round without any issues. It had some rough edges that made it a bit difficult to read sometimes. Here are some details:
The beginning was a bit confusing as the model was not stated clearly, and the author some how assumed the reader knows about it. Actually, there are appendices that should be put as early chapters in the book to properly introduce the topic; namely Appendix 10: A Brief overview of the origins of the Seven Levels of Consciousness model. If you know nothing about Barret's work, then I highly recommend that you start with that appendix.
The book then started to clear itself and turned into a cohesive and practical guide througout Part I: Understanding values. I especially liked his model of whole system change which captures the issues and challenges of alignment (and mis-alignment): personal alignment (betweem what you espouse as values and what you do and behave), values alignment (between pesonal values and organizational values), mission alignment (between what you do and what the organization does and behaves), and structural alignment (between what the organizaiton espouses as values and how it is strutured and how it works and behaves).
Unfortunately, in Part II, the author started to explain the tools that he uses with Values Centre clients. It's practical and useful, but the tone is increasingly "sales" which I see inappropriate, especially in Ch 6. I felt I'm reading a product sheet. After that, he started to show example after another with figures and analysis to a boring degree. A summary could've been better with pointers to more studies and stats in appendices. As you can see, the most important is left in appendices, and the less important (to a reader, I mean) is unfortunately brought to the front.
The book recovered in Part III, especially in Ch. 12: Reducing Personal Entropy, Ch. 14: Coaching the leader, and Ch. 15: The Leader as a Coach/Role Model. These chapters were on a completely different tone and content, and I found them very important chapters for self-development and self-coaching.
Part IV was mediocre as it turned into a rhetoric tone with very little connection to the particality of the book. The author started to talk about some many fragments that are still valuable but could have been much better and more connected to the part's title: structural alignment.
All in all, I recommend this book as it shows you "values" from different and practical perspectives. It is full of appendices that are more important than the original chapters themselves. Read it with patience and - more importantly - with a goal in mind: such as understadning and/or transforming yourself, your organization, or your community. Transforming the whole world through values is possible but honestly, it is a tough call 😉.
The book is centered around the "seven levels of consciousness" which can be viewed from different perspectives yielding the same meanings. The perspectives are individual, team, organization, and community/society. The seven levels are: survival, relationship, self-esteem, transformation, internal cohesion, making a difference, and service.
As I said, each level can be viewed and interpreted slightly differently based on the different perspectives. Where are values from this model?.. this is the defining moment: different values map to the different levels of the consciousness which yields to a powerful and simple model for measuring and analyzing values for personal, team, organizational, and societal development and/or transformation.
With that, I cannot say the book was a perfect round without any issues. It had some rough edges that made it a bit difficult to read sometimes. Here are some details:
The beginning was a bit confusing as the model was not stated clearly, and the author some how assumed the reader knows about it. Actually, there are appendices that should be put as early chapters in the book to properly introduce the topic; namely Appendix 10: A Brief overview of the origins of the Seven Levels of Consciousness model. If you know nothing about Barret's work, then I highly recommend that you start with that appendix.
The book then started to clear itself and turned into a cohesive and practical guide througout Part I: Understanding values. I especially liked his model of whole system change which captures the issues and challenges of alignment (and mis-alignment): personal alignment (betweem what you espouse as values and what you do and behave), values alignment (between pesonal values and organizational values), mission alignment (between what you do and what the organization does and behaves), and structural alignment (between what the organizaiton espouses as values and how it is strutured and how it works and behaves).
Unfortunately, in Part II, the author started to explain the tools that he uses with Values Centre clients. It's practical and useful, but the tone is increasingly "sales" which I see inappropriate, especially in Ch 6. I felt I'm reading a product sheet. After that, he started to show example after another with figures and analysis to a boring degree. A summary could've been better with pointers to more studies and stats in appendices. As you can see, the most important is left in appendices, and the less important (to a reader, I mean) is unfortunately brought to the front.
The book recovered in Part III, especially in Ch. 12: Reducing Personal Entropy, Ch. 14: Coaching the leader, and Ch. 15: The Leader as a Coach/Role Model. These chapters were on a completely different tone and content, and I found them very important chapters for self-development and self-coaching.
Part IV was mediocre as it turned into a rhetoric tone with very little connection to the particality of the book. The author started to talk about some many fragments that are still valuable but could have been much better and more connected to the part's title: structural alignment.
All in all, I recommend this book as it shows you "values" from different and practical perspectives. It is full of appendices that are more important than the original chapters themselves. Read it with patience and - more importantly - with a goal in mind: such as understadning and/or transforming yourself, your organization, or your community. Transforming the whole world through values is possible but honestly, it is a tough call 😉.
October 15, 2020
I enjoy reading this book. But, I don't buy into the perspective that CEOs should be social justice warriors.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews