How will leaders inspire the Value-driven performance?

Value is an important but abstract belief that leaders hardly shed the light on. Value is also classified as one of the  three layers of culture in organization (Schein, 1990). From that classification, value position is about what all staff try to identify and to translate the beliefs into actions. Therefore, organizations must determine the explicit core values with descriptors for aligning key competencies to achieve the organizational strategic goals, vision and mission. Defining the core values that link with key competencies is a critical step for aligning staff performance with organizational goals and strategic priorities to realize the vision and mission. 

The core values will be turned to manifestation embodying the abstract values through the actions. When staff perform by the values, they manifest in their daily activities at work. Values that binds with key competencies will also provide feedback on staff’s core competencies to perform by the values that pinpoints in the descriptors of key competencies. Value-driven performance will then improve work performance through aligning their attitudes and behavior with the organizational core values. Seminal research findings confirm the staff’s positive attitudes of work to link with job satisfaction and will improve work performance. Likewise, Senge in the Fifth Discipline model strongly argued staff to align their mental models and personal goals with organizational goals to converge all their thinking and actions to achieve the organizational goals. However, staff per se will challenge to align their mental models (thinking and believing) with the org goals. Therefore leaders must step in and thoroughly plan the actions to inspire the staff to uphold the grounded core values to motivate staff’s buy-in. 

Accept it or Get Sanctioned! Most of the coercive measures for staff to accept values will backfire on leadership effectiveness and undermine the staff motivation, job satisfaction and burnout. Most leaders prefer to sanction staff to give in and behave in accordance with the company grounded values. Value acquisition is not meant to be forced to succeed for human beings. Staff has their own personal motivation, goals and perspectives stemming from their lives’ experiences and educational background. Different staff has different cultures which poses a challenge for culture assimilation at the work place. Despite having the common core values or corporate culture , organization leaders can not force staff to acquire the values against their wills. External regulations will negatively motivate staff in the shorter time period and they will discontinue the actions after no controlling or close monitoring by the superiors. If leaders do not end up with another errand task of watching and reinforcing staff’s behaviors to be aligned with core values, they must inspire to drive an intrinsic motivation for staff to internalize the core values for the continuity. 

Inspiration is from an inner circle of thinking,which is aroused by the personal beliefs of staff that translate their leaders’ actions into positive attitudes. It is quite a popular quote  “action speaks louder than words” that leaders’ actions are being watched by many angles of their inner circle teams and crossed functional teams. Top or senior leaders are the hotspots of interest by many staff. If top leaders want to inspire value-driven performance, they must act to build Trust through  fostering Relatedness. What we echo for leaders to build trust through relatedness is beyond the common actions that most org leaders do in clarifying the core values, applying proper communications to translate core values into actions to be performed by all staff and so forth. Besides all of external measures, building trusts to inspire the value assimilation demands establishing a high relatedness with staff. Several relatedness activities include creating social and emotional space for personal relation and storytelling. Supporting teams to voice up and share their Initiatives is also a part of relatedness, on top of massive staff related programs. Autonomy is also a crucial ingredient for relatedness building which is more likely about how staff raise voices, concerns and creative ideas for improving the organization. Initiating a staff learning day is also an empowerment for  building staff relatedness through collective learning and coaching. 

Value is a part of culture which is unilaterally translated in organization by all staff and their leaders. Since value is linked with staff key competencies to achieve the organizational goals and strategic priorities to realize the vision, leaders are argued to inspire value-driven performance through building trust by fostering a high relatedness. Values can not be forced only by external regulations, namely policy, rules and standards. Value assimilation must be built from the inner circle of staff thinking for continuity of actions. Therefore, to inspire the value for staff to acquire, leaders needs to build a high relatedness to gain long-term trust to positively influence staff thinking and believing.

3 Tools for Managing Data at No Costs

Data Management is argued to firmly support the organizational learning. Learning organization relies on the knowledge management to innovate products and services to gain competitive edges over the rivals. Research has confirmed that the more effective knowledge management, the more innovative for competitive advantages. Managing knowledge is to turn the learning results of individual, team and organization to data which can be accessed and reused by the individual and teams for ideation and decision-making. For the importance of effective knowledge management, organization needs to properly record the knowledge as the product of learning of individual, team and the organization per se, in the database system for sharing and reusing in the robust cycle of work. Since knowledge can be tacit and implicit, it poses a challenge for filling the database with unnecessary and invaluable data which will complicate the data reusing and assessment. Therefore, it is recommended for the organization to design a knowledge management channel which identify the way knowledge flows and how to filter the valuable knowledge for organizational needs. 

Database management is another systematic way of recording and retaining the data for reusing. Since organization, not to mention their different departments and units, has a lot of data for communication, including irrelevant ones, they needs a database system to manage the overwhelming data for effective work communication. When we sneak about data, it also comes in a variety of forms - text, image, Multimedia, sounds... Then the organization needs a robust database system which can effectively handle all forms of data for recording and accessing. For a caution, Multimedia data such as video file and image consumes more storage space to put a burden on database system. In the current database technology, there are three ways the organization can set up their database system. The first one is offline and on-site database server, where computer servers with high valume of storage / Hard Disk drives are installed as the mainframe computer to record, retain and to retrieve for reusing. The second mode of database system is on-site and cloud-based data servers. This mode enables the data to be safely stored and secured by cloud server by giant cloud server company, namely Google Workspace, Amazon Web Services, Alibaba and so forth. Moreover, the organization still needs to install the computer servers as the mainframe for data communication but no requirement of high volume data storages / Hard Disk Drive. For the third mode, organization can consider web-based database system which all the configuration is on the world wide web and stored in the cloud servers. This approach is more convenient for data management and the configuration. However, there is a disadvantage that the whole database is not in the hand of organization but with the database developer company. Outsourcing the database developer company is advantageous when the organization lacks of specialized database developer staff to design, debug and maintain the database. Hosting the web-based database also requires skills in configuring the cloud server provider to launch the database application. In all, there are advantages and disadvantages of these three modes for managing database and the organization will explore and recommend the most effective mode based on their financial and knowledge circumstances. 

There is still a good venue for database to be managed at lower cost (efficiency) and yields favorable results (effectiveness), albeit less dynamic and robust functions. I would recommend three key tools for designing a web-based database platform at lower cost. The truth is database has three core elements - the storage of data (storage server), the data inputs or records and the accessibility. The first element (storage server) can be built with Google Drive, using the Google Cloud server, as a data storage. Google Drive, though limited with allocated storage capacity, can be increased with costs. It is also rather a wise move if the organization can make use of the YouTube and other multimedia channel to store their multimedia files and by inserting the link to the Google Drive. The second one is Data inputs or records that can be done with ASANA Task Management to link all documents with Google Drive. ASANA platform is free for use and can assign tasks, monitor and evaluate the tasks with unlimited files to upload. To maintain the uniformity, all records of tasks and results must be stored on the Google Drive which we can share the folder or file in the ASANA platform. The third one is accessibility. We can simply share the Google Drive to user by limiting the permission to access the files. However, doing this way will create more complicated file sharing to pop up in the user's Gmail account and their Google Drive. The most recommended tool to use is a blog which is right in the Google Workspace to create a database platform using Google Drive as your data server. Blogger is an application developed by the Google for sharing our posts in the blog style (a mini website) which is more specialized in the field of user. To sum up, there are three key cores of database and three tools which can be used to create the web-based database at lower costs.