A few weeks ago in the blog post “What Does Your Organization Value?” I wrote about what organizational values are and why they are important. I explained that the leaders of an organization must not just communicate organizational values but they must also model the values that they are communicating.

If they model something other than what they are communicating, their staff will pick up on it immediately. Employees emulate the values that their leaders are modeling, not necessarily what they are stating. Hence the Ralph Waldo Emerson statement “Your actions speak so loudly I cannot hear what you say.”

In the article, I suggested that leaders conduct a poll of their employees to find out what the employees perceive as the organizational values. I believe that this is an extremely important exercise that an organizations’ leaders should do every few years.

So, how should you go about this in your organization?