Deeply understanding your values is crucial to aligning your words and actions and maintaining relevance, even when things change over time or because of circumstances out of your control.
How you reflected your values to be relevant in a pre-COVID world looks quite different to what it does today.
The three core elements of the My Relevance Impact model, namely Values, Behaviour and Perceptible Reality, can help you manage the things you can control and the things you can’t in the new COVID world to maintain relevance.
If you have a good foundation of values, it’s likely that others will trust your authenticity. You will be able to remain relevant and make a larger impact if you’re able to adjust your behaviours to the COVID reality of less face-to-face engagement with colleagues, peers and leaders and significantly less opportunity for networking.
Tying behaviours to values
Values without the necessary actions and behaviours to back them up are just empty words.
For example, if an employer has proven continually that they maintain the value of respecting their workers’ time before the pandemic, their workers are likely to trust their employer to maintain this value by adjusting their Behaviours.
What the employer says (Values) and what they do (Behaviour) will influence what people say about them (Perceptible Reality).
In the constantly changing world of COVID work, employers can remain relevant by proving their trustworthiness. As a leader you can emphasise how colleagues and team members are only required to be available for work calls and meetings during standard working hours – even though they have their phone and laptop on hand all day. You might even institute different work requirements for those home-schooling, or have team/company wide mental health days off. SAP, Google, Thomson Reuters are just three companies who have done this. https://hrexecutive.com/software-giant-adds-mental-health-day-to-ease-covid-related-stress/ LinkedIn, Nike and Hootsuite have given their workforces a week off. https://fortune.com/2021/09/06/nike-close-office-mental-health-break/
Only contacting an employee during working hours would be a no-brainer pre-COVID but working from home can often be exploited. Updating company practices and policies to align with your values will maintain your relevance and trust.
Although what others say about you isn’t in your control, you have the power to influence those words by aligning your behaviours to your values.
Communication is crucial
Maintaining relevance within the usual corporate environment of actual meetings, lunches, events and conferences is easier with regular social interaction. Proving authenticity is more natural in a social environment as is the opportunity for networking and visibility.
The new environment of remote working requires increased and different forms of communication to build a positive reputation and avoid the negative effects of people’s opinions through their Perceptible Reality.
In a COVID world, you need to pay more attention to and devote more time for clear, regular communication to minimise misunderstandings. You need to understand the interplay between Zoom, emails, phone calls and texts. In what order should you be communicating through these channels and what? Do you need to use all these channels or not? How do you manage your communications across the different platforms? How do you present online and how proficient are you at this?
While values remain steadfast, the behaviours you employ to maintain your relevance will change according to the circumstances. Be careful of letting your visual appearance slip because your commute is now a 1-minute walk rather than an hours’ drive.
You can’t make an impact without relevance
If your behaviours don’t align with your values, you’ll experience the impact of negative second- and third-hand commentary, not that you’ll know about this – this is what other people say about you when you’re not on the Zoom. Over time this will, in turn, decrease your relevance, you won’t be trusted as easily, and your impact will diminish.
There is hope in relevancy
If you’re able to modify your behaviours to more clearly live your values, you will remain or even become more relevant. Leading with clear values will also provide a sense of hope and consistency to your colleagues, team and those in your network in a time where everything is unsettled and ever changing.
If your values have your colleagues/employees’ best interests at heart, and you regularly adjust your behaviours to uphold those values (showing up, leading from the heart and proving that you’re resilient in the face of constant change) your relevancy will remain high, will be recognised and appreciated.
As Marshall Goldsmith said (and wrote a book with the same title):
“What got you here won’t get you there.”
Maintaining your relevance in a COVID world requires active and different thinking about how you manage Brand You. Start today by assessing what you’re saying and doing across what platforms.