Our Values - Love
“Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.” – Dalai Llama
At Do-Well, we believe that love, compassion and kindness are the foundations that successful people, places and organisations are built upon. To us, they are much more than just words. They and part of who we are, how we act and how we work together.
In the first of a series of blogs from the band, we explore each of our values and why they are important to us and our work. Here, Pamela Ball talks about love…
Living values
There is a lot of talk and allusions to being values led companies in today’s chimeric and dare I say, a bit crazy world?
It is becoming more commonly accepted that shared core values help organisations to work together, not only more productively, but more humanely and with greater social conscience.
But (there’s always a but!), unfortunately values are not always lived or used as a shared mechanism to drive both passion and expertise. Instead they can become buzz words (or actually click words on a website) that are used as a marketing tool.
When a company or group is truly values based, usually those values were cocreated and used collaboratively across the organisation to not only help define behaviours but to also drive what the core products design and delivery look like.
Our Do-Well band is a consciously and deliberately values led group. Our band leader Ken Perry set the tone from the day he started the company and all associates who come to practice and play with us share these values.
All of our work is delivered in a bespoke, principled, and transparent manner. Engagement happens through generous listening and mutual respect, established by meeting people, organisations and communities wherever they are on their own journey.
Lets talk about Love ……
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I’m exploring our value of love, and in the near future other band members will be sharing thoughts around kindness and compassion.
When we speak of love at Do-Well, it is about using genuine care in our work. We want to work with care and with love and loving attitudes to help all of the people, places and organisations we work with to achieve their aspirations.
Every band member acts with kindness and compassion based on that caring attitude and our individual definitions of love for others.
Some people will cringe at this point…. using LOVE as an organisational value? As a leadership tool? Too soft or soppy, some might say. But, in reality, love is another word for a spectrum of caring emotions, and we do not use it lightly.
A good organisational culture doesn't spring up out of serendipity, it requires intentional collaborative building, where each and every team member is recruited within the context of shared values.
We choose love to be an anchor that cements us with care for each individual and our collective offer. We wanted our anchor to be strong and able to withstand the turbulent winds of all kinds of socio-economic impacts. We wanted to tie ourselves together with both joy and shared concerns.
A culture of care
Culture is created by an organisation's values, attitudes and behaviours. If this culture does not lead first with care, it cannot generate the wellbeing for itself and its teams that leads to success.
We are likely to all have examples of times where we’ve worked with people who have seemed to not always care either about each other, or about the wellbeing and feelings of those they work with. It is easy to see how these kinds of behaviours can lead to a more toxic culture and tick box wellbeing policies that are only designed to cover risk and not the real issues that can impact on wellbeing and people’s ability to do their jobs well.
At Do-Well our love and care for each other and others acts as a guiding beacon to our behaviours, interactions and business planning. It’s so much easier to “be happy” at work when you know others truly have your back, when they know listening about your sick puppy or your teenagers accomplishments has as much meaning (or more) than the VAT rate on a tender.
Research shows that conscious connection with values buffers against stress.
It makes sense - if people have a need to feel and give love and if the kind of work and working conditions you have allows that care to blossom, you will of course be more resilient and less stressed.
We have created a way of working where we are safe to talk about music or how we truly feel or if we had a good day or a bad day. We share our foibles and our trust and play our diversity out in shared music and books. We are allowed to be genuine and allowed to appear ….’’soft ‘’. With the only consequences being those of cemented relationships and a safe culture to thrive in.
For me, love is how every organisation should lead the way.
We can find the knowledge (head) and the techniques (hands) to go forward if we are sharing unconditional regard from our hearts.
Maybe you and your company, could, or should…. talk about love?
