GVV Pillars: Reasons & Rationalizations

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From the course by University of Virginia

Ethical Leadership Through Giving Voice to Values

43 ratings

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University of Virginia

Ethical Leadership Through Giving Voice to Values

43 ratings

This course offers an action-oriented introduction to Giving Voice to Values (or GVV), an exciting new approach to values-driven leadership development in the workplace, in business education and in life. GVV is not about persuading people to be more ethical, but instead it starts from the premise that most of us already want to act on our values, but that we also want to feel that we have a reasonable chance of doing so effectively. Through positive, real life examples, pre-scripting, rehearsal and peer coaching, GVV builds the skill, the confidence and likelihood that we will act on our values more often and more successfully. Based on research and practice, with over 1,000 pilots in educational settings and companies on all seven continents, GVV helps answer the questions: “What if I were going to act on my values? What would I say and do? How could I be most effective?” You will come away from this course with an expanded toolkit, as well as practice, in a variety of methods and techniques for voicing and enacting your own values and principles. You will develop and practice leadership skills in "peer coaching” with other learners. Through cases and stories based on recognizable workplace, classroom and life values conflicts, you will apply the GVV techniques and “re-frames”, expanding your repertoire for possible action as well as identifying and rehearsing responses that are likely to be most effective. Through this practice, you will gain greater confidence and competence in voicing and enacting your values effectively.

From the lesson

Developing Scripts and Action Plans

Welcome to Week 3! During this week you'll start to build a "tool-kit" for ways to feel more confident and comfortable in voicing your values. You'll discover how to develop scripts and action plans. First, you'll explore the GVV pillar, Voice. This pillar helps you understand how you can examine the different ways to build your capacity for voice and the variety of forms it can take. Next, you'll be introduced to the final pillar, Reasons and Rationalizations. This pillar helps you understand how to anticipate the objections that you might face when trying to voice your values. By doing so, you can prepare and practice effective responses to these objections. Then you'll discover some of the challenges and opportunities you may face in voicing your values based on your level and position within an organization. Recognizing these challenges and opportunities can help you identify which levers you can use to address them. Two cases are provided to illustrate the point that you can find effective strategies for acting on your values at all levels of experience and authority. By the end of the module you will have identified tools that you can use to help you voice your values effectively. You'll use these newly acquired tools to revisit your Tale of Two Stories and craft a new ending.

Welcome to Week 32:43

Introduction to GVV Scripting and Action Planning1:08

GVV Pillars: Voice6:46

GVV Pillars: Reasons & Rationalizations8:52

Meet the Instructors

Mary Gentile
Creator/Director, Giving Voice To Values and Professor of Practice
Darden School of Business

Now let's talk about the seventh pillar,

the last pillar of giving voice to values, reasons and rationalizations.

Reasons and rationalizations refers to the kinds of pushback,

the objections, the arguments that we think we'll encounter or

that we fear we will encounter when we try and express our values in the workplace.

The rationalizations can be very powerful.

They can be compelling, but they are in fact vulnerable to response.

They're not bulletproof and so the idea behind giving voice to values is to give

us a chance to anticipate them, to recognize them and to practice effective

responses to them, so we'll be ready when they come up in our conversations.

Now there's two ways that these reasons and

rationalization can impact us when we're trying to voice and act on our values.

The first way is what we call pre-emptive rationalizations.

These are the kinds of rationalizations that we tell ourselves

in advance of raising an issue.

They're the kinds of arguments that stop us before we even start.

And they kind of work like this, you're working along, you're doing your job,

you've got your head down, and all of a sudden, something happens.

A manager comes and asks you to do something, a friend, or a colleague, or

even a customer starts pressuring you to do something.

Or maybe you witness something in the workplace that you're concerned about, and

you get that feeling in your gut that this is a little dodgy,

this is not quite right.

But before you can even think about how you're going to act, how you're going to

respond, all of what we call the pre-emptive rationalizations rush in.

These are things like, maybe I don't have all the information.

Maybe it's not really wrong.

Maybe this is just how it's done here.

Maybe it's wrong, but really, I couldn't change it and I'll just make things worse.

Maybe it's just not my responsibility.

All of these pre-emptive rationalizations rush in and

they stop us before we even start.

Now many of these reasons may be true, but

the fact is that we don't even think about whether there's a way to address them.

So what giving voice to values is about, it's about spreading out the time,

between the moment when you get that feeling in your gut that something's off,

and the moment when the rationalizations might rush in,

to spread out that time to create a kind of safe space.

A sort of laboratory, where you can simply ask yourself the giving voice to values

thought experiment question.

You can simply ask yourself what if I were going to act in this situation?

How might I get that done?

And by having this opportunity to rehearse and practice in this safe laboratory

in advance, you have a chance to trigger the innovation and the creativity that,

we know from research,

people are more likely to experience when they don't feel pressured.

So that's why we try and anticipate these pre-emptive rationalizations.

The second way that we might experience these reasons of rationalizations

are real time or in the moment rationalizations.

These are the kinds of arguments that you're likely to hear

from the other person, or the other people that you're trying to influence, or

you're trying to address in this particular situation.

Now these rationalizations again are powerful, but they're not bulletproof.

And it can be useful to try and

anticipate the most commonly heard versions of these rationalizations.

So let's share four of these rationalizations that we hear most

frequently in the work place.

The first one that we hear quite often is, it's standard operating procedure.

It's just the way it's done here in this organization,

in this industry, in this part of the world.

Now when you hear this rationalization, again,

although it may be compelling it's usually an exaggeration.

So you might want to take a look and say, can I look around and

see is that really true?

Does everyone always do this?

If that's true, why do we even have rules?

That's a way to begin to question the rationalization.

Another one is, if everyone really did this, what would it actually mean for

the functioning of this industry, of this company, for our relationships

with customers, our relationships with the public sector, the government?

This is really often a rationalization.

If it's really true that everyone does this,

would I be comfortable if someone knew we were doing this?

Who I would be uncomfortable with having them know we were doing this?

So these are some of the questions that you can ask yourself and

you can begin to build into your response.

You can also look for positive examples of folks who have found ways,

either in your company or in other companies, to act according to the rules,

so that you can use those as counter arguments.

And finally you can use the giving voice to values thought experiment and

simply say, what if we wanted to do this differently?

How might we do that?

To trigger a problem solving rather than a preaching or scolding approach.

The second of these common reasons and

rationalizations is the idea that it's not material.

It's not a big enough deal.

The problem with this one or

a way to begin to address it is that usually people are using some sort of

external metric to determine that this is really not a big deal.

And these metrics are vulnerable to bad data, bad judgment and even our own

inherent biases and tendencies to want to diminish the size of the challenge.

And so when we're trying to respond to this we can try and

look for ways to question the assumption that really isn't that big a deal.

Another thing that we can use as a response to this one is to remember that

some things can't be just a little wrong.

Fraud is fraud, you can't just be a little bit fraudulent.

And finally, a wonderfully powerful response to this one is to suggest,

if it's really not that big a deal, this is an easy time to address it.

And if we wait til it's a bigger deal, it's going to be harder.

The third most commonly heard reason and

rationalization is often what we call locus of responsibility.

The idea here is that someone will say, well it may be wrong,

but it's really not my responsibility.

If you're talking to someone who says that,

you're in a good position because they're already admitting there's a challenge.

And so the way you present it is you don't try and argue with them that it's wrong.

You don't come at them with that kind of preaching position.

You actually engage them in a problem solving conversation.

We are trying to take it past the conclusion that you both share, that this

is probably not the best way to proceed and you try and generate some options.

And then the fourth and final of these commonly heard reasons and

rationalizations is something we call locus of loyalty.

This is the idea that someone will say, well yeah, it may be wrong but

I don't want to be disloyal to my colleagues or

my boss or my company or my customer, by pointing out the problem.

And this is something where you can think there's a couple different ways to

think about loyalty.

So, for example, if you're working with a sales team who wants to inappropriately

report a sale in this quarter in order to enhance the bonus for the whole team.

You might say, well, I want to be loyal to my team and increase the bonus.

But another way to be loyal to your team is to say,

let's stick with the accurate reporting for this quarter, because otherwise,

we're putting ourselves in a more difficult situation next quarter.

We're going to be under greater pressure.

We're also risking our team's reputation,

their productivity and their comfort level going forward.

So, you frame it as loyalty, but you redefine what loyalty means.

The other way to think about the locus of loyalty is that loyalty is

a two-way street.

So, if a colleague or a customer or

manager is asking me to do something out of loyalty to them, you might be

asking yourself well are they being loyal to me, to put me in that position.

That may not be an argument you would use with them explicitly, but

it can be a way to tap into your own motivation to do something.

So after looking at these common reasons and rationalizations,

I invite you to take a look back at the answers you gave

to the GVV survey questions on reasons and rationalizations.

And to consider whether you might change any of your answers at this point.

Remember, the idea here, the power of this last pillar is that you want to be

able to rehearse your responses to the kinds of rationalizations that you're

very likely to face in any particular values conflict.

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