The four main values for Dynargie, established 27 ears ago are courage, empathy, positive attitude and quality. Philippe Graff, the founder of the company, is willing to tell us what each of them mean for the company and for him personally.
1. What values do you share within the organization?
We have four values. And by the way, I think companies shouldn't have too many values. I know a company of our kind - they have 12 values. I've been telling them a lot of times that this is too many, because you should ask everybody in the company and everybody should be able to tell you quickly what the values of the company are. If there are eleven of them it becomes very difficult. So you should have four or maximum five values. So, we have four values and our four values are: courage, empathy, positive attitude and quality. These are our four values.
2. Could you explain each of them?
We decided on these values 27 years ago and we have never changed them. So, number one is courage. When you are a manager it is very important to show courage, because a manager has a difficult life. Sometimes he has to take tough decisions and he has to be able to assume these decisions to communicate them in a courageous way, not beating around the bush, not trying to escape his responsibilities. Another reason why courage is so important is that managers have to solve conflicts. There are always conflicts in any organization and a manager is there to solve the conflicts, to listen to people in conflict, to understand the real reasons for it and then to take a courageous decision. These are decisions that might not please everybody - when you are a manager you cannot please everybody, you will make some people unhappy about what you did. But if you do not take this risk of making someone unhappy, you are not doing your job as a manager. Sometimes I say to young managers in our seminars: "If you want to please people, if it is important for you, if you want to be popular, then don't be managers. Go to politics and in one speech you will please one part of the population, in another speech you will please the other one and you will have all the votes and that will be a fantastic job for you". So if you decide to be a manager you must be ready to displease people, to make some people unhappy. So you need to have courage because it is important for the success of the organization.
3. What about empathy?
The second one is empathy. Empathy is very important as a whole and for us in particular because we are in consulting business. So we must be sure that we understand and listen to our clients before proposing any solution. If we don't do that, if we are not empathetic enough, if we have already the solution in our head when the person only starts speaking - there are big chances we will come with a wrong solution. We must really understand the company, understand the context, listen carefully, make investigation, have a lot of empathy to understand the business and people before we make a proposal. It is also true within the organization. You need empathy to understand your clients, but you also need empathy to understand people who work for you. Everybody is different. For someone his private life is very important for success. He needs time for his family and you have to understand this, you have to be open for it. Because if this is important for him, you cannot completely neglect it otherwise you will not keep this guy or you won't keep him motivated. Another person may consider driving a Porsche as success in life, which I can understand, it's another motivation factor. So empathy is important and it is also something that is counterbalancing courage. Because if you have only courage and no empathy, you may be a good driver but you won't have people behind you. You don't understand them so they will not follow you. If you have empathy but no courage you may get into a trap of demagogy, being a populist, saying different things to different people because you don't want to make anybody unhappy. But then there are contradictions, people don't know what their boss is thinking. Empathy without courage is worthless, courage without empathy is not enough, you need both. That's why we put these two values on the top of our list.
4. What are the rest of the values?
The third one for us is positive attitude, because we think that positive attitude is the only way to get out of difficult situations and this is also the way to live in society and to influence people. You can say a lot of things to people, you can give a lot of feedback to your staff members, provided that you have positive attitude. In other words, instead of saying "Look, you did this wrong, it was shame to do it this way" you say "If we speak about the future, I consider you in the similar situation do things differently". The feedback is much more accepted by people because you are not judging them, you ask them to have a different behaviour in the future. It's the same thing but it is thinking about the future instead of the past. This is positive attitude and people can accept it, you are not condemning them, you are not judging them, you are asking them to be more professional in the similar situation in the future. That's why positive attitude is very important because you can communicate a lot of things if you show that you are not judging, if you show that the only thing you are interested in is improvement in the similar situation in the future. That's why we give a lot of importance to this value. The last one is quality and I don't think we have to speak much about it. In the business we are in, which is service-oriented, if you forget about quality, you are dead. There is no reason why a client will come to you, pay for the services which are sometimes expensive, because we are not the cheapest in the market, if they don't get excellence in quality. That's why we chose quality as a value for us - it is a survival tool.
5. What is the unique point of your company?
I think what makes us easy is that we are not only in the business of technical skills, management skills. For us values are very important. In other words, when we run seminars on people management, we firmly believe - and we try to practise it ourselves which is not easy - that what makes a good manager is not only using technical skills on management, but it's much more than that. It's what you really believe in and how you are going to make sure that your people share your beliefs and behave the way you expect them to behave. It must come from deep inside. You cannot learn it at a seminar. We more and more realize that discussion of values becomes more and more important for companies to keep people together especially when a company undergoes difficult times. During the crisis there is a tendency for people to go in different directions and lose that glue that they had before. If the company has very strong values and if they implement these values during the crisis as well, not only when the weather is nice, then they can keep people together because they see that these values are not just words but they are being practiced at the most difficult moment.
