Value creation is an essential phenomenon in the success and growth of organizations. Understanding the recipe for it should be a priority for any business executive and individual who wants to be a leader of the future and stay at the top of the game. Having knowledge about value creation can benefit people in many aspects of their lives and this knowledge will last for a lifetime. Without value creation, business wouldn't be businesses. 

When talking about value creation, companies usually think about the value they create for the customers and stakeholders, analysing the process in value chains. 

But what if value creation included any kind of behavior, those that you do for others and others do for you, that generate some kind of value in your life and company, in all of its forms?

What behaviors generate real value in your life and have helped get you where you are now? What behaviors generate value in the lives of others? Which ones are mutually beneficial, sustainable and work both ways?

Business Value Through Multiple Lenses

We can define business value in many different ways. It is common for business to view it through the economic lense, using revenue, profit or market shares as indicators that quantify it. However, Forbes defends that more successful companies measure and define value  in many other ways, and most of them are intangible.  

Types of value creation behaviors companies should think about: 

• For the world

• For customers, 

• For stakeholders, 

• For our employees, 

• For ourselves. 

We can think of them at a very small scale like a positive encouragement you give to one of your co-workers and brighten their day, to a sequence of behaviors that lead to signing a 10 Million dollar contract or reducing your company’s carbon footprint. Value creation behaviors like these can have huge positive impacts on you and the company. These behaviors could have people who work for you who were once afraid to voice their opinions and ideas could now have the courage to voice their ideas. Those potential ideas could be a solution to a problem you would have never thought of. Also because of your value creation behavior, your co-workers and those you lead are more comfortable with you, causing you to receive more feedback, more ideas, and a more comfortable work environment. 

What are some examples of value creation behaviors in your company? What are the positive consequences of them? What is the real value you are generating for your customers and they are generating for you? 

What are some lenses we can use to look at value? 

• The value of Networks

• Value generated by our workplace culture

• Value generated by fulfilling a companies mission and its positive impact in the world

• Value created for workers when doing work, in the form of skills or intellectual property, value that is mutually created for the company. 

• Value of Diversity in teams

• Customer loyalty

The Elements of Value

Harvard Business Review identifies the building blocks of value that lead to sustained revenue growth. “Strong performance on multiple elements does indeed correlate closely with higher and sustained revenue growth.” They divide the value you can create into different categories: social impact, life changing, emotional, and functional, extending Maslow’s approach to the hierarchy of needs. 

If we think about the different elements of value and the different dimensions where they apply, we can start identifying the behaviors that get individuals and companies to achieve and succeed in the value creation process.

What value elements are you generating with your products or services? What value are your employees bringing to you? What type of element values are you creating for your employees through your workplace culture? What are the step by step behaviors that lead to your success? 

Value Creation = Positive Peace

We can actually find value creation in every episode of engagement there is in our company. Positive peace can be viewed as a suite of positive, prosocial behaviors that maximize mutually beneficial positive outcomes from interactions with others. Mark Nelson, founder of the Peace Innovation Lab at Stanford and co-founder of the Peace Innovation Institute in The Hague, talks about the hidden positive peace companies automatically generate to the world in their daily operations. 

The advantages of having diverse teams are many. Research shows diversity is actually a key factor for increasing collective intelligence and innovation in teams. Another benefit is added: the dimension of value and positive peace. Whenever teams in our companies collaborate across difference boundaries to generate mutually beneficial outcomes the value generated to the world is in the form of peace. 

Value Creation Behavior Design

CEOs and Business Executives play a very powerful role in modeling desired company behaviors. They set a personal example employees follow.  

To define the behaviors that are associated with value creation executives must constantly ask themselves

What are positive behaviors that form as a direct result of your workplace culture? What is the value generated from them? Who is benefiting from this value? Is it mutually beneficial? Sustainable? 

What behaviors are adopted by the leaders and executives of your company? Which ones can be replicated and be adopted by workers? 

What are the positive behaviors that arise when employees work towards achieving the company mission? What is the value generated from them? 

What type of behaviors generate value for your networks? Is the value you generate mutually beneficial? Are the behaviors reciprocal? 

Understanding our company’s signature behaviors is key to understanding the value creation process and our value chain. But how can we design new behaviors to meet new goals? The Peace Innovation Lab at Stanford identifies a simple and collaborative way to design value creation behaviors: they “Starfish” for Behavior Chains. 

Make it simple and small. Fogg comments on the ability and motivation needed for a behavior to be completed by anyone. Targeting low ability and defining small simple behaviors for employees to easily adopt increases our chances for that behavior to become sustainable, while reducing the risk of big failures. 

Conclusion

Executives and leaders across the world have the opportunity to make a positive impact on their company, the people around them and the world, leading by example. Adopting simple small behaviors that generate value in all of its forms, that are sustainable, mutually beneficial and that can be adopted by anyone. Value creation behaviors can positively benefit many aspects of your life like, work environment, partnerships, social networks, and many other parts of your life. They can lead to growth and make your relationships stronger.

What are your company’s value creation behaviors? What is the true value you are generating in the world? How can you modify or enhance these behaviors to increase the value generated and take care of the world during challenging times, like right now, where good leadership is crucial?

Written by: Lucia Vina Lopez & Dieondra Garner