What is Giving Voice to Values (GVV)?

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From the course by University of Virginia

Ethical Leadership Through Giving Voice to Values

43 ratings

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

What is Giving Voice to Values? Why and How it Works

Welcome to week one of the course! What kinds of values conflicts have you experienced in your life? Has there been a time in your life where you have been faced with a values conflict and didn't know how to speak up, or what to say? During this week, you'll first be introduced to a story called The Client That Fell Through the Cracks. This story provides an example of the kind of values conflict that we all can encounter in the workplace, and how to address it by effectively acting on your values. Next, you'll explore what Giving Voice to Values (GVV) is and who uses it. You'll hear from practitioners in business, higher education, and the military in regards to why and how they used GVV to address their workplace challenges. We'll discover how research informs GVV in developing a moral muscle memory, and how this innovative approach is different from traditional approaches to ethics. Then you'll be briefly introduced to the seven pillars that form the foundation of GVV. Finally, we'll spend some time examining in more depth the first two pillars, Values and Purpose. By the end of this module, you'll realize in the face of values conflicts there is power and impact in asking yourself a new question, "What if I was going to act on my values--what would I say and do?"

The Client Who Fell Through the Cracks3:41

The Client Who Fell Through the Cracks: What Happened?4:38

Why Take this Course?7:38

What is Giving Voice to Values (GVV)?6:59

Meet the Instructors

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

So welcome back.

I'd like to take a few minutes now to talk about just what

is Giving Voice to Values or "GVV" as I call it,

and where does it come from.

To be honest, Giving Voice to Values grew out of my own crisis of faith.

I had been working in the field of business ethics and values

driven leadership development for

several decades at leading business schools and another organizations,

and I began to notice a disconnect.

It seemed that there was a real disconnect between the way people

actually experienced ethical conflicts and values conflicts in their work lives,

and the way we would go about teaching about them.

We taught about them as if they were entirely a matter of intellectual understanding.

We would always talk about how we need to give people

an ethical framework so they can determine what the right thing to do is.

We approached these issues as if they were entirely a cognitive matter.

But that really didn't seem to be the way people were experiencing it.

So let me tell you what would happen.

I would typically walk into a classroom or maybe go into

a corporate training room and if the subject was values and ethics and leadership,

we would usually give the learners some sort of

case study to read before they walked into the room.

Some sort of thorny ethical dilemma.

People would usually walk into the room with an idea about what they thought

the right thing to do was in that particular circumstance.

They'd already analyzed the situation somewhat.

But then during the course of the discussion,

in the training program or in the classroom,

two things would tend to happen.

The first thing that would happen is that people's thinking would become more complex.

They would begin to recognize that maybe they didn't have all the information,

and maybe these behaviors were common practice in this industry,

or in this individual company,

or in this part of the world.

Or, maybe they were actually problems

but trying to act on them is likely to just make the situation worse.

The thinking would become more complex.

I actually think this is a good thing.

We don't want people to walk into the circumstances in naivety, right?

We want them to understand what's going on from many different angles.

But the second thing that would happen was a little more troubling to me.

I don't know if you've had this experience but what I often

see when I'm in a group of people or if I'm in a classroom,

is that there's usually one or two people that when they

speak everyone turns to listen to them.

You know, they may be the most articulate,

they may be the ones who can share a very complicated idea in a short pithy clear way.

They may just be the wittiest,

the ones who always have a funny story to tell to illustrate their point,

but for whatever reason,

when those people speak everybody turns to listen to them.

What I was finding in these conversations about ethics and values in the workplace,

is that when those people spoke,

they were usually the ones who were expressing the most

skeptical if not cynical position about the issue at hand.

They would be the ones who would be saying you know "Mary,

I know what you want me to say but in the real world that's just not possible".

So what was happening is that the people that

everyone listened to were the ones who were saying,

it's not possible to act on your values.

What I was finding is that students or managers were walking out of

these programs more confused and less empowered,

and that just didn't feel good.

It didn't feel like that's the way I wanted to spend my life,

if that's the contribution I want to make.

Life is short. I want to do something that matters.

I actually took a step back from this work for a while.

But around that time I remembered some research that I had seen years earlier when I was

still working at Harvard Business School and

it was two different studies by two different scholars,

Douglas Huneke and Perry London.

They both decided that they wanted to understand better the behavior of people who act

with moral conviction during times of high stakes, high risk.

They both decided that the way they would approach this study is through doing

in-depth interviews with people who had acted with

that kind of conviction in high risk situations.

They both decided they were going to interview separately,

decided they were going to interview the population of people who are

often referred to as "rescuers" from World War II.

These are people who put their own lives at

stake to help others who were at risk during the Holocaust.

They did these in-depth interviews, they wanted to find out,

do these people have some sort of common experience,

some common education, family background?

As these studies go they found

a list of things and I frankly don't remember most of them,

but there was one factor they found that stuck with me.

It really resonated, probably because I was an educator,

but it was this.

They said that the people who acted with this kind of conviction in

these high risk situations or reported that as an earlier point in their lives,

usually as a young adult,

they'd had an experience with someone more senior to them,

a boss, a teacher, a mentor,

even a parent of rehearsing out loud what would you do if,

and then various kinds of moral conflicts.

They actually had the opportunity to pre-script themselves and to rehearse.

This rehearsal occurred at

both a cognitive or intellectual level as we talked about earlier,

but also at a behavioral or an experiential level.

So at the cognitive level they named the values that were important to them,

they put a script around it and articulation,

but at the behavioral level they actually voiced

these things to someone more senior to them who

stood in as proxy for the kind of person that they

might need to communicate with in the actual circumstances.

So this was the "aha" moment for me.

It was this idea of rehearsal,

pre-scripting, and even peer coaching.

I started to think, "Well,

that's an interesting way to think about values,

development, and ethics education". Instead of...

It's all about asking a new question instead of

asking what is the right thing to do in any particular situation.

Giving Voice to Values asks once you know what you believe is right,

how can you get it done effectively?

What would you need to say and do?

If you remember nothing else from this course,

I hope you remember that.

That when you encounter values conflicts to shift

that question it's a kind of thought experiment for yourself.

Because you're shifting the moment then from a test of

moral character to a problem solving exercise,

and we've all solved problems in our lives.

We can all do that.

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