Someone made this point at a seminar we held, and before he’d finished speaking 3-4 other attendees nodded and clearly shared his pain. I’ve heard variations of that complaint many times over the past 20 years. Which has raised the question of what, exactly, are values for?
You could be forgiven for thinking that they don’t do much more than appear on websites and the occasional meeting room wall. There are, sadly, innumerable examples of organisations not behaving in accordance with their claimed values. The truth is, values only matter when they drive the right behaviour, and when they guide – sometimes change – decisions.
Values might best be expressed and understood as underpinning an organisation’s culture. And they should be defined in terms that support and drive that organisation’s overall strategy. If that all sounds obvious, we have to ask why it so rarely happens; or why the best examples shine out so clearly against the rest.
I’ve always felt that the most important thing about values is that they’re operationalised. Horrible word, but critical delivery. Run them through the “Which means that…” test.
The leadership team of a financial services brand I worked with wanted to have honesty as their one core value. “Pro-active or reactive honesty?” was the question that made everyone stop and think. They concluded it had to be pro-active, and it had to be 100%. To their eternal credit, they recognised that they couldn’t guarantee both, so they committed to another statement against which they could.
That’s when and how values become operational.
That decision was probably the first example of a pattern I can now see repeating several times in my client experience. Culture cannot be separated from performance, and neither can be separated from reputation: they reinforce each other, for better or for worse.
But many organisations still look at values in isolation. The Senior Partner of a professional services firm client introduced the programme we were about to start as a “values project”. It had never been called that in any of our discussions up to that point, and “values” were of course an integral part of the strategy we developed over the next three months.
But after we had agreed a new brand strategy, competency framework, 5-year business plan and client segmentation plan, the Senior Partner had the grace to say in one of our launch meetings, that to see this as purely a “values project” had been a huge under-estimation of its worth to the firm. As testimony to the leadership’s team commitment to every aspect of that strategy, the firm increased its revenues by more than 60% over the next five years.
I’ve come to believe that the best organisations are those in which leadership teams make it easy for good things to happen. Ensuring that everyone has the same appreciation of “What we stand for, what we stand against and what we believe in” is one way they do that.
That’s where the real value of values lies.