Generic core values won’t make a difference in your company or your culture. Fix them.
Nobody Remembers Generic Values
Over the last few years we’ve helped a wide range of management teams craft their core values as part of organizational transformation. Ever since Jim Collins identified the importance of core values in his seminal bestseller Good to Great, companies across the planet have clamored to fill in that blank on their foundations list. These days it’s hard to find a company with a vision and mission that hasn’t taken a stab at listing out some form of values. Though the idea is right, often the execution is so very wrong.
Among the issues is that while filling in the values blanks, leaders forget that they are crafting language for people in order to help everyone in the organization understand what is expected, what will be rewarded and what kind of behavior will help the company succeed in the future. Generic should not be tolerated.
One Web site offers a list of 400 or more common terms you could consider for your values. We see them all the time: Integrity, Teamwork, Respect, Profitability, Dedication ... While there is nothing wrong with any of the terms in that list, there is nothing memorable about them, either. This means it will be very difficult for people within the company to remember which common attributes they are supposed to embody. Why settle for common when you could have uncommon and extraordinary values—the kind that help you build an uncommon and extraordinary company?
Say What You Mean
I think integrity is just as important as the next guy. So are respect and accountability and innovation and profitability. But your take on integrity may be decidedly different than mine. Keep in mind we want values to be memorable. So, instead of just listing the generic Integrity, try: Promises Made, Promises Kept or; Uncompromising Ethics or; Do the Right Thing, Even When No One is Looking. If your intention is that your company will be built through people doing what they say, or keeping promises no matter what, use those words in your values. The language will be fresher, more memorable, differentiating and significantly more authentic than some generic attribute.
Add Clarifiers When Necessary
Especially when introducing new values to a company, it can be beneficial for everyone involved to have some type of clarifier just to make sure everyone knows why each value has meaning in the great company lexicon. One of our clients had a few examples of cross-functional teams collaborating to bring new ideas to the market, but the practice wasn’t yet embraced across the organization. So with this aspirational space, we chose Ingenious Collaboration as the value and clarified it with “We nurture a collaborative environment that celebrates insatiable curiosity and diverse ideas.” This allowed us to capture the CEO’s intent and better ensure everyone in the company would be able to align themselves with his ideals.
For another client, staying true to their entrepreneurial roots was important. We could have just listed Entrepreneurship as the value. Instead, we chose Entrepreneurial Drive and clarified it with “We challenge ourselves to continuously think and act as entrepreneurs—with grit, big, bold thinking, get-it-done attitude, and measured risk taking—and to not lose our souls to bigness.” Entrepreneurial Drive is the shorthand. The clarifier provides the rich language the company needed to unite its people.
In the end, we want words real people understand and use—not corporate babble. The guy on the production line is not impressed with your MBA, nor does he care that you listed Resourcefulness as a new value. He believes he’s always been fairly resourceful, so you’re not helping him much. Give him language he can use and care about.
Edit Boldly
I live by a rule of threes and fives: People generally can remember three key points but lose interest after five. So keep your list short and sweet. Keep your values to ideas you will truly embrace and police. Four values that really lay a solid foundation for your company, and that you will reinforce throughout the hiring process, quarterly and annual reviews, and town halls, will always stand a better chance of making it into the corporate lexicon than any rambling list.
In his 2002 HBR article “Make Your Values Mean Something,” organizational guru Patrick Lencioni discussed what he calls “Permission-to-Play Values”, which “simply reflect the minimum behavioral and social standards required of any employee. They tend not to vary much across companies, particularly those working in the same region or industry, which means that, by definition, they never really help distinguish a company from its competitors.” He uses Integrity as an example. Rather than let that term clog up valuable values real estate, consider building your own permission-to-play values in order to give ideas that have more meaning to you and your company a little more room to breathe.
Live Out Loud
“What you are shouts so loudly in my ears I cannot hear what you say.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
This statement rings particularly true in the case of company values. People wait to see how managers and company executives live the values, not how they talk about them, before deciding to adopt the values themselves. If the values are not regularly demonstrated from the top down, and reinforced in a positive, cascading communications style, the new values stand little chance of adoption across the company.
Consider this before you embark on the next t-shirt, coffee mug and poster campaign. Try living the values boldly from the top down. Lead boldly and reinforce the language through management levels. Use the terminology in meetings, town halls and presentation. Then find employees guilty of embracing the ideals. Above all, live the values.
Remember the guy on the shop floor? He’s been through this exercise before with the last management team. He’s heard all the words, seen the posters, and thrown away several coffee mugs as each regime tried to mail in a new corporate theme. He doesn’t care what “values” you talk about (and yes, he uses air quotes around your word “values") unless you live them first. If you say integrity and he sees managers cheating the system to hit their numbers without recourse, you might as well stop the communications program before you begin. He won’t buy anything you’re selling.
Know, Live, Tell
With clearly articulated values in place, and executives and managers living them across the company, it’s time to tell the stories. While I’m not a fan of poster campaigns, I do support getting the values language into the hands of every employee. One of our CEO clients printed his company’s vision, mission, values and corporate narrative on small pocket guides that were then distributed across the company—to each of the 25,000+ employees. People were expected to learn the language and use it. And he liked calling out people in town halls around the world to see if they knew the new values. It certainly drove home the point that he was serious about moving the company forward.
That approach won’t work for everyone, nor is there one perfect way to craft the words or list of values for each company. But employees need to be able to access the words you use, to embrace the ideals you promote and share the stories that connect the tribe. Authentic stories of people within the company doing the right thing and employees rewarded for engaging in healthy new activities will go a long way in driving engagement and long term adoption.
People want to join a focused cause, to be a part of an organization that’s making a difference in the world. Craft your values to help that dream come true.
What do you think about what’s here? What are your favorite values? How would you improve the process?