Are Core Values Uncovered or Assigned?

I often get asked by executives how we come up with the words when we start the Vision, Mission, and Core Values process. Or, as one executive asked, “Do you already have this stuff written down somewhere, and you’re just making us go through these exercises?”

The short answer is no; we don’t already have predetermined answers. We work hard to uncover and discover the values within each company.

There are two types of organizational drivers to consider when thinking of crafting core behavior language:

Start-Ups and Assigning Values

It would be a mistake to say you assign values to new companies. You don’t, really, because companies are started by people with prior experience. And that experience is a launching point for the future company’s core behaviors.

If we’re working with executives starting a company, we dig deep to understand their vision for the future and what kinds of people can help them reach their goals. Similar to working with existing companies, we ask founders to describe the best people they’ve worked with in the past. Many founders may have a tough time articulating pithy strategy and value statements, but most can give you an idea of the kinds of behaviors they think will help their company and brand stand out in the marketplace.

Those behaviors rarely sound like, “We’d like people with integrity, who are accountable, and who feel empowered to do smart things.” Why? Because everything I just mentioned is common sense and fairly obvious. Stating the obvious isn’t differentiating.

Many startups need to have a speedboat mentality. They need to be nimble, responsive, able to take action quickly, try new ideas, and adjust on the fly. And so their core behaviors should reflect those needs to help ensure they recruit the kinds of people who embrace that kind of culture.

As a new company grows, founders need to demonstrate the behaviors in how they operate and treat people each day; then, new employees can embrace the core behaviors as simply part of the operating system. The key here is demonstration. If it’s just leaders telling people how to behave, that’s worst case assigning (imposing) values … and it rarely goes well.

Uncovering Values in a Change Initiative

Vision, Mission, and Core Values are standard fare in many organizational change initiatives. A trick here is understanding what’s driving the company to change. Are you fixing a problem? Restructuring? Changing business strategy? Coming out of a merger or acquisition?

If we’re starting from a positive position, uncovering the positive values can be a simple experience. We unpack the behaviors of the best employees, compare those to the behaviors of the worst employees, factor in executive goals and company vision, and articulate the values already present in the company.

If we’re starting from a negative position, we first have to understand how broken the culture is. Some cultures need to be healed before the new language can be introduced. If negative behaviors have been the norm for a while, no amount of positive thinking and well-crafted attributes will stand a chance. So, we fix the culture while talking about the behaviors that would set the company up for success.

In this case, it can be helpful to get the employees involved in discussions of the kind of culture they want to be a part of, how they’d like people to act, and how they’d like to be treated. By engaging employees and not just executives, people at varying levels within the organization can play a role in the change initiative.

Then, when the new core behaviors are introduced to the company, they won’t feel like something assigned to everyone out of the blue. It’s worth saying again: if the company culture has been broken, it MUST be mended before new language can be introduced. Otherwise, management is asking for a rebellion.

Values aren’t something to be assigned or imposed—they emerge from the lived experiences, aspirations, and demonstrated behaviors within an organization. Whether working with a speedboat company needing values that enable rapid innovation, or an established tanker organization, the key is uncovering and articulating authentic behaviors that will drive success. This requires careful attention to context and alignment between stated values and demonstrated behaviors, between leadership actions and company culture, and between the organization’s past experiences and future aspirations. When this alignment is achieved thoughtfully and authentically, values become a powerful force for positive change.

Core Values or Core Behaviors. What's the difference?

Back in 1994, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras identified core values as fundamental beliefs and guiding principles that helped the best companies keep everyone on the same page. But did they really?

A 2020 MIT Sloan Review study found that more than 80% of large companies published their core values online. Other studies place the number of companies with stated core values as high as 92%. This simply says that companies embraced the concept of stated core values.

But employee satisfaction scores tell a story of broken cultures. A Fond study of HR execs found that "only 22% responded that 60% or more of their employees know their company’s core values." A Gallup poll found that "just 23% of U.S. employees strongly agree that they can apply their organization’s values to their work, and only 27% strongly agree that they “believe in” these values." And a Leadership IQ study showed that "only 20% of respondents say their company always hires people who fit well with their company values."

If people can’t articulate what the values are, how can they be expected to be influenced by those values?

If leaders don’t demonstrate the desired behavior, why would they expect employees to act any differently?

This is why I believe that one-word values don’t resonate with people. They’re empty words. No one needs another poster with an eagle soaring over a canyon with the word “Respect” in giant Times New Roman. I’m pretty certain that no one has ever walked down a hall thinking disrespectful thoughts, seen a poster, and then changed their way of thinking.

Random statements don’t help, either. One company I worked with had a core value of “Fly Your Freak Flag.” What they meant, I think, was for everyone in the company to be themselves, uniquely, and build a better culture through intellectual diversity. That’s not what they got. When they asked employees to write their “freak flag” on large cards that could be hung outside offices, one male leader wrote, “I like to pee sitting down.” Another wrote, “I can burp in three different languages.” Funny, but I’m sure HR couldn’t use any of that for cultural enrichment.

Here are some examples of companies that have gone beyond one-word core values to create more nuanced and actionable core behaviors:

Zappos:

• Deliver WOW Through Service

• Embrace and Drive Change

• Create Fun and A Little Weirdness

• Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded

• Pursue Growth and Learning

• Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication

• Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit

• Do More With Less

• Be Passionate and Determined

• Be Humble

Google:

• Focus on the user and all else will follow

• It’s best to do one thing really, really well

• Fast is better than slow

• Democracy on the web works

• You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer

• You can make money without doing evil

• There’s always more information out there

• The need for information crosses all borders

• You can be serious without a suit

• Great just isn’t good enough

Zillow:

• Customers Are Our North Star

• Turn On the Lights.

• Do the Right Thing.

• Own It.

• ZG Is a Team Sport.

• Include and Empower.

• Think Big, Move Fast.

• Deliver Quality on Time, Every Time.

Tesla:

• Do the impossible

• Constantly innovate

• Reason from “first principles”

• Think like owners

• We are all in

These examples stand out in their simplicity and ability to inspire while clarifying the kind of culture the company wants. Employees can understand what the company wants from them. Executives can model the behaviors. HR can recruit individuals who WANT to live these values.

If you’d like help discovering the core behaviors within your organization and crafting the language, let’s talk.

What’s wrong with your core values?

Thinkhaus Idea Factory works with companies each year to define their vision, mission, and core values. Almost immediately, someone steps forward with a list of one-word values they found after a quick Google search.

You've seen them: integrity, accountability, empowerment, inclusion, passion, teamwork, respect ... the list can go on for a while. What's wrong with these?

For starters, they're vague. How do you define when someone has made an integrity breach? You'd have no problem firing an employee who padded their expense report by $500. But would you fire another employee for taking a couple of company legal pads and pens home for their kids? Both are technically stealing from the company. If you'd fire one but not the other, "integrity" is on a sliding scale at your company.

One-word values can be ambiguous and interpreted differently by different people. When that happens, you get inconsistent applications across the organization.

They're also hard to represent in hiring and firing decisions. Would you hire someone who doesn't act with integrity? Of course not. Do you want your employees to feel empowered? Probably. But empowered to what degree?

Let me give you a quick example of why one-word values are challenging. Enron, one of the poster children for organizational dysfunction, unethical practices, and accounting fraud, had four simple core values: Communication; Respect; Integrity; and Excellence. You could argue that some people in the company used these as behavior guides. But leadership clearly didn't.

A method I was taught early in my career is still one of my favorites: working with leadership, unpack the behaviors of the best people in the company. You know, those you'd hire in bunches if they were available. What do they do that makes them stand out? How do they act? How do they treat clients and teammates? Conversely, do the same exercise on the behaviors of the worst employees. What gets them on the bottom of the list? Why?

When you go through this exercise, you rarely end up with single-word answers. Instead, you'll hear things like, "I can count on her to do the right thing even when no one else is around," or "He lifts others up around him so the team becomes stronger," or "She's action-oriented and gets things done."

All of these can be used to represent Core Behaviors that will help with recruiting and evaluations and will ultimately help the organization stand out among its competition.

What do you think? What's your favorite example of a core value statement? Which one stands out as the worst?

Does anyone really care about core values?

I work with clients every year on vision, mission, core values and culture challenges. When we get to articulating core values, executives often defer to a standard list of behaviors like Integrity, Accountability, Responsiveness, Empowerment, etc. But this random list doesn't do anything for anybody.

Enron's core values were Communication, Respect, Integrity and Excellence. Most would agree that these values were anything but core to the company.

The culture was corrupt. And that's where I find executives get confused. Your core values emerge from the culture. They don't drive it.

If your culture is dysfunctional, it doesn't matter how many core values you list or how you word them. If the leadership doesn't demonstrate the kinds of behaviors you want, TELLING your employees how to act will fall on deaf ears.

Ralph Waldo Emerson put it this way: “What you do speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you are saying”

So, no, core values don't matter. Core behaviors do.

If you want to change a company, or help guide an organization to a positive new future, focus on the behaviors. Start at the top and cascade down. Once the leaders get it right you can consider making posters and t-shirts. Until then, no. You're just asking for trouble.

The Problems with Core Values—And How to Fix Them

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?

5 Easy Steps To Get The Greatest Value Out Of Your Core Values

Weak core values can hold companies back in the battle for the best people and minds, investors and brand enthusiasts. Capture the values that make you unique and build the healthier culture the best employees seek.

1. Kill Hollow Core Values

Ever since Jim Collins and Jerry Porras called attention to the importance of organizational core values in their book Built to Last, the world has rushed to fill the corporate walls with attributes, beliefs, quotes and any number of vacuous statements that might pass as a value. We’ve all seen them: Honesty, Authenticity, Respect, Courage … the list can and does go on and on. It doesn’t have to be this way.

I encourage my clients to push beyond generic language to words and expressions that leave no room for misinterpretation. Let’s use Integrity for example. Integrity is an excellent trait. I believe all companies should fundamentally be built on a platform of people acting with some sense of integrity. If that’s true, and every company should act with integrity, and all employees should embrace it as a core value, how does one company differentiate their spin on integrity from another?

Therein lies the challenge, because synonyms for integrity include honesty, principle, sincerity, candor, goodness and righteousness, among others. What do you, specifically, mean when you list integrity as a core value? Do you want people to be honest, or sincere? To be good, or righteous? I’ve found that when the interpretation is left to the individual, the advantage almost always swings in the favor of the individual.

Want further reason to kill hollow values? Enron, now the poster child for corporate corruption and scandal, listed four core values in their 1998 annual report: Respect, Integrity, Communication and Excellence. Granted, they wrote clarifying sentences after each, but those sentences are just as hollow as the values. My personal favorite follows Respect: “We treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves. We do not tolerate abusive or disrespectful treatment. Ruthlessness, callousness, and arrogance don’t belong here.”

2. Watch How The Best Employees Think And Act

We as individuals live our lives based on what we value, and we want the places we work to operate the same way. As Jessica Amortegui points out in her article, “5 reasons You Need To Instill Values In Your Organization,” “rather than get people to live the values, [organizations] should focus on the values that live in the people. This taps into the innate qualities that exist across mankind: human virtues.”

Throughout my career, I’ve regularly conducted one-on-one interviews with people across my clients’ organizations prior to developing core language. During these interviews it can quickly become apparent what values the company embraces, what isn’t working and what the top employees wish could be expressed. By the same token, taking note of the traits the worst employee exhibit can often help provide clarity for what the company does not want to move forward. Once we’ve helped our clients discover the values that match their organization, we help craft language that will set them apart internally and externally.

3. Write Your Values To Reflect Your Organization

Expressing core values uniquely matters immensely for your company. They serve as a tool for recruiting and as a barometer of sorts for existing employees. They can be a banner to guide the desired ideas and actions, and guardrails against unwanted behavior.

Write the way your company thinks, acts and talks. If your environment is ultra casual, feel free to express your values that way. There’s nothing wrong with saying “No one here is too good to take out the trash or sweep the floor” if that fits who you are. If your culture is more formal, you might try “Entrepreneurial Spirit—We expect everyone here to do the little things in order to help us reach our goals”. Stay true to who you are—and what you want to become.

Here are a few examples that might help frame in different approaches:

Delta Airlines

• Always tell the truth

• Always keep your deals

• Don’t hurt anyone

• Try harder than all our competitors—never give up

• Care for our customers, our community and each other

McDonald’s

• We place the customer experience at the core of all we do

• We are committed to our people

• We believe in the McDonald’s System

• We operate our business ethically

• We give back to our communities

• We grow our business profitably

• We strive continually to improve

Sealed Air

• Uncompromising Ethics

• Courageous Determination

• Ingenious Collaboration

• Purposeful Innovation

Zappos

• Deliver WOW Through Service

• Embrace and Drive Change

• Create Fun and A Little Weirdness

• Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded

• Pursue Growth and Learning

• Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication

• Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit

• Do More With Less

• Be Passionate and Determined

• Be Humble

4. Wait A Year Before Handing Out Mugs And T-Shirts

How you introduce new values language to any organization is important. We caution our clients against rushing to print posters, mugs and t-shirts with the new values, which are often tied in with Vision and Mission articulation. It’s not that we have anything against t-shirts and mugs, it’s just that people tend to hate them in these circumstances. Seriously, hate them. T-shirts offered up too early in the process signify that a company is more interested in the organization than its people, and if the people don’t come first that t-shirt is likely to only represent how out of touch management is with those who make the company great.

We promote cascading communication—starting from the CEO and moving consistently through management—and management living the messages they preach well before they try to drive anything down into the system. A senior manager who cheats the system to get his way in front of his managers is going to have zero chance of getting his team to buy into anything he says about Integrity as a value. Once managers consistently demonstrate that they buy into the new corporate language, through their actions, the rest of the company can start to get on board—and then you can give everybody in the newly refreshed brand tribe a t-shirt to help them celebrate.

5. Have An Exit Plan For The Haters

Sometimes during the process of rolling out core values across an organization, companies find people who simply don’t or won’t embrace the new language. Let’s be clear here: the company carries the burden of first communicating any new cultural language to its employees and helping employees see the advantages of moving towards the new ideals collectively. But at some point management owes it to the rest of the company to help the naysayers move on. It’s really hard to have a healthy organizational culture when most of the company buys into the values while a few negative outliers are allowed to passively or actively fight the system. Either people agree that the values matter and live them, or the values don’t matter and neither does the culture.

Core values are an important part of building healthy organizations and getting everybody on the same script. Most companies don’t have to look much further than their best employees to know what kind of culture they have and what they should celebrate. But the words you use to articulate your values, the way management lives them, and the way you introduce the new language to the company can make difference in whether the organization buys into the program or just waits until management moves on to a new topic.

If you need help getting send me a note and let’s get the conversation started.