Organisations love to have a set of values! I was reminded of this fact this week by a very amusing sketch from the comedy group Wankernomics which has been doing the rounds again on social media - probably not one for in the workplace but well worth a look!
The challenges with organisational values are twofold. The first is perfectly exemplified by the above sketch, where a group of senior people within the organisation (or a high paid group of management consultants) arbitrarily select some words which they think will make the company look good and those become the values. Then they'll get them stuck up on office walls, on screen savers and PC backgrounds and printed onto lanyards and that's the end of the exercise. We now have a set of values which we hope will magically permeate into the organisation from being in contact with the employees bare necks and manifest themselves through their behaviours.
The other problem is that, in MANY cases, the stated values of the organisation bear absolutely no resemblance to the lived experiences of those who work for or interact with the organisation.
Integrity, communication, respect and excellence were the stated values of Enron. Someone remind me what happened to them again. I think it was something about a massive fraud, zero psychological safety, financial impropriety and a huge collapse.
Responsibility, honesty, bravery, diversity, pride, solidarity and reliability are the core values of the Volkswagen Group. Not sure exactly how those showed up when they were fined $4.3bn for Dieselgate; the scandal where they intentionally cheated emissions tests and had vehicles releasing 40x their stated level of emissions when they got on the road.
Convenience, affordability and innovation were the core values of Theranos, the blood sampling organisation who claimed to be able to help patients to identify health risks with a minimally invasive blood sample. The only thing they innovated, however, was how to lie about the capability of their product and their toxic work culture stopped whistleblowers from coming forward before the company collapsed having taken over $400m in funding.
At least Worldcom, who filed for bankruptcy after an accounting scandal in 2002 which led to the introduction of the Sarbanes Oxley Act, had the decency not to bother having a set of corporate values, which CEO Bernard Ebbers described as a "colossal waste of time" as he shepherded his organisation into the grave.
You can see from these (albeit extreme) examples that in lots of cases, the values of an organisation aren't worth the paper they're written on. And that's not to say that there aren't organisations whose values really reflect what it's like to work there and to deal with them, but just having a set of values isn't going to magically make your organisation live up to them.
So there are a couple of options if you want to go down the road of values, if you want to do it well. The first is to do what I think a lot of companies do - the ASPIRATIONAL values approach. Go through an exercise, involving people from all levels of the organisation and both inside and out, and build a set of values which capture what your organisation is like at it's very best and what you want it to be like. Then you have to ensure that your organisation actually lives up to these. How do you measure them? How do you gather feedback to make sure that's the lived experience of your people and customers? How do you reward and recognise people for embodying them. How do you hold people accountable for not living up to them? How do you make sure that all of your processes from attraction and recruitment right through to retirement are aligned and representative of these?
And the other option is to do a similar exercise, but to capture the ACTUAL set of values which your organisation currently embodies. These might not be values you're happy to share publicly as yet, but if you do it right, you'll get a list of values which are very telling.
Start by trying it yourself. Spend ten minutes with a blank sheet, thinking about your experiences with your organisation in the last week or two. Don't be nasty, don't be kind -just be honest. What has your experience been like and which words capture that? What have your colleagues and other teams and departments been like to deal with? Helpful? Efficient? Slow? Frustrating? What are your processes and procedures lie to navigate? Rigorous? Robust? Bureaucratic? Kafkaesque? How does it feel to see those written down?
What about if you did the same but instead of thinking about your organisation, you captured what you think it's been like for people working or dealing or interacting with you as an individual? For every one, come up with a recent example which supports that and think of any examples which might go against it.
Once you have this, you can reflect on how it would feel to be eulogised using these words and that's the starting point to changing and living a values-led life. If I don't want those words spoken aloud at my funeral (or at least at the wake where people have had a couple of pints and stopped having to be nice about me!) then which words DO I want, and how do I need to behave in order to embody those? This can be a stinging exercise, but if values matter to you, then they need to show up in how you live and how you lead.
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