There are few topics in the culture lexicon that stimulate more conversation and pontification than the idea of corporate values.
<Yes, I freely acknowledge with this post I’m bringing my little soapbox to an already congested town square>
If you were to ask your most tenured employees the part of your organization that they’re most cynical (or ambivalent) about, it’s likely your values.
And sadly, if you were to ask your hiring managers or those who regularly face eager and enthusiastic recruits the toughest question they have to answer, it would likely be something like this:
“Can you tell me the last time your organization made a difficult, unpopular or expensive choice based on the values you proudly display on your website and on that poster on the wall behind you?”
One way to avoid that horrible question is to have such innocuous and obvious values that to contradict them would literally put you out of business.
When the bank that holds my mortgage, checking account and kid’s education savings tells me about their value of “Trust” I cringe and shudder. When an airline or nuclear power utility trumpets a value of “Safety” at their shareholder meeting, I’m convinced somewhere a kitten dies. Those values are table-stakes and category pablum.
As countless others have opined, the surest way to fuel that deep employee – and customer – cynicism is to fall at the critical 1st and 2nd hurdles.
Credibility.
Consistency
A recent personal example.
A recent credibility failure was me coming down to breakfast Saturday morning half-asleep, bleary-eyed and largely incomprehensible from staying up until 3:30AM watching HBO’s “The Wire”. Difficult to admonish my daughters about the dangers of too much screen time and social media when Dad had gorged on 6 straight hours of the greatest police show ever broadcast.
My friend and sage counsel Ron Tite has an elegantly simple refrain – Think Do Say. In that order. Not, as is more often the case, in the reverse.
Falling at the consistency hurdle is one we see explicitly and insidiously in our newspapers each and every day. The articles and headlines that get an eye-roll and an exasperated sigh but no longer a raised eyebrow.
Last week in the United States a torrent of technology companies – from Twitter to Facebook to AWS – took sweeping moves to remove Donald Trump from their platforms. Citing concerns about his proclivity to incite riots and public mischief ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration, they stepped in to prevent him stoking his millions of followers with more malicious and inflammatory content.
The jaded question from many corners was, understandably, “where the heck were you for the past four years as you willingly let him run amok on your platforms.” Perhaps the Twitter stock market ticker below gives the cynics some rationale.
Consistency is about treating your values as an always thing not as an opportunistic “when it’s convenient” thing.
The starkest example of that consistency over opportunity will always be the Chick-Fil-A position on supporting or advocating for anti-LGBTQ rights. For me, and millions of others who petitioned and boycotted the organization, that standard was outlandish and shameful, but the organization stood by it as a tenet of their deeply held religious views. Was it an unpopular position? No doubt. Did it cost them business? Absolutely but interestingly, it made little obvious dents in their sales. For the record I’m glad to see that the organization has re-evaluated and softened their stance as this 2019 article highlights.
So, if organizations regularly ignore or obfuscate around their values, is there any logical reason to bother writing them up in the first place and broadcasting them with zealotry and wide-eyed enthusiasm?
My inner idealist says YES.
Abso-frigging-lutely this is an exercise any success driven organization should commit reflection and introspection to.
It’s an opportunity to proclaim what you stand for and stand against. That means going beyond the wafer-thin and facile terms you currently espouse and find the unique truth you unambiguously hold dear inside your company. If you don’t fully articulate the values and behaviours you need to drive your strategic success, that’s not a failure of intellect, it’s a failure of courage. Will you choose to interrogate your values?
It’s an opportunity to hold your leadership accountable to your people and your culture. Not the other way around as many foolishly believe. Your people aren’t any more accountable to your leaders than your leaders are accountable to your people. Organizations succeed when accountability is a two-way street and your values can be an excellent foundation of that accountability. Will you choose to hold everyone accountable to your values?
It’s an opportunity to build some predictability inside your organizational culture too. Culture leaders like Stan Slap and the founder of IT unicorn Globant Guibert Englebienne are strong proponents of the notion that your culture is a living organism that seeks surety, predictability and consistency amidst the chaos and confusion in the world. That chaos and confusion is often self-inflicted because internally we act inconsistently and erratically, we say one thing and do another, we ask our people to believe us “this time” when the “last time” they gave us their trust it didn’t turn out too great. Will you choose to live to your values?
A friend recently wrote an elegant piece about the circumstances that lead to the recent events in the US Capitol. In it he referenced the singular brilliant quote from ad legend Bill Bernbach that I believe holds true for values as well:
“A principle isn’t a principle until it costs your something.”
I’d suggest that taking the easy way out on company values has cost us all too much already.
