Is your top team 'walking the talk'?
Is your top team 'walking the talk'?
Remember Enron? Their corporate values were:
Communication
Respect
Integrity
Excellence
These are fairly generic corporate values, in fact, they might even be similar to the ones you have in your organization. You might have spent quite a bit of time drafting, developing, and wordsmithing the values you have. If your list of company values is like the Enron list above, you might have good cause to be a bit nervous.
Why? Because these values on their own are meaningless. These are all what I would call ‘super fluffy’ words that we could all have very different meanings for. Having a list of words is a very dangerous way to go about identifying the values you think you hold as an organisation and the values you expect all of your employees to follow.
In previous articles, I have referenced the work of Patrick Lencioni. He wrote an HBR article back in 2002 titled Make Your Values Mean Something. In this article, Lencioni shared his four different types of values and these are:
Core values – those values that are deeply ingrained principles that guide all of a company’s actions.
Aspirational values – those values that a company currently lacks but needs to be successful in the future.
Permission-to-play values – these are the values that represent the minimum behavioural or social standards required of employees.
Accidental values – these are the values that spontaneously take hold over time without being cultivated by the leadership.
It’s incredibly useful for organisations to categorise their values according to Lencioni’s value types in the first instance, but that’s not enough. We need to gain absolute clarity on what those values will look like in behavioural terms. What will people be doing if they are living these values?
Some organisations I interact with have done a fantastic job of articulating their values at the corporate level. The challenge often comes when you go deeper into the organisation and ask teams or individuals what do you have to do to live those values, what does that look like? Often, people really struggle to find the words that would describe how they live the values. Why, because there haven’t been the conversations that have cascaded from the top of the business to make sure the values mean something at every level in the organisation and that all employees know what “integrity” looks like in their team or role.
The other key aspect of having values articulated that reflect the way things are done, is that the entire organisation will have eyes focused on the top team to make sure that they are walking the talk. If there is any hint of incongruence at the top, that will be the cue for the rest of the organisation that the values don’t really matter. You’ll hear things like, “the values can’t matter because the top team isn’t living them, the words in reception must just be wall art.”
It’s important to make sure that company values are understood by everyone in the organisation. The only way to do this, and have the values mean something, is to have conversations with teams to make sure they understand what the values look like in their environment. And a big tip here, don’t start this discussion by telling them what you expect the values to look like in behavioural terms. Get them to articulate this to you in their language and if something isn’t sitting quite right, throw it open to the team to discuss further. Encourage a conversation where there is the opportunity to challenge and debate in a healthy way. Who knows, that might even reflect one of your values.
If you want your company values to be authentic, well adopted throughout the business, and ultimately something that enables your employees to make better decisions, you need to have your senior leadership team walking the talk first. You also need to have your people involved in creating the understanding within their team and context. If you miss these fundamental steps out, and a lot of organisations do, your values run the risk of being the hollow words that sit on a wall somewhere but aren’t really the way people behave. They won’t provide the clarity around how your people need to be to achieve success.
If you’re not sure if your company values have been adopted well within your organisation or they don’t reflect the way you want the organisation to be, we should chat to explore what could be creating the lack of alignment. Don’t leave this situation to simmer, it’s an opportunity to create an environment where everyone is on board and focused on the things that really matter.
Lead with Impact,