Company Values: When Words Become Commitments
I sometimes wonder how much time and money organisations have spent coming up with values that could belong to absolutely anybody. Integrity. Excellence. Innovation. Collaboration. All perfectly respectable words. But what do they actually tell anybody about your organisation?
Why are those particular things important to your business? What do they ask your people to do? And how will doing those things help you achieve what you're trying to achieve?
Because if we can't answer those questions, what exactly have we created?
I'm not against company values. Quite the opposite. I think they can be incredibly powerful. But I do get frustrated by the number of organisations that seem to confuse having a set of values with actually valuing something.
What's wrong with being cost conscious?
I recently had a conversation with Hope Collins, founder of Hope Collins Advisory, for Sticky From The Inside. We got talking about the rather predictable language that tends to appear whenever organisations define their values. At one point, we agreed that we'd actually have a lot of respect for a business that openly declared Cost Consciousness as one of its values.
It's not particularly glamorous, is it? It's hardly going to look inspiring on a giant mural in reception. But if managing costs carefully is genuinely important to how that organisation succeeds, why shouldn't it be a value? It might tell employees something useful about how they're expected to make decisions, use resources, challenge waste or weigh up competing priorities.
Compare that with Integrity. Really? Do we need to make a special declaration that we won't lie to our colleagues or customers? I'd rather hope that was a fairly basic expectation. Now, I'm not saying integrity can never be a meaningful organisational value. It absolutely can. But surely we need to go further than simply announcing that we're decent people.
If integrity means telling a customer that your product isn't right for them, even when that costs you a sale, now we're getting somewhere. That's a belief influencing a decision. And a behaviour that might actually require something of us.
Company Values aren't behaviours. But they need behaviours.
For me, values are the beliefs an organisation holds dear because it believes those things will help it succeed. That's an important distinction. They're not simply a collection of desirable personality traits. They should have a meaningful relationship with the organisation's purpose, ambitions and the way it believes it needs to operate. But the value itself is only part of the job. It needs to be supported by real, relevant, observable behaviours that demonstrate the belief is alive and well in the organisation every day. Otherwise, how would anybody know?
This is where Hope introduced her Commitments framework, which asks organisations to declare what matters, define it, demonstrate it and draw a line around what isn't acceptable.
I like the emphasis on commitment. There's quite a difference between saying we'd like to behave in a particular way and agreeing that this is how we do things here. But I don't see commitments as a reason to abandon values. I see them as one way of doing the harder work that values require. Because the words aren't really the difficult bit.
From mural to mindset
This isn't a new frustration of mine. Way back in Episode 10 of Sticky From The Inside, I spoke with Alice Smith and Graham Watson from We Can Creative about taking company values from mural to mindset. I still love that phrase. In that conversation, we explored the importance of finding values that genuinely reflect a business rather than choosing something safely appealing to everybody.
One of the memorable pieces of advice was to be glad if your values upset a few people. At least that might suggest they stand for something distinctive. I'm not arguing that values should be deliberately controversial. But if every organisation could adopt yours without changing a thing, I'd question how much direction they're really providing. And that's before we get to the uncomfortable question of whether anybody actually behaves in accordance with them.
The real test is what happens when someone doesn't
Imagine an organisation that proudly talks about collaboration. Now imagine its biggest commercial performer regularly withholds information, undermines colleagues and makes everybody else's job harder. What happens? Do we challenge that behaviour because it contradicts something we genuinely believe matters to our success? Or do we look the other way because they're delivering the numbers?
Hope and I spent some time exploring this question. Her framework includes a stage called Draw the Line, which makes the behaviours an organisation isn't prepared to accept explicit.
That matters. I've seen how powerful the signal can be when an organisation actually challenges someone influential or commercially successful for behaviour that contradicts its stated values. Suddenly, people realise the words might mean something after all.
Of course, accountability has to work upwards too. If leaders can ignore the commitments while everybody else is expected to follow them, we're straight back into the territory of attractive words and very little credibility. And perhaps that's the most demanding part of all.
Not writing the values. Not launching them. Not putting them on a wall. Living with the consequences of having chosen them.
So what do your values actually do?
I don't think every organisation needs to rip up its values and start again. Though some might. Particularly if they've ended up with a set of words that nobody can explain, distinguish or connect to the business. But for others, perhaps the more useful challenge is to ask whether they've done enough to make their existing values meaningful.
Why does this belief matter to our success? What would we see people doing if we genuinely lived by it? What decisions should it influence? What behaviour would contradict it? And are we prepared to challenge that behaviour, whoever demonstrates it?
Because when values are distinctive, relevant and genuinely connected to the way people need to behave to achieve an organisation's ambitions, I think they're enormously useful.
They can provide direction, shape decisions and help people understand what sort of organisation they're part of. But when they're just a collection of admirable words, I'm not convinced they're doing anybody much good.
Maybe the question isn't whether your organisation has values. It's whether anybody inside it gets any value from them?
This article was inspired by my conversation with Hope Collins on Episode 158 of Sticky From The Inside, “Company Values: When Words Become Commitments”. Hope shares her Commitments framework and explores how organisations can make behavioural expectations clearer and accountability more meaningful.
For an earlier conversation on the subject, listen to Episode 10, “How Do You Take Company Values From Mural To Mindset?”, with Alice Smith and Graham Watson.
The full Episode 158 transcript is also available to download:
Andy Goram is the Founder of Bizjuicer, an employee engagement and workplace culture consultancy that's on a mission to help people have more fulfilling work lives. He's also the host of the Sticky From The Inside Podcast, which talks to experts on these topics from around the world.
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