Enron had the values integrity, respect and excellence displayed in their lobby. And then their leaders went to jail for fraud…
Clearly it’s not enough to simply have nice sounding words.
At their worst, that’s what company values are. Words on a wall. A slide during onboarding. A poster that no-one reads.
Employees are told to memorise them as if they matter, yet the only time they see them is if they accidentally find themselves on your website. The values are disconnected from everyday behaviour, decision making, hiring, promotion and leadership.
That’s why values get a bad rep.
But when values are done well, when they are uniquely designed to serve your organisation’s strategy and culture; when they guide behaviour; when they shape decisions; when they act as a call to action…
That’s when values become accelerants of culture and performance.
We’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly whilst helping organisations define their company values and I like to think we’ve cracked the code on what makes values truly meaningful.
We never gatekeep knowledge so here’s all the theory that sits behind what we believe makes values meaningful.
(We’re keeping the magic of how we facilitate the workshops back – you’ll have to reach out directly if you want to know how get to the end result 😉)
WHAT MAKES A MEANINGFUL VALUE?
There are 4 ingredients that we believe serve as useful guides for creating a good set of company values:
- Unique, not ubiquitous
- Marmite, not vanilla
- Stretching, not settling
- Directive, not decorative
Unique, not ubiquitous
Two studies, Guiso et al (2013) and Sull et al (2020), analysed how often various cultural values were posted on company websites. Although performed almost a decade apart, they reached similar results.
The long-tailed distribution suggests there are a handful of values that are ubiquitous, such as integrity and collaboration, which each appear in over half the websites.
Why is this a problem? Well, when your values are ubiquitous they also tend to be meaningless. In the same study, Sull et Al (2020) found that although 80% of the companies they analysed had positive company values, there was no correlation between stated and actual values.
This is what happens when a value could be said by anyone.
Instead your values should be unique, designed to help your company’s specific needs.
When we worked with the world’s leading art fair Frieze, we landed on “connect the dots” as one of their values.
Frieze had recently expanded to Seoul and Los Angeles, in addition to New York and London, resulting in a culture that was globally distributed and increasingly siloed. They needed a value that would foster a culture where everyone worked as one team contributing to a bigger vision.
Not “collaboration” – that’s ubiquitous.
But “Connect the dots” – uniquely framed to serve their needs.
Marmite, not vanilla
Another issue with single word values is that they’re too generic to be useful. There’s not enough substance behind them, not enough grit, for people to know what they’re supposed to mean.
Let’s take the value of integrity. This value is shared by Walmart, Save The Children, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Ford, Chevron, Adidas… Charities, Banks, FMCGs, NGOs, Fast Fashion all have exactly the same values despite being completely different organisations with completely different cultures.
This brings us to what we call ‘vanilla’ values. No-one would dislike them, no-one would say “no we don’t want that” – which makes it a pointless value.
If you’re a charity, you shouldn’t want to have the exact same value as a hedge fund. If you do, it means you’ve got a word that can be interpreted in such wildly different ways for it to serve no purpose at all.
Instead you should aim for marmite values. You know you’ve got a marmite value if it seems perfect for your organisation and absolutely terrible for another.
And that’s ideal because, back to point one, you’re creating values specifically for your organisation.
One of my favourite examples of this was told to me over a dinner by someone that used to work at a global investment bank. He said they used to have an informal principle called “long-term greedy”. God I love that. It’s actually a perfect value… for an investment bank!
What it suggests is: “We’re about building relationships for the long-haul. So we might do things in the short-term that don’t make much financial sense to invest in the relationship but only because we see an upside in the future. But make no mistake, we are greedy! This is about making money!”
Stretching, not settling
Okay okay so we’re noticing an issue with single word values… But let me twist the knife a little bit more.
Integrity and Respect. Both of these appeared in Enron’s values and, surprise surprise, they also take the Number 1 and Number 4 spot as most cited values. Why is this? Well, we obviously want everyone to act with integrity and respect…
The Institute for Global Ethics is an organisation dedicated to exploring the idea of shared moral values and helping organisations and individuals put those values into practice. They identified 6 shared moral values: trust, honesty, respect, responsibility, fairness and compassion.
These really should be the bare minimum of what you’re willing to accept. They’re super important and should be strictly upheld, but don’t waste a value telling people to be good people.
If you have to remind people to be respectful you’ve got bigger problems.
Instead of reinforcing your foundation, you want values which help you stretch further. They’re you at your best. Some might be slightly aspirational and a few might be future-focused. They’re inspiring and will help your organisation get where it needs to go if everyone puts them into practise.
The work we did with Bates Wells, the UK’s first B-Corp Law Firm, is a good example of how to shift from settling into stretching.
One of the values we landed on was “Champion Each Other”.
Settling would been something like ‘kindness’ or ‘fairness’. “Champion Each Other” is a much more active command, it has more oomph and encourages everyone to stretch. There are implications to championing each other that aren’t apparent in something like ‘fairness’.
Directive, not decorative
This brings us to our final ingredient.
We always say that values are only meaningful insofar as you might need to sacrifice something for it. Your values should take a stand, there should sometimes be a cost to upholding them. Not always, but when push comes to shove and a tricky decision needs to be made, upholding your value might cost you.
This means they need to be actionable. More than that, the language of the value needs to imply a course of action and suggest what type of behaviour is expected.
For each value, we go on to define example behaviours that bring them to life, but people should get a sense of what’s expected simply by reading the value.
Sometimes this means we frame values as behaviours or instructions, like “prioritise creativity” for Frieze.
Sometimes they’re more of an identity statement, like “reliably excellent always” which we created for Safetykleen, the world’s leading provider of chemical cleaning & environmental solutions.
“Reliably excellent always is” is much better than simply “excellence” which could mean many different things and therefore doesn’t helpfully signal what behaviours you’re expecting to achieve excellence.
Both of our examples above suggest a way of behaving without having to dig deeper.
A decorative value looks nice but doesn’t guide behaviour. A directive value requires action to uphold it.
Here’s our cheatsheet
If you don’t feel proud when you say your values out loud, or need help creating some from scratch, get in touch!