Let’s give values an upgrade

The truth is values have become wallpaper.

All organisations lean on a number of basic strategic concepts to keep them grounded and pointed in the right direction. A mission ensures you’ve got a long-range goal. A vision clarifies what the outcome of realising this goal looks like for you and your customers. A strategy nails down some kind of plan for how to get there. All these things are good (though are frequently executed poorly). They have a clear role to play and they act as a guide for organisational priorities and activities.

As omnipresent as a mission, a vision and a strategy are your organisational values. Culture is known as all important to businesses today and values are some kind of representation of culture. There’s logic there. So they get an automatic seat at the top table. Significant money is spent exploring them, defining them, articulating them and putting them on posters.

Such posters are literally emblematic of the fate that awaits any newly resolved values — they become wallpaper. As omnipresent as values are within modern organisations, their usefulness and impact once defined tends to be negligible. Here are four reasons (our opinion) why values become wallpaper.

They’re generic

If values are a stimulant for the culture you want to create, you’d hope for them to be sharp and distinctive. A snappy shortcut to ‘who we are and how we work together’, you’d think. Alas, values tend not to be distinctive. In fact, most sets of organisational values regress bizarrely to a mean of human decency. Aligning behind tenets like ‘Respect’, ‘Trust’ and ‘Accountability’ means your emerging culture will look pretty much like the world outside, where people are generally good and well-meaning and things are generally ok. The fact that such failed corporate citizens as Enron laid claim to words like these (specifically, “Communication. Respect. Integrity. Excellence.”) should serve as a further red flag.

They’re flat

Too often values are articulated based on some kind of strangely standardised template, as inferred in the prose just above: a single noun. Whilst this achieves the noble goal of pithiness that might lead to good recall, it also leads to flatness. There’s only so much feeling you can weave into a generic noun. A single word will rarely carry much intention or elicit much motivation. It means that values tend to be upheld with passivity. You don’t see people going around hollering animatedly about respect. Apart from Aretha Franklin.

They’re static

Whilst every other strategic concept (the mission, the vision, the strategy) is pointed at the future and progress, values tend to represent the present. They are usually established with a ‘set and forget’ mindset and represent stasis. They get reviewed every now and then, when people feel sufficiently bored of them or when they fall behind society’s ever-evolving codes. Then it’s set and forget one more time. If you stare at a good mission, you might feel optimistic, even a little inspired. If you stare at a set of values (on a poster, probably), you’re likely to feel nothing, perhaps just a little sleepy.

They’re abstract

Values are rarely tied effectively to missions, visions and strategies. They tend to sit adjacent, alone, without context and practical applicability. They live in a vacuum — representing, regrettably, the role that People & Culture plays in many organisations. This is a huge missed opportunity and, as a result, values aren’t taken seriously and aren’t primed to play an active role in shaping organisational futures.

So, the question that demands to be asked: should we forget values and find something better to stimulate and sharpen our organisational cultures? Frankly, yes. Is there a better way? Almost certainly, yes. We have some thoughts.

Let’s rewind and begin with the opportunity. It’s not to come up with something better than values. It’s to create a new strategic concept that can genuinely stimulate a distinctive organisational culture. We know we can’t create culture out of nothing (Aaron Dignan said it best — see below) but we can definitely stimulate it to take shape and nurture it.

“Culture is like a shadow. It emerges.”

— Aaron Dignan, Brave New Work

So, where to start? Forgive us for doing the classic strategist’s trick of turning something crap on its head to see some possible solves.

Make them specific, not generic

‘Respect’ is not something you can do much with. Particularly if you’re already a respectful type of human, as the majority of us are. The new version of values needs to be much more specific in its articulation, so it can be specific in its expectations. A fully-coloured picture is required.

To ensure more specificity when it comes to value-type constructs, our approach challenges teams to explode any given value into a series of commitments. These are generated individually but prioritised and resolved collectively. A list of 4–5 ‘commitments’ under each value then serves as a guide and source of inspiration for specific employee actions.

Make them intentional, not flat

Values demand only to be passively upheld. Any new construct needs more oomph about it. To create fervour. These should be things that we pursue with passion. Things that motivate and tap into our collective urges (the good ones).

To tap more into the true collective intentions of a group, we often start any P&C program with an activity called the ‘Common Charter’. In this, a group starts by generating a broad range of things they hold to be collectively important, relating to their work. These are then mapped, merged, edited and wordsmithed into a set of no more than 6 firmly-held beliefs. These form a common charter. They’re usually full of heart and humanity, and they’re far more distinctive than single word nouns. When you have a charter like this in play, that people are ready to passionately pursue, it goes way beyond what values can achieve.

Make them active, not static

We have to go beyond representation of the current state. Whatever we replace values with has to be a change agent. Not a transformational change agent necessarily but something that helps us edge forward every day, and improve ourselves individually and collectively.

Because values are often seen as the ‘soft’ side of corporate life, they don’t have goals attached, beyond some lip-service references in people’ KPIs. To ensure value-type constructs (we prefer beliefs as they are much more intentional) are activated, they must have goals attached to them. With each belief that sits within a common charter, we then ask our client teams to put actual, measurable objectives in place. From there it’s important to constantly review, reflect and recalibrate in order to move the culture dial.

Make them real and practical, not abstract

Finally, the construct we build has to have a practical real-life application. A connection to activities to be prioritised, of initiatives to put in motion. And importantly, a clear sense of connection to an organisation’s big picture strategy. If your mission is to take people to outer space, being respectful is a good baseline but won’t get you far beyond handshakes at the launchpad.

This isn’t easy to solve. How you make your beliefs (or values, if you must) truly connected to your bigger picture strategy depends on how your organisation is wired. The key is to elevate the conversation to a ‘ways of working’ level. We encourage teams to lay down some idealised ‘common practices’ in service of both the culture they seek to create, and the pursuit of the organisational vision and strategy. There’s a real sweet spot there if you can find it — where your beliefs inform new ways of working, that in turn help you realise your mission faster and better.