Four Reasons Why Your Core Values are Hurting Your Organization — #metoo
The CEO of the company is reluctantly acknowledging it. Yes, someone has been sexually harassed by a powerful person within the organization.
As he is interviewed by the media he offers a certain admonition of guilt but says that it’s only a very isolated incident and it should in no way define the organization at large.
The organization itself, we are told, is inherently good and as proof the CEO touts their core values.
Over the last couple of weeks I have been reading, with a mix of interest, sadness and frustration, a number of the stories being told in the wake of the #metoo movement
The focus of this post however is not on the tragic reality of sexual harassment, nor on the dynamics of the #metoo movement itself, but on the topic of core values.
I don’t remember a time when organizational core values (or values in general) have been more on the agenda than right now (at least not in my native country Sweden).
Though I believe the conversation about core values is incredibly important, there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of how values actually work. A misunderstanding that is most striking in the way leaders talk about the core values of their own organizations.
The danger is that when leaders tout their defined core values as some form of alibi, their coworkers and the general public become increasingly discouraged with the whole concept of values as they are left wondering about the great discrepancy they see between the behavior of the organization and its stated core values.
I hope this post can give some inight into why the way we talk about organizational core values is oftentimes more harmful than helpful and why we should care deeply about getting it right.
1. We Assume that Our Written Core Values are the Actual Values of our Organization
While most of us do not have written personal core values, we still make value based decisions all the time like;
- If we should spend yet another evening at our kid’s dance recital or stay at the office.
- If we should buy that new iphone or put the money aside to save for a new apartment.
- Which friendships and relationships we should give our time and energy to.
- What kind of behavior we choose to celebrate as we raise our children.
These decisions might seem rather straight forward but there a number of tricky value based decisions we all make on a weekly or daily basis.
If you would ask a stranger to analyze your life based on how you spend your time and financial resources, and what your network of friends looks like, they would get a rather good picture of what is truly important to you, what you value.
This capacity of making value based decisions is something every person in your organization automatically brings with her to the job.
It is what I would call a capacity of the Heart of the individual, that as people come together around a shared purpose, vision or mission, becomes a shared capacity of the Heart of the organization. This in turn constitutes the organizational culture.
The obvious conclusion then is that your organization didn’t start having values the day your leadership decided to define a list of beautifully formulated core values.
It had values from day one.
Since an organization doesn’t need to have written core values to actually make value-based decisions, it is very possible that the written core values, however beautiful the might be, are not the actual values in the Heart of the organization.
This explains the discrepancy we so often see between defined core values and what the organization actually values.
An organization might for example say that it values creating a healthy work environment for women. And that might be true to a certin extent, but when the choice comes between that and power, the pursuit of power (though probably not written as a value on the website) becomes the priority.
This discrepancy is dangerous and leads a lot of people in your organization to believe that core values do not matter at all.
It can also lead to your organization morally bankrupting itself.
2. We Believe that Our Organizations are Inherently Good
In 2009 a scandal became public. The communication’s director of the Swedish arm of the International Red Cross, Johan af Donner had to leave his job, since it had come to the knowledge of other people in the leadership team that he had embezzled about one million USD from the organization (and from another non-profit).
What also became known was that Johan af Donner had a history of embezzling money from other former employers, but his ability to fundraise had still taken him to this position, keeping the spotlight away from his past.
A person very familiar with the organization said in an interview about the scandal;
“Before the scandal, the Red Cross saw themselves as holier-than-thou, a conception that birthed arrogance. ”Give us your money. For what? Don’t care about that! We are the good guys.”
Most of us understand that we are able to make decisions, that could perhaps lead to other decisions that would be disastrous for the people we care about further down the road.
I have seen leaders I knew and admired make decisions that had irreparable consequences for their leadership and the organizations they served.
Having a humble understanding of our own fallability makes us more prone to admit that we are well capable of both constructive and destructive decisions.
As the russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote;
“the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts.”
When it comes to our organizations however, we seem to believe that they are inherently good, even though they are founded by people, lead by people and made up of people.
Our desire to see ourselves as the good guys can effectively keep us from seeing the inner corruption at the Heart of our organization. Instead of rooting it out we let it keep growing until it slowly but surely permeates the whole organization.
Instead of being true, honest, focused and transparent the organizational Heart becomes marred by hypocrisy, ulterior motives and hidden agendas.
The organization loses its focus on what is truly important and starts to value the wrong things which in turn starts to change the course of the whole organization.
3. We Believe that the Values of the Organization are Constant and Fixed
Let‘s say that we have at some point done the work of defining core values that are in line with the values in the organizational Heart, or created alignment around our aspirational values.
It is easy for us to take for granted that the values in the organizational Heart are fixed once and for all. But an organization is a living organism. It keeps on evolving as people come and go and as we go through different joint experiences.
If we are not careful, the people we hire might come with a totally different set of values than the values of the organizational Heart, which slowly but surely will start to change the direction of the organization.
As we all know, it doesn’t take more than a small shift in direction to find ourselves, somewhere down the line, far away from where we thought we were going.
The values in the organizational Heart are constantly shaped in the organizational conversation and in our shared experiences. If we would take a look at the conversations going on at the board meetings, during the lunch breaks or within a group of people in a certain department we would perhaps see that the focus is something entirely different then what we have defined that we value.
4. We Don’t Want to Pay the Price of True Core Values
As Jim Collins pointed out in his bestselling book, Built to Last, true core values are the values we will hold on to even when they become a competitive disadvantage.
To put it in another way;
if core values are not allowed to cost us anything they are not really worth anything either.
Too often however, there is no price tag attached to a defined core value. When a situation shows up that requires a tough value based decision, the defined core value is quickly put on the back burner for the thing we find truly valuable.
Most defined organizational values are unfortunately not practically applicable.
They might sound nice, but they don’t inform behaviors and it’s hard to measure the actions of the organization against them. In the worst case scenario they are words that have been chosen just to make the organization feel better about itself.
It is no wonder then, that our defined core values are rendered powerless and without any ability to steer the internal direction of the organizational ship.
What Can Be Done to Set a New Direction?
In a later post I will go into more practical applications of how to move away from this discrepancy between words and behaviour.
I believe however that the process has to start with recognizing that we cannot hide behind our core values.
We need to realize that the inclination of the organizational Heart will always trump the aspirations of the leadership. Unless we challenge the organizational Heart’s inclination we cannot ever move towards our aspirations.
What the organization actually values in its Heart will sooner or later be seen in its actions and behaviour.
The Need of Humility and Courage
As leaders we need humility to perform an honest diagnosis on the state of the organizational Heart, even when that might lead to painful realizations.
And we need to have the courage to challenge the things in our leadership, culture and structures that aren’t healthy or in line with the purpose and vision of the organization.
This battle of the organizational Heart is never entirely won, but in fighting it we build resilience and moral fortitude.
The lives of the people we serve and the purpose of our organizations are too important not to take that seriously.
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