Your “core values” don’t belong on a mug, t-shirt, or poster

Every time I see corporate values printed on a mug, poster, or on the back of an ID card, my mirror neurons fire and I feel embarrassed for the poor schmucks that have to suffer such indignities.

I get that the corporate types who commit this culture crime intend to increase the visibility of the corporate values. I understand they want to make sure that the values are always easy to reference. Those aren’t bad goals. Leaders are at a loss for how to do this effectively, so they resort to the easy solution of throwing money at the problem by having their corporate schwag vendor print a bunch of tshirts, mugs, and other landfill-destined consumer ephemera.

It’s not effective. It’s counter-productive. In Creativity Inc (great book, read it!) Ed Catmull writes,

“when you distill a complex idea into a T-shirt slogan, you risk giving the illusion of understanding — and, in the process, of sapping the idea of its power. An adage worth repeating is also halfway to being irrelevant. You end up with something that is easy to say but not connected to behavior.”

The most infamous example of values distilled into something easy to say but not connected to behavior is Enron, who famously espoused integrity as a core value. Here’s a tchotchke some well-meaning HR person distributed to Enron’s people:

The error here is believing that the artifacts make the culture, rather than the other way around. Culture is a set of shared values, beliefs and behaviors. Artifacts are produced by a set of humans who share a culture. Artifacts happen because of the culture. Artifacts don’t create the culture, but that doesn’t stop executives from trying to manufacture culture by printing up artifacts and slapping them on walls, desks, and people.

Culturally clumsy HR and internal communications professionals focus on pumping out a bunch of cheap artifacts to give the illusion of cultural alignment and to manufacture an image of togetherness. If everyone puts on the same shirt at the offsite, then everyone believes what’s printed on the shirts, right? The t-shirt is a particularly problematic approach because it suggests that diversity in outward identity makes one not a “culture fit” — a line of thinking that can sometimes give rise to “culture fit” interviews that judge candidates on superficial similarities such as gender, race, or socioeconomic status.

Culture doesn’t work like that. Stickers, mugs, posters, t-shirts and other cheesy corporate kruft feel like inauthentic attempts to manufacture culture. They feel like propaganda designed to manipulate, rather than real expressions of a shared set of values, beliefs and behaviors.

So what should be done instead to facilitate cultural alignment and to create clarity around a set of shared values? That’s a question that takes a book to answer well and properly, but here’s a brief list of things I think must happen:

• First, discover your culture by starting with stories. Start with the founding story. Why did the founder start the company? What did she hope to achieve? Why did she hope to achieve that? Why was that important to her? Then look around for more stories. Ask about times of high tension or drama. Ask about times when a tough hiring or firing decision had to be made. Ask about mistakes that were made and how the company addressed those mistakes. For every story, write down the protagonist, the dilemma or choice s/he faced, and the resolution. Finally, write down the “moral of the story” and what the company baked into its values/beliefs based on this episode. Try to gather 50 or more stories by interviewing a representative cross-section of people (not just the executive team).
• Next, group stories by theme. One theme that often emerges in successful companies is some version of “put customers first.” The stories supporting this theme help prove that the company doesn’t just say it puts customers first, but actually acts, and sometimes bleeds for this belief. Many of us are familiar with J&J’s aspirin recall. That’s a powerful story that proves the J&J Credo more than any coffee mug or poster ever could. This is what you need — a few powerful stories that show your people choosing one set of values or beliefs over another set of values or beliefs. Even better if these choices required difficult compromises such as asking shareholders to take a back-seat to some higher principle. This is where you’ll need to make some difficult decisions regarding how many themes (or values) you’ll want to support. Avoid the temptation to cram 10 or 15 values into a document that’s meant to help people focus on a few behaviors and beliefs that are held most dear. If you don’t have the courage to make a choice, then your people won’t either.
• Create mechanisms for sharing stories. There are so many ways to tell a story. Create a corporate documentary focusing on just one story. Hire a writer to write the stories out in long form, creating a book of short stories that demonstrate the company’s values in action. Have the founder give a public talk about one of the stories. Tell the press one of your stories that you’ve never told the public before. Blog the stories. Podcast the stories. Create a graphic novel. Poems. Songs. There are so many ways to tell stories.
• Solicit new stories around the themes. To keep the culture alive and vibrant, it’s important to find new and interesting stories that support the core values you’ve chosen to highlight. If there aren’t regular new examples supporting a core value, then perhaps that value isn’t really shared anymore by the team. This is the ultimate test of whether a company is actually living and breathing its core values. Plentiful, daily evidence that the value is being lived proves that a given belief is truly shared.

There’s lots more to this, but for now I’ll wrap with another example of what not to do. I particularly love how this culture wall stands adjacent to the trash room/janitor’s closet. That way, it’ll be hard for people to tell whether the stink is from the trash room, or the dated-the-moment-it-was-printed word-cloud wall.