Organizational Values: Do they help or hinder your company culture?
"Your core values and purpose, if properly conceived, remain fixed. Everything else - your practices, strategies, structures, systems, policies, and procedures - should be open for change. Values are a fixed stake in the ground. You get it right once, and the rest of the work consists of tinkering with the organization.
Typically, executives devote a tiny percentage of their time and effort to gaining understanding, a tiny percentage to creating alignment, and the vast majority to documenting and writing a statement. In fact, the distribution of time and effort should be nearly the opposite.
You should spend a significant percentage of time actually trying to gain understanding, a tiny percentage documenting that understanding, and the vast majority of your time creating alignment. In short, worry about what you do as an organization, not what you say.” - Jim Collins
I work a lot with companies who are seeking to improve their organizational culture, and a key starting point is to look at a company’s values, and ask some hard questions.
- Are these espoused or in-use values?
- How would you know?
- What would your people say about the values? (Do they even know what they are?).
Gaining clarity around these questions can assist an organization to understand whether their values are contributing positively to the culture, or actually undermining it. If company values are well known and understood, then used as decision-making tools to steer consistent leadership behaviors, then it is likely that trust and engagement will be enhanced and sustained. However, if the values are merely words that look good on posters or the company’s website, but are barely known or utilized, then the end result is likely to be a cynical and disengaged workforce.
What are your Core Values?
Identifying core values that your team can buy into is essential if the organization is to use the values as intended and positively influence the culture. Jim Collins put forward a series of questions to assist leaders in identifying their company's core values. Have a read through the below questions and answer authentically (ideally with other members of your leadership team).
If you find yourself saying “no” to one or more of the questions (as applied to each of your company’s espoused values), then they are unlikely to be genuine core values, and (of course) it will be much less likely that your leadership team will base decision-making on them.
- If you were to start a new organization, would you build it around this core value regardless of the industry?
- Would you want your organization to continue to stand for this core value 100 years into the future, no matter what changes occur in the outside world?
- Would you want your organization to hold this core value, even if at some point in time it became a competitive disadvantage - even if in some instances the environment penalized the organization for living this core value?
- Do you believe that those who do not share this core value - those who breach it consistently - simply do not belong in your organization?
- Would you personally continue to hold this core value even if you were not rewarded for holding it?
- Would you change jobs before giving up this core value?
- If you awoke tomorrow with more than enough money to retire comfortably for the rest of your life, would you continue to apply this core value to your productive activities?
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Clive Lloyd is an Australian psychologist who assists organizations to evolve psychological safety. He is a director and principal consultant with GYST, and developer of the acclaimed CareFactor Program
Clive was recently named among the top 5 Global thought leaders and influencers on Health & Safety by Thinkers360.
He is the author of Amazon #1 best-selling book "Next Generation Safety Leadership: From Compliance to Care"
For further information about GYST's programs please contact us at:
Email: info@gyst.com.au
Office: +61 7 5533 2103
Website: www.gyst.com.au
The question is asked if organization values help of hinder the company culture. I understand that first must gain understanding and alignment. May I add to what also may hinder the culture? I posit that an organization’s values are like foundational stones in a cairn. Each person brings their own uniquely shaped stone—some smooth, some jagged, some colorful. The cairn holds together not because every stone is identical, but because they’re stacked with intention, balance, and respect for the structure’s integrity. If one stone is misaligned—say, someone values Efficiency over Thoroughness in a context where precision is critical—the cairn wobbles and may fall. So, its one thing to talk about an organization holding core values, it is for naught if that organization does not have the courage to remove the stones that don’t fit or contribute to that cairns strength.
I think organisations need to also consider both their moral meaning and ethical methodology as part of grabbing at a collection of 'values'.
If they are co-created with the audience whom are meant to live by them. Properly communicated ie the audience have regular conversations about why we have them, what they are, and how they are expressed in everyday situations, and finally clearly demonstrated by every leader in what they say, the decisions they make , and used in e.g 360s - then they can be very helpful. If not they’re just words.
Go ahead don’t live up to them; yes and then attack front line workers.