What is valuable in your Organisation?

Several years ago, I found myself in a scoping meeting at a prominent public sector health organisation. The room was filled with senior leaders eager to develop a set of values they believed would enhance the organisation's performance. The proposed list was familiar:

• Integrity: Acting with honesty and transparency, adhering to strong ethical principles in all business practices.
• Collaboration: Encouraging teamwork, open communication, and cooperation among employees to achieve common goals.
• Innovation: Fostering a culture of creativity and continuous improvement, encouraging new ideas and problem-solving approaches.
• Customer Focus: Putting the needs and satisfaction of customers at the centre of all business decisions and actions.
• Accountability: Taking responsibility for one's actions and outcomes, ensuring that employees are held to high standards and can be trusted to deliver on commitments.

The leadership team aimed to design a workshop that would embed these values into the corporate culture, ensuring staff incorporated them into their daily work. However, I couldn't help but feel sceptical about this approach. My reaction must have been noticeable, as I was soon challenged to explain my reservations.

I candidly shared my concerns. Many items on the list represented fundamental human interactions, while others should be standard practice in any organisation. There was no clear connection between these values and improved organisational performance or strategic clarity.

 The Pitfalls of Generic Values

This approach has several shortcomings:

1. Lack of Resonance: Generic values are unlikely to inspire or engage employees. They often fail to capture the unique essence of the organisation.
2. No Behavioural Change: Since these values reflect basic human interactions, they don't drive new behaviours or improvements.
3. Top-Down Imposition: Values crafted by a small group of senior leaders may not resonate with the broader staff, leading to disengagement.

Embracing Singular, Thematic Values

Many organisations have invested time in identifying what they truly value, building their culture by attracting individuals who share those values. Often, these values are singular, revolving around a central theme.

Take Patagonia, for example. This American retailer of outdoor clothing and equipment centres its core values on environmental responsibility. Their mission includes building the best product, causing no unnecessary harm, using business to protect nature, and not being bound by convention. Within this framework, sub-values like innovation and collaboration naturally emerge. The commitment to "cause no unnecessary harm" implicitly encourages innovative and collaborative solutions.

Similarly, Apple's core values revolve around innovation. They emphasise creating great products that change the world, focusing on simplicity, owning and controlling primary technologies, and deep collaboration to foster innovation.

Google's values focus on user-centric innovation. They prioritise focusing on the user, doing one thing well, and ensuring that fast is better than slow.

Reframing the Question

To develop meaningful values, it's essential to involve the wider organisation. Consider asking:

• What do you find valuable in your organisation?
• What do your customers value in the products and services you provide?

This inclusive approach ensures the values resonate with all stakeholders.

The Hedgehog and the Fox

Isaiah Berlin's essay, "The Hedgehog and the Fox," offers a pertinent analogy. He distinguishes between those who know many things (foxes) and those who know one big thing (hedgehogs). The hedgehog's singular focus—curling into a ball for defence—demonstrates the power of a central, unifying idea.

Rather than overwhelming employees with a multitude of competing demands—be agile, focused, accountable, a team player, creative, and sustaining—it may be more effective to identify a single, underlying value that everyone can relate to and embody.

Developing and Embedding Core Values

Creating a positive organisational culture requires intentional and thoughtful identification of core values. Here are six steps to defining your organisational values:

1. Assess Your Current Organisational Culture: Evaluate where your company stands by gathering feedback from employees, clients, and stakeholders to understand the true identity of your organisation.
2. Review Your Strategic Business Plan: Determine where your organisation wants to be in the next one to five years, ensuring that your values align with your strategic goals.
3. Determine the Culture Needed to Achieve Your Plan: Identify the organisational culture required to reach your strategic objectives, considering the variety of personalities, backgrounds, skills, and education you want on your team.
4. Decide if Your Values Need to Shift: Based on your assessment and strategic plan, finalise your new or revised set of values that will guide your organisation towards its goals.
5. Define What Your Chosen Values Really Mean: Clearly articulate what each value means in the context of your organisation, ensuring that employees understand how to put each value into action.
6. Incorporate These Values into Organisational Processes: Integrate your newly defined values into all operational areas, including recruiting, onboarding, performance evaluations, and employee development.

By following these steps, organisations can develop core values that are authentic, engaging, and aligned with their strategic objectives.

Conclusion

Developing organisational values is not about compiling a list of generic attributes. It's about identifying a singular, compelling theme that encapsulates the organisation's essence and inspires its people. By doing so, organisations can foster a culture that is authentic, engaging, and aligned with their strategic objectives.