Why Your Values Don’t Make It Off the Poster
You’re a leader or professional who truly knows the value of values. You’ve soul-searched by committee, articulated what the team stands for, admired its… adequacy, set it free on the intranet, the new-starter pack, and cascaded it via team meetings. Now sit back to watch it powerfully reshape the hundreds of daily work choices made by tens, or thousands, of workers.
Or not. 71% of employees feel their organization's values are just for show.
If it doesn’t, the reasons may lie in various types of tokenism.
Turnkey culture isn’t a thing. You expected too much, too soon, from too little. As critical as it is to know what you stand for, a values statement is not a magic culture in a box. Its a rule set that influences culture.
A values statement isn’t standalone. It’s like a traffic sign in a foreign country: an abstract number on a stick without a mature investment in rules, police, courts, universal driver training, public awareness campaigns on new changes, and years of cause and effect. If you want behavioural changes, maturity level counts. Do you need a new sign—or a holistic do-over?
Your expression is bland. 80% of workers find that company values are jargon rather than real beliefs. Culture by committee, leadership consultancy, and influencer-cut-copy content have hollowed out words like respect. And corporate comms applying verbal lipstick after the fact probably won’t fix low-impact ideas.
The Middle Management Gap. 60% of middle managers report struggling to translate organizational values into daily interactions with their teams, according to a study by the Corporate Executive Board (CEB, 2017). These managers, caught in the execution mindset, often have only token training, and lack the coaching, performance measures and executive tough-love needed.
You didn’t equip anyone else, just told them. Even if leaders are on board, over 60% of staff say they daily witness workmate behaviors that contradict the organization's values. People have diverse EQ and in-built values and an e-learning module or poster won’t shift their dial much.
Your values are a lie, and your leadership is weak—due to condoning an exception, especially in management. Studies show that only 25% of employees believe their leadership truly models the values the organization promotes (Kaptein, 2011). A single incident has a deep and wide impact on trust and engagement, (‘psychological contract breach’), as negativity spreads much faster than success, due to negativity bias and social contagion. And disappointment is very hard to get back in the bottle.
Do:
Inform yourself before you talk to consultants. Explore how different industries in different towns articulate values.
Take a change management approach. Or a transformative one (where the values & culture are living and continually rearticulated). This can be as simple as a plan on a page with a lean fistful of tools and tips.
Invest beyond leaders. Build in-house capability. Shift some front-end spend to the reinforcement.
Journey v destination. Ask about bottom-up culture approaches that give the workers skin in the game. These can be short, sharp processes, and no longer than a top-down approach.
Explore high impact training with immersive simulated scenarios that flesh out real-world nuances for staff.
Build in hard measures/blunt questions on values v behavior in 360 surveys, and deal with hot-spots.
Don’t:
Settle for bland, overused words. 75% of corporate values statements feature "respect." Look at how Nike infers excellence, integrity and respect with "do the right thing." - and asks you to think.
If you like a three word motto, explore refreshingly timeless examples like Microsoft’s ‘smart, kind, helpful’.
References:
Tenbrunsel, A.E., & Messick, D.M. (2004). "Ethical Fading: The Role of Self-Deception in Unethical Behavior." Social Justice Research.
Brown, M.E., & Treviño, L.K. (2006). "Ethical leadership: A review and future directions." The Leadership Quarterly.
Fehr, R., Fulmer, A., Awtrey, E., & Miller, J.A. (2017). "The Gravitational Pull of Negativity: A Framework for Understanding the Contagiousness of Unethical Behavior in Organizations." Organizational Psychology Review.
