By Chally Kacelnik
Let’s get honest about how values play out in organisations.
Here’s a piece in the Harvard Business Review that I found thought-provoking: To Change Company Culture, Start with One High-Impact Behavior, by by James Elfer, Siri Chilazi, and Edward Chang. In it, the authors discuss their timely targeted model for approaching behavioural change in organisations, which they’re finding very effective. I’m interested specifically in one of their findings about values:
We had long noticed that it’s typical for many organizations to promote their corporate values as “Who we are.” The idea, presumably, is that this will create a social norm for people to live up to in their day-to-day actions. But what if this inert framing leads to complacency? Might it not be better, we wondered, to position a value like inclusion as a goal that can only be attained if you actively strive for it?
The metrics picked up when they tested this theory. Framing values as who we are, then, rather than who we could be, actually makes organisations less likely to be in alignment with their stated values. Saying “these values are who we are” makes it less likely to be true, because there’s not a lot of room to acknowledge alternative readings.
This made me think of this piece about how people delude themselves about the moral value of their actions at work in order to protect their self-image. If you’re making a definitive statement about identity, then it’s almost inevitable that your interpretations of your own behaviour are going to get retrofitted to fit that perception, regardless of what you’re actually demonstrating. (My use of the passive voice there is deliberate because it’s indicative of the kind of lack of ownership that comes to pass!)
What can we do shape organisations that live out their values, then? Three steps: identification, application, and framing.
Organisational values can be identified (and applied) well or badly. When identifying values in the first instance, organisations can take a top down approach and use confusing phrasing instead of getting wide stakeholder input and making sure the chosen values are genuinely understood and felt.
Then there’s the application. Is the set of values another layer of corporate nonsense that sits in the strategy and on some posters, or is it applied in day to day work? Application can come up in things like:
- Goal setting and project selection (both as gateway criteria)
- Performance management (behavioural guidance)
- Training activities (supporting meaningful development)
This is done by asking: is this in line with our values? Or: how will this support our actions to be in line with our values?
Lastly, an aspirational framing supports getting honest and striving for value-based behaviour. It’s the difference between setting the expectation and letting it stagnate or setting the expectation and making it something for which to continually strive. “We want to do more,” not “we are”.
All the time in our work at LKS Quaero, we ask people “how do you know what your organisational values are?” We get a lot of thoughtful responses, but the biggest insight that an organisation is living its values comes when people organically raise an organisational value as a factor in organisational improvement work they’re doing. Values are lived when they’re about action, not identity.
At LKS Quaero, we help organisations apply their values effectively. For more information, visit us at lksquaero.com or follow us on LinkedIn and Facebook.
