Know Your Values: Articulate Your Company Values With Honesty

If you’ve ever done an online dating profile you’ll know how hard it is to come up with wording that perfectly encapsulates all of your interests, personality, humour and everything else that makes you dateable. If you’ve gone a step further and dated someone whose profile you liked, you might have had a situation where the person is nothing like what they wrote in their profile. Unless the person is actually much better than you thought, this situation is not likely to be the basis of a long term healthy relationship - and if like one of my previous online dates might leave you looking for the nearest exit!

Writing down your company values is not so far removed from your online dating profile. And the last thing you want is to leave your employees bewildered or running for the hills. So let’s start by looking at a couple of sets of corporate values from other companies:

Company A

• Communication – We have an obligation to communicate.
• Respect – We treat others as we would like to be treated.
• Integrity – We work with customers and prospects openly, honestly, and sincerely.
• Excellence– We are satisfied with nothing less than the very best in everything we do.

Company B

• Stewardship
• The Best People
• Client Value Creation
• One Global Network
• Respect for the Individual
• Integrity

At face value, there’s not really much difference between the core message of these two sets of values. You’ll probably have seen some of these at previous companies, or from your competitors. Now for a bit more information... The values under Company A are actually the corporate values stated in the 2000 annual report of Enron - the company behind one of the biggest bankruptcies of our time, run by a number of executives who were later indicted and imprisoned for their involvement in misleading shareholders and concealing the loss billions of dollars. The values under Company B are those of Accenture - one of the most successful consultancies in the world who regularly make the cut of the top 100 companies to work for. This is pretty staggering considering the similarities between the set of values and the reality of the companies they represent.

So what can we learn from these examples?

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

OK, so I know the title of this article is about how to articulate your values, but there are many ways to articulate yourself outside the written word. If you gave your significant other a written appraisal of their cooking you’d get a quizzical look at best, at worst you’ll be wearing the subject of your review. You’d probably be a bit safer by clearing your plate and finishing with a big “mmm”. Verbal, written and non-verbal actions/communication all form part of how you articulate yourself to those around you so you should consider all of these when you’re thinking about how to articulate your values to your stakeholders.

If you’re looking at what your corporate values should be you should first look at the values that are displayed by your actions. Do your executives aggressively chase new business or do you work on partnerships that might not result in a deal for months or years? Do you train people who are bad at their job, or fire them? When faced with a financial crisis do you tell all the staff or keep the image of serenity to avoid panicking them?

How you act in these situations will be a demonstration to everyone at your company of what you value and how you act. Often these behaviours are echoed throughout the organisation but sometimes they aren’t, which leads us to our next point.

Their Values vs. Our Values

The reason a lot of sets of corporate values don’t really hit the mark is because they don’t reflect the values across the business. If you have inconsistencies between what your executives value and what your staff value then the corporate values you articulate might not ‘stick’ in the way you might hope. Executives are different from most other staff in that they are well paid, have access to sensitive information and have the power to make their decisions a reality, so it’s easy to see how there could be disconnects between the groups.

The executives of the company need to take the time to understand what their staff value and what it is about the company that keeps them coming back each day. You could do a staff survey... but the best way to find out about staff values is to talk to people from across the business to find out their views. Like I said earlier, there is a lot more to articulating your values than writing them down.

If you’re confident that you’re all on the same page then the hard part is done, all that’s left is to (you guessed it) articulate them!

‘Living’ The Values

You might have heard this a lot but living the values is really the only way to keep them, well, alive. In practice, this means using your values to make important decisions about which business deals to take on, who you partner up with, who you recruit, how you decide pay rises… where your hold your christmas party!?

If you’re committed to having a set of corporate values then you should be ready to look at your policies to see if they reinforce or sabotage your values. For example, if you have a value of placing team achievement higher than personal gain, then a bonus structure that rewards individual achievement will encourage people to act in a way that goes against your values. In another example, if you have a corporate value of independence, you might decide to reject a lucrative business deal if it could lead you to become more dependent on another business for your income.

Conclusion

These sorts of tough decisions are what will articulate your values to everyone inside and outside the business, and are the sorts of things that will set you apart from the competition.

And once you’ve done all that, please feel free to put them on a poster in reception.