Are corporate purpose & values statements serious, silly, or a sham?

The worst hospital I’ve ever had to deal with was so proud of its purpose and values it blazoned them across every surface from the website to the tiles in the foyer: Deliver Excellent Health Outcomes, Outstanding Experience of Care, Outstanding Experience for Their People, and Be a Sustainable Organisation, Visibly Reassuring, Clearly Communicating, Actively Respectful and Positively Welcoming.

My experience as a patient was that they did nothing to treat my health problems and little to care for me. They failed to honour appointments, they got my medications wrong, they ghosted my queries and accused me of being non-compliant when I raised concerns. They showed little politeness and less kindness. Their bathrooms were filthy and their staff disengaged. Luckily, I was able to transfer to a different hospital that restored my faith in the healthcare system, and sorted my problems with swift effectiveness and warm humanity.

Does this story reveal that corporate purpose and values are worthless? Or does it show how much it matters to get them right? Here’s my professional and personal conclusion, and how I arrived at it, in a less than 5 minute read...

The case for sham

Goodness knows it’s easy to mock statements of purpose and value. Too many are crafted from corporate-speak that nobody uses in real life (championing, shape the future, unrivalled).?Too many are vague to the point of incomprehension (what does Raise the Bar mean, Thames Water??Lead the Way, Deloitte?). And too many come over as preachily insincere (I’m not sure that Compassion would be the first word I associate with the UK Home Office, or Integrity the stand-out value of Enron) as well as disassociated from what the organisation actually does (How does Yum Brands, a fast food conglomerate, Make the World Better? How does being Bold improve your housebuilding, Barratt?).

But I don’t think we react so strongly to bad purpose statements because they are clumsily put together – nobody expects poetry from corporate marketing. I think our problem is that these statements speak cheaply to things we hold dear: the why of what people do, and how far they are willing to go in pursuit of that mission. A customer relationship may not be a marriage, but it is not a transaction either – it is people dealing with people, and we need at least some level of trust in all our dealings.

The real challenge

We trust people when they are straight with us and when they show they care about what we think or feel. We see people as trust-worthy when they have a two-way conversation with us rather than giving a fancy speech, when they talk about real things not theories, when they are realistic and open, even if that exposes them personally or risks making them look ridiculous. We trust them when they listen more than they talk, when their actions embody their words.

It’s the commitment that counts: if you are not sure whether you have it in your organisation, ask yourself: ?What have we sacrificed for our purpose or values?

If you and your colleagues struggle to come up with a big, real example, perhaps you have work to do...

So, how do I get purpose and values right?

Full disclosure: defining an organisation's purpose and values is hard, resource-intensive, long and difficult work.

This is not a task you can delegate to consultants, or tick off a meeting to-do list, or sort via a half-day session at the whiteboard – and you definitely can’t get there by prompting ChatGPT! Purpose and values statements need to come from a series of deep, intimate, reflective and exposing conversations together as an organisation about what matters, how much, and how capable and how willing you are to deliver on that promise. And you yourselves need to write it, in your own language. This takes time, resources, effort and dedication. It will only work if the result is genuinely a product of you as an organisation coming together, committing to what matters most to you, expressed in your own words.

Why bother?

Because purpose and values make your organisation real to your customers, employees and stakeholders, and if you neglect them you are cutting out your corporate heart, lungs and nervous system. If you take purpose and values seriously, you will find that the process of defining them acts as a catalyst for organisational transformation. In the deep conversations I outlined above, you will interrogate your strategy and your operations more rigorously than ever before, you will get to know your colleagues, suppliers and customers more intimately than you imagined (and they will get to know you too!), you will understand better in all kinds of ways how your people work, what they do, what they care about most, their strengths and weaknesses and aspirations and fears.

You will come together as an organisation, with a new sense of energy, focus and belonging – and that strength will show, my experience with clients tells me and independent research confirms, in your financial results, in your long-term resilience and growth, in your evolution with and for your customers, and in your growing reputation as a great place to work, where people do great work.

Conclusion: purpose & values are serious, not sham

I know every leadership team is overburdened and braced for shocks right now, and nobody in their right mind wants to take on extra work. But getting serious about purpose and values is no nice-to-have but an essential that delivers more bang for buck than any other business intervention, and transforms people - even top executives - in the process.

May it do so for you.