I mapped the ASX 100’s Corporate Values and this is what I learnt… (Part 2)

This is the second post in a series on the ASX Corporate Values, if you want to know why I subjected myself to such an undertaking, you can read the first here

?A user warning here; what follows are my opinions, simplified and amplified for the dual purposes of clarity and light entertainment. I should also add that I am not making statements of judgment on any individual organisation, in fact, as someone who has been involved in the process of value selection and articulation as both a consultant and an employee I am keenly aware of the rocks and hard places that lead us to this list.

But I do think it’s worth taking a step back to look at where all of these conversations, workshops, focus groups and other initiatives have left us, and ask ourselves how well these constructs are serving us…

Before we get into my observations, let’s go through the (painstaking) methodology.

1. Copy and paste the ASX100 codes into an excel spreadsheet
2. Google search “corporate values” of each organisation and click around until I found them (More on this later…)
3. Copy the values into the excel spreadsheet. I ended up with 93 value sets.
4. Paste values into a Miro board (one value per digital post-it) and cluster into like terms*

*As with any such exercise this is more art than science, and there may be disagreement on how I’ve clustered the values, or the names I’ve given the groupings. To which I say, please, feel free to have a go… I will happily send you the source data!), but what follows are observations that I’m not sure would be wildly different if I had grouped or named clusters differently.

The magic number:

Let’s start with a more ‘fact’ based observation. How many values does the average ASX corporation have? Mathematically the answer is a smidge under 5 (4.92), but the spread is pretty interesting…

• 11 organisations had 3 values
• 29 organisations had 4 values
• 29 organisations had 5 values
• 17 organisations had 6 values
• 4 organisations had 8 values
• 3 organisations had 10 values

As a management consultant I’ve been told many times that there is an ‘ideal’ amount of bullet points that should be on any slide, ‘because that’s how many concepts the human brain can scientifically hold in their mind at once’ – very compelling! The problem is, I’ve heard that this number is 7.. and 6… and 5, and 4. Therefore I’m not going to say there is one ‘magic’ number But if we put ourselves in employees’ shoes for one second it doesn’t take a validated statistical analysis to tell us that less is probably more.

The organisations that have 6, 8 or 10 frankly read like shopping lists. Fine if you’re going to write them down on a piece of paper and tick them off one by one, but probably not ideal if you’re hoping to use them as guiding principles for every day behaviour. At the risk of overdoing the metaphor, are employees setting off to the shops, and leaving the list behind, defaulting to a trolley full of pizza-shapes because that’s what they were hungry for at the time…?

There is also the matter of how many concepts are being captured as one value., with frequent doubling (and sometimes tripling) up . In some cases these expressions contain quite separate themes, for example ‘Enabling superior results through effective planning and agile deployment’ and ‘Be true, be fair and build goodwill’. Aside from the fact that these don’t exactly roll off the tongue, this kind of expression adds to the ‘laundry list’ effect.

I don't want to be an organiastional pop-psychologist (highly unqualified on this front), but it strikes me that this is emblematic of a very common challenge; the inability to make trade offs. Obviously given endless choices, we would all want organisations to embody dozens of varying virtues; but when you choose your values you need to make hard decisions - how you prioritise is a statement. Stuffing 10 concepts into 4 values might make us feel like we can have our cake and eat it, but in the end by saying everything, we're saying nothing.?????????????????????

Yoo-hoo, where are you?

?It’s easy to be cynical about the efficacy of corporate values, and the idea that they are ‘virtue signalling’ is not entirely unwarranted. Particularly when you look at where these values reside. Given that I only have access to information and documentation that is available online, I can’t comment on how visible these values are from within or how they are brought to life.

However as I dug around on company websites, through press releases and documentation, I noticed that many organisations value sets are only to be found by clicking through their ‘governance’ pages and downloading a policy (most frequently a ‘Code of Conduct’). This reveals something about how the organisation thinks about its values. After all a code of conduct is typically a publicly available, if not overly inspiring document, published in a bid to be transparent with and reassure shareholders. Yes, we tell ourselves that these are important in guiding employees faced with difficult decisions; but how much help are values like 'collaborate' in the face of genuine confusion over a correct course of action.

I understand that this is the system in which these organisations operate; that if something goes wrong, not having a code of conduct would set off alarm bells. It can easily be argued that having a beautifully designed and interactive 'Values' content on the 'About us' page is equally cynical window dressing. And yet, I don't think those organisations whose values are hidden in a PDF in the bowels of their ’shareholder information’ section, aredoing so to protest virtue signalling

Raising the floor (not the ceiling)

When I worked with Executive Teams to identify and articulate target organisational behaviours (and interesting to note, we chose to work with behaviours rather than values because these provided more of a tangible call to action, rather than abstract concept), we used the phrase ‘Raise the ceiling not the floor’, that is, we instructed clients to be aspirational, rather than merely capturing the most basic expectations they had of staff.

Depressingly, I came across an HBR article by Patrick Lencioni from twenty years ago (!) that begins; “Take a look at this?list of?corporate values: Communication. Respect. Integrity. Excellence. They sound pretty good, don’t they? Strong, concise, meaningful… If so, you should be nervous. These are the corporate values of Enron, as stated in the company’s 2000 annual report. And as events have shown, they’re not meaningful; they’re meaningless.”

Let’s take a look at whether corporate Australia has heeded this warning and how many of these values are still in use;

• Communication: Only 1 organisation has a value ‘proactively communicate’ – not bad!
• Respect: 19 hits…
• Integrity: The most common term, with a whopping 37 direct hits (Not including a smattering of ‘Do the right thing’ etc)
• Excellence: 19 references to ‘Excellence’ plus 7 ‘Performance’ and 6 ‘Results’

So not only are we not managing to raise the ceiling; we are positioning our floor alongside Enron.

In his article, Lencioni talks about 4 kinds of values; Core Values, Permission to Play values, Aspirational Values and Accidental values, and it’s clear that our organisations are going extremely long on the second. Lencioni explains that Permission to Play values “?…simply reflect the minimum behavioral and social standards required of any employee. They tend not to vary much across companies, particularly those working in the same region or industry, which means that, by definition, they never really help distinguish a company from its competitors”

To me, biggest take away here, is that if Australian corporations are giving up the opportunity to express values that would distinguish them from competitors, really say something about who they are, or what they aspire to be; shouldn’t we at least be seeing (and shouldn’t employees be feeling) that basic human values like integrity, respect and care as the cornerstones of corporate behaviour? It seems as if we have (somehow) set the bar simultaneously too low, and too high.

Variety is the spice of life (and the ASX is in dire need of some seasoning)

?I’ve already picked on the (depressingly) most commonly occurring corporate value – integrity. But clustering concepts together revealed very little variance in both the conceptual underpinning and articulated language used across organisations.

Aside from Integrity, Respect and Excellence (/Performance / Results), what are the other common clusters? If you want to play a game, stop reading now and take a moment to place your bets… if you’ve ever worked in a large scale organisation I predict your guesses will be fairly accurate

Collaboration: This one actually is expressed in a number of different ways as it seems even corporate Australia has the ‘ick’ with the term collaboration, but the message is the same; we are going to have to work effectively together to drive performance. This isn’t untrue, but again, whether or not we see it reflected in how organisations work is an open question.

Care: The care construct often acts as a counterbalance to a list of otherwise quite commercial list of values, as if it’s saying “Oh yes, and we’re human too!” Its popularity seems to reflect the expectation that companies broaden their focus from shareholders to other stakeholders, employees, communities and the environment. It’s undoubtedly important, but do communities, employees and customers feel that organisations truly ‘care’ about them? Or is this actually a classic case of ‘Performative Transformation’ in action?

Innovation: This is the value in which organisations have tried to inject a little bit of originality into their value set. With expressions like ‘Shape the future’ and ‘Be a pioneer’, there is no denying that this value, and its’ siblings ‘Passion’ ‘Agility’ are leaning toward the more aspirational side of things. It makes sense in the age of ‘Disruption’ and ‘Change is the new BAU.’ The question is what innovation looks like in the context of a large scale corporate that is likely burdened with legacy systems, bureaucracy and governance requirements.

Accountability: I find it difficult to summon the energy required to even comment on this one. The combination of possibly the driest corporate expression of all time, with the underlying meaning of ‘Do what you say you’re going to do and then take responsibility for those actions’ is meaningless in its ubiquity. Again, it is fairly grim that we need to remind our people (and organisations) to take some accountability.

Safety: For those who have ever work in an organisation with a need for a strong workplace health and safety focus (mining companies for example), it would not surprise you to know that Safety occurs commonly. On the one hand it is a classic example of a minimum requirement, hygiene in the extreme, however it is so existentially important for those working in dangerous jobs that I hesitate to put it into the same category as ‘integrity’…

Customer: For the cynics among us, this cluster supports the the idea that values can influence (or at least reflect) actual transformation. Though I still hear customer service horror stories and occasionally fall into a call centre abyss, by and large I think organisations have managed to drive better customer outcomes. Tellingly, in my experience, this value is also one that tends to drive genuine action (read: investment)

?The joy of the Party Mix (aka ‘Miscellaneous)

?Like all good clustering activities, there were values that did not happily fit within the other clusters. And it is within this ‘miscellaneous’ section that I found the most inspiration and hope, particularly for the kinds of values that I think are helpful in driving genuine transformation. Here are a two of my favourites;

Curiosity: I love this, partly because curiosity is also one of my favourite values in a person. Curiosity is the natural precursor to genuine innovation, which does not happen through a relentless focus on the need for innovation, new products, new services and disruption, but through open and agenda-less curiosity.

Humility: This one, whilst maybe not sexy, strikes me as a real game changer for organisations (as well as individuals and leaders). It changes focus from having all the answers to being open to what they might be, and crucially acknowledges the possibility that the individual, team and organisation might get it wrong.

So what…?

Clearly one of the questions that emerges through this exploration is the underlying purpose of these value statements. Do we think they should be descriptive (i.e. what do we value) or prescriptive? (i.e. what do we think we should value). At the moment they seem to be a strange hybrid of the two (i.e. what we think, you think, we should value) which makes them far less useful on either the descriptive or prescriptive front.?

And whilst I think there is a veritable chasm between the values that organisations claim to represent and those that can be observed, I think there is still a role for organisational values. Ultimately our values (whether stated or not) are driving individual, team and organisational behaviour.

If we want values to drive real change within our organisations, we need to be able to inject the values themselves into the conversation that governs them. Let’s have the integrity to point out when we’re not acting with it, the humility to challenge ourselves on what we could be doing better and the curiosity to ask what else might be out there.