Values

In 1982, in Chicago, seven people died because of a consumer product they ingested. Evidence showed that the fault lay with retail outlet security rather than the manufacturer who, at the time, had that product circulating nationwide with a retail value of over US$100 million (equivalent to $281 million in 2021).

A hard-nosed approach would have been to demand retail outlets beefed up their product security processes and, given the relatively low number of deaths when compared to the popularity of the product in question, launch a PR campaign to highlight the proven safety of the product in question.

Yet, this is not what happened. The product in question was Tylenol and the company was Johnson & Johnson, led, at the time, by James Burke whose actions during the Tylenol murder case changed product packaging safety rules forever. Burke, however, was driven by more than the need to deliver value to shareholders and protect the brands of the company he led. His values were in alignment with the values of J & J (popularly called the Credo) and it was that alignment that led him to take the unprecedented actions he took that not only stopped a problem from becoming widespread and raised the bar for consumer safety in the future but also safeguarded the marketshare of a market-leading product and enshrined the status of the company that produced it.

Hays, the global recruitment specialists, write that: “An organisation’s values lay the foundation for what the company cares about most. It provides a common purpose that all employees should understand, work towards and live by. Once you define and promote your values, employees come to understand the behaviours that are expected of them that will lead to success.”

The government website of my home state in Australia has an excellent document on the worth of values for businesses that I urge you to read. It details how to correlate personal principles and values to business practices and how to then communicate them within and without the business in a way that helps reinforce them and embed them in business behavior.

Values and Behavior

The reason we’re discussing such seemingly esoteric subject at all lies in the way values influence decision-making which then affects choices, actions and behavior. Studies show that perceptual organization plays a role in linking values to choice behavior and, as I mentioned in Intentional from which the image below has been taken, values lie at the very core of what makes us do what we do.

The connection between basic human values and behavior is not limited to business alone. It is consistently detected in the decision-making process of adolescents, for example. It is this consistent connection that makes the values of a business a key component of its identity, marketing and leadership style.

Having values, in the first instance, clarifying them and communicating them well is what creates a sense of trust within an organization. Trust, in turn, makes everything else possible. But it has to start with values.

How are yours reflected in the business you work for or the enterprise you lead??