What Happens When Organizations Compromise Their Core Values?
Andy Hansen
I help entrepreneurs organize their life and priorities so they do more of what matters most without sacrificing the life they've built
I was speaking to a friend of mine last Christmas about his new job. He had decided to change careers after things didn't work out the way he hoped they would in education. As a teacher, he became frustrated with many aspects of his job.
One thing he said to me stuck out especially:
“Anytime they tell us we’re a family, they’re about to ask us to do more work.”
In other words, they only appeal to values when they are trying to get something. It feels manipulative.
He was referencing a conversation he had with a colleague of his, which should already speak volumes of the type of culture present between the school’s educators. Even if it’s not totally true, it feels true some of the time for people there.
Dysfunctional dynamics aside, this is a problem for the direction and culture of any organization. If your plea to remind your employees that, “we care about each other and our successes are shared ones”, precedes you asking them for something, it doesn’t really feel honest, does it?
The irony here is that by appealing to the value of family, it has the impact of reminding employees that management is not looking out for them, thus embedding the mindset of “every man for himself”.
If the relationships were built upon mutual trust, maybe employees would give leaders the benefit of the doubt more frequently. Trust has to be a cornerstone of any employee orientation strategy and should be a regular, integral part of job duties.
Are Core Values Mostly Bullshit?
My guess is that it depends upon who you ask, but I think it’s safe to say that most organizations violate their stated core values often, for various reasons. Often, organizations place deadlines and sales quotas higher on their priority list than a culture of trust and empathy. If your organization, like Thomson Reuters, has distilled its values into one meta-value -Trust - one would hope that would be fundamental to every interaction.
(Side note, I use TR as an example because I worked there, not because I think they are bad.)
For Thomson Reuters, a world leader providing information in news, legal, and financial services, everything they do is built upon trust. If their customers have to question the integrity of the information they get, it compromises their value.
“Together, we help inform the way forward to a more understanding, trusting world for all”
Understanding and trust are key components of why the company exists, and should be the intangibles that all the work optimizes for. They are here to create more trust and understanding. “Informing the way forward” is what they contribute. The impact of that contribution is “a more understanding, trusting world for all”.
Other crucial values are integrity and independence, as articulated in their trust principles. The company has only somewhat recently reached its final form, following two major mergers in 1996 and 2008.
Prior to the last merger, Reuters had been a fiercely independent news organization with principles that inspired loyalty from journalists worldwide. When the merger with Thomson West was announced, many trade unions signed off on a letter questioning the ability to remain independent and unbiased.
“In particular we have the following questions about the Trust Principles:
Pehr Gyllenhammar, Chairman of the Reuters Founders Share Company, explained that the Reuters Trust's First Principle had been waived for the Thomson family because of the poor financial circumstances that Reuters had been in, stating, "The future of Reuters takes precedence over the principles. If Reuters were not strong enough to continue on its own, the principles would have no meaning."
I might ask, “If the trust principles are fungible, aren’t they already meaningless?”
Of course, all assurances have been given that, if a situation arises that might compromise adherence to the Trust principles, David Thomson, whose family-holding company owns 53% of the company, would vote with the guidance of Reuters Founders Share Company. All members of the board of trustees have been appointed after the merger.
It seems dishonest to have such a broad appeal to these trust principles on your website when one was “waived” because of hard financial times. It wasn’t just any of them. It was the first trust principle. It is justifiable to wonder, as the Unions did in 2008,
“If [the first Trust Principle] is now to be breached for the Thomson family, why should anyone in the future pay attention to the remaining Trust Principles?”
Why, indeed?
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What do employees say?
Comparably offers income and culture data on companies. With 656 Thomson Reuters employee survey participants so far, we can draw some data here.
The way the questions are worded here doesn’t quite get where we need to, but they’re useful.
When asked, “To whom do you feel most loyal at work?”, “no one” (15%) scored higher than “company mission/vision” (0%). The vast majority of employees felt more loyal to their Bosses and co-workers than to the stated mission and vision of Thomson Reuters.
When asked, “What’s the main reason you stay at your current company?”, only 6% of employees said it was the company mission, compared to 31% who said “comfort & familiarity” and “comp & benefits”.
Broadly, employees at Thomson Reuters are not inspired by Trust and Understanding. Keeping their job is much more motivating.
If a company whose market cap is around $57 billion is built upon the foundation of trust, then trust should inform every decision made, from CEO to Customer Service.
How can we more effectively embed and embody company values?
These words have to have real meaning, and they have to transcend business goals. Trust is more important than the existence of any one company. It is more important than any quarterly projection.
If your employees feel trust is an essential component of their work, they will be willing to stay through hard times. They will work harder to be their best, and they will want to be at their best at work, every day.
Talk about them, often, and hold yourself accountable to them. One thing that makes values real is to dig into the story they play in our lives. Values have to be made real and tangible.
A simple exercise is to practice defining what the words mean to us as individuals, and then explore a time in our lives when that value was present or absent. This will take work, skill, and commitment to the process to bear fruit. It’s not always easy to access this level of awareness for everyone.
Ask questions like,
What does Trust mean to you? What is the impact of deeper trust? What are some prerequisites for trust?
What is a time in your life when trust was valuable to you?
This is an Emergent Way of doing business
Let’s examine the statement by Pehr Gyllenhammar, the chairman of the Reuters Founders Share Company when he justified violating the trust principles. In particular, Gyllenhammar made a statement that seems uncontroversial :
“The future of Reuters takes precedence over the principles”
This is akin to saying, “The house is more important than the foundation”.
Now, more than ever, our principles have to take precedence over the future of any business.
There’s a reason countries have constitutions with Bills of Rights. They are there to make sure that the government cannot overstate and over-emphasize the importance of any present-moment objectives.
Values and principles will be there much longer than any one company or government.
Shouldn’t we act like they matter?
Why are some values sacred?
One company that honors its values well is Chipotle. They have certain ethical standards for their food, and if they cannot find meat that does not meet these standards, they will go without it, rather than compromise their values to sell more food.
Clearly articulated, well-defined, and embedded core values help everyone in your organization make more cohesive decisions and inspire loyalty from your customers.
All companies should develop processes for embedding and embodying their core values. Core values should be sacred to the organization. Things that are sacred are more important than success and shareholder payouts.
If something is sacred to you or an organization, you do not compromise it to make money, no matter what. Those values are what will keep your employees and customers through hard times.