Yes, We Have No Values*

As a communication professional with long corporate experience, I’ve participated in numerous efforts to develop, publish, and promulgate corporate “core values.”

Core values are words to live by – or die by (more later). In my jaded view, they are principles that inspire the degree of obsessiveness leaders want workers to apply to their jobs. They may also indicate the degree of panic executives are experiencing over how workers are applying themselves to their jobs, as evidenced by the bottom line. But here's a more dispassionate definition:

Corporate values are the guiding principles that dictate behavior and actions within a company. Examples include: Accountability, Boldness, Collaboration, Continuous improvement, Curiosity. [ChatGPT]

If you’re concerned that your company has no core values, never fear. There are still plenty to choose from. These 21 candidates are ripe for plucking from indeed. I suggest selecting "Integrity" and adding three or four more. (Who doesn't want "Integrity" in their core values?) Once you've done that, have them all printed onto business card sized slips of paper and laminated so your employees can more durably staple them onto themselves.

In its article “Make Your Values Mean Something," Harvard Business Review eventually begins pointing out some of the pitfalls of core values:

"Values initiatives have nothing to do with building consensus—they’re about imposing a set of fundamental, strategically sound beliefs on a broad group of people."

They're getting closer, but they're not quite there.

Corporate values are a way for corporate leaders to manage employee behaviors. For example, as one CEO I've worked with sagely put it, values can be used to manipulate employees into working harder or longer for the same compensation. (See the "Deliver or Die" example, below.)

As a communicator, I’m often dragged into corporate values birthing. Once I was part of a small team that spent days creating "values candidates" through a series of moderated group exercises that consumed large amounts of yellow Post-it Notes and colored Sharpie ink. I sorted through the ranked outputs at the end of each session, rewrote the leading candidates to make them pithier, and submitted them to company leaders. They sat at a conference table, gazed at a screen, and decided what values they wanted in. I was then directed to develop an internal comms plan for disseminating the new values to the company.

That exercise in corporate values – like every other I’ve witnessed – came down to a handful of executives choosing what to impose upon the rank and file employees – regardless of whether they intended to live up to them themselves.

And that is the danger of values: as soon as they're out of the bag, one or more senior execs will have a goat rodeo.

• In 2016, Wells Fargo was found to have engaged in widespread unethical practices, such as opening unauthorized bank and credit card accounts without customer knowledge. Their core values at the time included "doing what's right for customers."
• I've worked with one executive who, in her early career, was directed to go to a bondsman and proffer her corporate credit card to provide bail money for two CXOs who'd been rolled up in a prostitution sting. (Today, that company's values include "Integrity.")
• One of my companies published its values to our website to impress prospective employees. I can’t recall what they were, but I do recall changing them on two occasions after they were published. The changes came from members of the Executive Leadership team. I was then advised that new changes to the corporate values were on the way and I should be prepared to update the website. In a PFC Wintergreen moment, I unpublished them instead. No one called me out for it.
• I worked for a large services and tech company that tried to articulate its core values with the help of an advertising agency. Most are long forgotten, but the memorable one was: Deliver or Die. After a week or two of sardonic comments throughout the office, the CEO attempted a clean up effort via closed circuit broadcast. “Deliver or die,” he said, “refers to the company – not the employee. If we don’t all do our very best for every customer, this company won’t have earned the right to survive.” Yadda yadda.

Should values come from our employers? As a recipient/co-conspirator of many core values projects over a long career, I've boiled it down to three things that matter to me, and always have.

• Embrace your company's vision, mission, and goals. They are, more or less, unique to your company and should provide your practical guidance.
• If a company wants to impose core values on its employees, it should first answer: Why don't we trust their individual values? When employee values cause problems, companies can turn to disciplinary processes; not dueling values.
• The values that matter to me are not on a laminated card. They're distilled through my individual life experience, and are grounded in my family, my faith, and a life lived as well as I can live it.

Of the companies on my LinkedIn profile, 50% no longer exist. They, and their values, are gone. I remain.

*The title is paraphrased from "Yes We Have No Bananas," by Frank Silver and Irving Cohn, 1923.