Are Your Values Worth The Poster They Are Printed On?

• Integrity - Service - Courage - Achievement - One Team?
• Integrity - Collaboration - Accountability - Respect - Excellence
• Integrity - Collaboration - Excellence - Accountability - Service

The above words are the values of three different Australian companies. These three companies are all very large and successful businesses, dominating their industry. You might be thinking, these values are all very similar. Maybe they are even similar to your organisation’s values too? I wouldn't be surprised. These words are common choices for many organisations.

You might also be thinking that these all look like good values, good words, fine words. These are the values of these three successful companies because they are the values that good companies would have. While I don't think there is anything particularly wrong with them as words, these words alone are not enough to create a great company.

The three companies with these values are Westpac, ANZ and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. These were the values on their websites, on the posters on their walls and in their Investor briefings before, during and after the Royal Commission into Banking.

The Royal Commission was a devastating set of revelations for the Banks showing that, while these words were prominent on walls, websites and presentations, they were not lived in the decision making processes throughout their organisations. Let’s look at just a few disconnects between the values and actions of the banks.

1. Offering a debt-ridden customer who had maxed out his credit card and admitted he was a problem gambler a $35,000 limit increase. Is this Accountability?
2. Selling insurance products to vulnerable customers who, due to the terms and conditions of the products, were then explicitly excluded from ever being able to make a claim on these insurance products. Is that Integrity?
3. How about charging a customer who had died for Financial Advice. Is that Service? That sounds like going way over and above, don't you think?

Values are so often a collection of nice words. We ask everyone in the business, what do you think our values should be. They give us a long list of good words. We then grab a thesaurus or pay some creative consultants to boil these down to a small number of really good sounding words. We create some cool posters, reprint the mouse pads and update our websites to say these are our values.

Sadly, these words don't mean a thing until they are lived. Until they are tested in the day-to-day interactions between company representatives, customers, colleagues, regulators, the community, they are little more than wasted ink. They only come to life if they form the backbone of your behaviours, culture and decision making.

Three simple questions to ask about your values are:

1. Can everyone remember them?
2. Does everyone know what they actually mean?
3. Does everyone use them to guide their behaviours?

If any of these are not answered with a strong yes, you’ve got work to do on developing and embedding your values. When asked by organisations to help them to refresh their values, I am always cautious. Changing the words on the walls from one set of words that no one remembers or uses to make decisions, into a new set of words that are equally ignored is a pointless exercise. Good for consulting fees, but terrible for your organisation.

Instead, I ask potential clients three questions about the values they currently have:

Q1- Are they really a choice?

Strategy guru Michael Porter says "strategy is all about making choices, trade-offs; it's about deliberately choosing to be different." It is vital in choosing a strategy to be deliberate in not only what you choose to do, but what you are therefore choosing not to do.

I believe values should have a similar set of properties when we develop them. So often, the values that an organisation has are less of a choice, and more of a simple expectation we have of everyone.

Let's take Integrity for example. Is this really a choice? Don't all your customers and suppliers expect you to have integrity? If your competitors chose to describe their values as Deceitful, then maybe you have a case, but choosing Integrity is much like choosing a value of Law Abiding... it is not a value, it is an expectation.

Making sure values are choices is important because they need to be actively used. They are guidelines that help your people make decisions.

You can choose to be fast and messy or slow and meticulous. You can be Customer First or Employee First. You can be Risk Takers or Risk Adverse. There are many choices you can make and none are wrong, but they all tell you and your people of the type of organisation you are going to be.

Q2 - Do they provide clarity?

The second question on your values is about clarity. Do your people understand what they mean and how to use them?

Many years ago, I was working for an organisation that had 'Brave' as one of its newly minted values. Brave sounds good, most of us would like to be brave or think we are brave.

One day, in a meeting, someone was obnoxious to a colleague, belittling their point of view in front of the entire team. When that person was called out for this poor behaviour, their response was:?

"I was just being brave!"

You might guess, this wasn't the intention of the value, but you can also see that without further clarity a single word is always open to interpretation. You could similarly imagine that a value like Respect could be interpreted as being professional and courteous to your peers. Respect could also mean never challenging people in positions of authority. You might want one of these and not the other, but your single word value doesn't provide the clarity needed to make this interpretation easy.

Clarity requires more content and context. Describing your values in stories and specific situations is a useful way to improve this. In my experience, those values that are embedded through real-life stories work best. Some organisations, such as Zappos.com collate stories that define their values and culture. This is compiled into a beautiful book that is shared with all employees each year.

One of our clients has a set of stories they tell every new employee to help bring clarity to the ‘way we do things around here’. Describing the values as stories taps into the primal parts of our brain that are receptive to this ancient art. However you provide it, clarity is vital.

Q3 - Are they seen in action?

My favourite example of values in action was a story the late CEO, Tony Hsieh of Zappos told in his book Delivering Happiness. After a conference, Tony found himself with a few other out of towners in a hotel room wanting pizza. None of them knew of any pizza stores that would deliver in the area. Tony suggested one of them call his team at Zappos.

While renowned for their service in selling shoes, Zappos didn't do pizza delivery. His fellow hungry conference-goers thought he was crazy, but Tony insisted they try. After a moment of initial confusion, the Zappos team member asked the caller to hold. While the room listened in on the speakerphone, the Zappos team member came back on the call after a few seconds and said:

"Do you have a pen? Here are three places near you still delivering pizza. Have a great night and thanks for your call."

There is no policy for what to do when someone calls for a pizza. There is no KPI or bonus system for helping strange callers. The Zappos team member was just living the core value of the organisation: To live and deliver WOW.

Your written values might be the most elegantly designed and beautifully crafted in the world, but if they do not become clear commitments and consistent behaviours, they are not your lived values and they will not be representative of your culture.

The critical difference between values and culture is action. If the values become clear commitments that translate into consistent behaviours, then they shape your culture. If they don't, they are likely just expensive posters and visuals.

Leaders play a critical role in embedding values into a team culture. They must be constantly communicating to ensure there is clarity on what the values are, what they mean and translating these into shared commitments and behaviours relevant to their specific team. It is not enough to have vague ideas, they need to discuss and demonstrate what each value means in the team context. "Delivering WOW '' in the accounting team might look very different to the marketing team, this is a leader's job to set the expectations and commitments.

Leaders are also accountable for monitoring the behaviours of their people and providing feedback on the alignment of behaviour to these values. If your people are living the values, a leader must provide recognition and praise, highlighting this to the rest of the team. If your people are acting out behaviours that are not aligned to the values, and especially if they conflict with the values, it is the job of the leader to give feedback and demand alignment of behaviours to the values.

Values might be written by the Executive Team and rolled out on posters, but they are embedded into culture through the constant efforts of people leaders who relentlessly clarify, monitor and manage the behaviours of their people.