The Value of Values

The true purpose of values is to guide behaviour – to act as a compass point or North Star as it were; to describe what we, as an organisation, stand for and what you, as a customer, can expect from us.  They also describe how we treat each other (both internal and external customer) around here.

If we have to tell people to behave honestly, or in a trustworthy manner, or with integrity, it would seem we have problems that are far bigger on our hands!

One of the biggest problems with the historical trend of describing values with just one word is that they are too open to interpretation.  What one person perceives as “honesty” may not be the same as another, whose beliefs and values may have been influenced by their upbringing, experiences, and environment.  Consider the person who finds it necessary to lie to protect either themselves or their children from abuse and violence.

And if I were to build on the commentary by Simon Sinek, describing a value with a noun does not tell people how to act.  An action is a verb – a “doing” word, you may recall from school.  While I don’t necessarily believe all values have to be verbs, I do believe all values have to be supported by statements that make clear the intention of the value and that describe the kinds of behaviours that support and uphold that value.

For example, let’s take one of the favourite one-word values, “trust.”

Imagine if a person grew up in an environment where the only way to feel safe was to lie or hide things.  Apart from lacking honesty (another favourite value), such behaviour suggests this person is unable to trust the people around them.  What might their perception of the word, “trust” be?  Something, I suggest, along the lines of “people are unreliable, they let you down, they cause you to be hurt.”  Therefore, their learned behaviours may be framed around, “I need to cover things up or keep things to myself so that others can’t hurt me or let me down.”

However, if we were to add some guiding behaviours to the word, “trust,” (not that I’m advocating one-word values, but for the sake of the argument, we might underpin it with statements like this:

“We earn the trust of others by doing what is right and doing what we say we’ll do.”

“We build team trust by having each other’s backs, calling out untrustworthy behaviour, and being open and transparent in our communication.”

To enhance clarity, it is also good practice to articulate behaviours that would undermine the value, such as:

“We don’t lie about things, and we don’t gossip behind other’s backs.”

“We own our mistakes; we don’t blame others.”

“We don’t omit telling others things or hold back information from others.”

As Simon Sinek says, you can’t “do” honesty (a noun), but you can “tell the truth” (tell is a verb).

Values set the tone for workplace culture; their accompanying guiding behaviours underpin and steer the culture.  If you have values without clearly articulated behaviours, you have only half the equation.

Creating values is a team sport. The more you can involve everyone on the team, the greater the buy-in you’ll have to the result. The more buy-in you have, the more your people will uphold “their” values and the more they will hold others to account, thereby creating a living workplace culture that self-regulates.

Having clearly articulated and communicated both the underpinning and undermining behaviours also makes it far easier for leaders to address and regulate behaviour that is out of alignment with the values.  So that, rather than providing feedback to a team member that their behaviour is untrustworthy (hard call and very likely to offend), we can refer to our list of undermining behaviours and explain that gossiping behind someone’s back is not the agreed way we behave around here because it undermines our value of “trust.”

By Dawn Russell 
The Hartware Group