Are your firm’s values worth the price of the frames that they presently occupy while hanging in your lobby, the main conference room and your CEO’s office?

As a confirmed Leadership Anthropologist, I am fascinated by the use, misuse general lack of use of well-intended and thoughtful statements of values.  What should be potent guides to behavior and frequent reference points for talent and business decisions are often nothing more than artwork.

Values are décor until they are taught and then applied in the workplace.

The All-Too-Common Problems with Framed Words

  • The words are often meaningless agglomerations of gibberish constructed by a committee.
  • Once framed and announced they are rarely referenced again.
  • The values have no teeth.  While the words on behavior might be spelled out, exceptions are the norm…often perpetuated by the very people that should defend and give life to the values.
  • The values are absent from the hiring process.
  • The values aren’t taught to new hires…not in an exercise of rote memorization, but with examples and stories and scenarios that help explain and educate on the import and relevance of these behavioral statements.

4 Steps for Breathing Life into Your Firm’s Values

1.  Ensure that the words are clear, meaningful and actionable.  If your values resemble so many meaningless mission statements (a post for another day), then it’s time to clarify.  Note to self…don’t use a committee to wordsmith the values.  The committee’s role is to review and challenge the author to improve the clarity, brevity and meaning of the statements.  Even Jefferson had to bow to the demands of a tough editing committee as they took much of the flowery language out of the Declaration of Independence.

2.  Teach the values.  Or, more importantly, teach existing employees and new hires about the meaning and intent of the values.  Yes, spend time and spend some money to create a program that helps everyone understand the values and importantly, understand the meaning, intent and application of these words to day-to-day business.

3.  Hire to the values. Point your behavioral interviewing at understanding how people support or don’t support the firm’s values through their prior actions.

4.  Enforce the values.  If these things are to have any meaning or impact at all on your business, they must have teeth.  I share Jack Welch’s perspective that it doesn’t matter whether you are an A player, if you don’t support and live up to the values of the firm, then your not going to be part of the firm.

The Bottom-Line for Now

The existence of clear, meaningful and usable values serves to eliminate much of the counter-productive noise in the workplace. Standards for behavior, performance, cooperation and even dispute resolution have their basis in some common guidelines.

Cynical leaders might be quick to say that they wouldn’t bet next year’s revenue targets on a program to improve the visibility, meaning and use of the firm’s values.  While they might be right…the pursuit of the steps outlined in this essay will take time and there is always cost associated with time, I might just bet that the long-term future of the company will be more easily secured if the values are alive and well and serving as intended.