Make your values valuable

Bringing your values to life 

You are probably curious how to change or consolidate your culture since you are reading this. Perhaps you already decided to start by formulating your values. However, it is your culture that you want to change, and not your values. Focus accordingly. By clarifying the situation and the objective, you get more guidance for the discussion and the role of the values you end up formulating. To guide the discussion, try answering the questions below: 

1. Start with impact. What would you like to say about your culture that you cannot say today? Start with the outcome and your hope. Which cultural change is your organisation in need of? Whatever you do, start by asking yourself: What do you hope to achieve by changing your culture?
2. Internal or external pressure. Are you losing competitive edge and need a more innovative or commercial culture? Are you merging with another organisation and need a unified culture to reap the synergies? Did you come close to a regulatory cliff and need to boost compliance or ethics? How would a changed culture leave you better off? What would happen if nothing changed in your current culture? Start with the business risk and opportunities.
3. Core behaviours. Which behaviour does your future state depend on? What do you need to do differently to succeed? Do not ponder common niceties, but core actions needed for you to meet your objectives. Something that is not trivial or easy, but that takes conviction and dedication. In short, behaviours that take effort, e.g., balancing tensions between personal benefit and the collective good, short-term impulse and long-term objectives or serving shareholders and serving other stakeholders.
4. Contextual constraints and enablers. How may you leverage structures and processes to deliver to the cultural change and the business outcomes? Which other changes will your values have to support and explain?
5. Narrative: What story should you tell about who you are and where you are going? Is it a story about the need for cultural change because the situation has changed, or is it a story about getting back to the cultural roots that you risk drifting away from? And how do your past and future bear on this more generally? 
6. Values: What role do your values play in the overall mix of cultural change that you wish to achieve? Should they be highly visible in your internal communication and repeated again and again? Like: We try harder. Something that you diligently navigate by? Or do they service the basic sensemaking of it all with other cultural markers taking centre stage in communication? 

Values that work

Now you are ready to define your values. Mostly this is low risk because the greatest harm values normally do is being irrelevant. Sometimes stated values are fairytales without roots that can create cynicism if you openly violate them in everyday behaviour. So, you might as well define values that spark meaningful conversation and inspire – rather than ones that simply waste everyone’s time. 

1. Define values that serve your identified needs 

Please do not pick the same values as everybody else. Integrity, innovation, trust etc. are so widespread they are at risk of losing any clear meaning. Such standard values can be read as if you simply are not serious about the exercise. Or that your culture is like every other company, and thus in reality not a ‘culture’ – i.e. a noticeable difference. Start with the traits and behaviours you need to succeed and work backwards to pick your specific values. 

Also, avoid going overboard with form, such as picking values that all start with 'c' or that are forced into an acronym. It can be read as a sign that you are confused or, worse, shallow. Moreover, avoid obvious or default values. They make your stakeholders wonder how come they are necessary to stress. E.g., do not state that you are ‘honest’. We expect you to be honest. Saying so only makes us uneasy.

2. Formulate values in a way that resonates 

Values must have semantic depth and friction. They should give a clear picture of what to do and not to do. E.g. Pace over perfection. Perhaps with a poignant formulation that makes recipients stop and ponder. Or a value that resonates with the in-group. At Implement, we have Own the energy, which asks everyone to take responsibility for the energy they bring to every interaction. We all know what it means and act accordingly to create an upbeat and positive atmosphere that instils hope, optimism, and that little extra from everybody involved. 

Also, formulate values that allow for natural conversations. Your culture lives in everyday interactions, not in PowerPoints or in your employee handbook. Living values are part of normal conversations without feeling odd. At Implement, we have very little bureaucracy and a lot of trust in people. Find a way is our common answer to people asking how to proceed as a way of signalling trust in the person’s own judgement and encouragement to get things done even faced with uncertainty.

Pro tip: use verbs instead of nouns to make values instructive and easy to act on. Verbs activate the neural pathways for carrying out the wanted behaviour and minimise the need for mental translation of goal into action. 

3. My or our values? 

There are good reasons to formulate values as either collectively – ‘We’ – or individually – ‘I’. The collective ‘We’ highlights the norm of How we do things around here while ‘I’ highlights personal responsibility and accountability. Both are important for cultural change. Some organisations solve this tension by formulating higher level principles as ‘We’ – We always put customers first to establish the collective reference. Associated behaviours are formulated in the first person – I always decide to the benefit of our customer to show how everybody contributes to the overall value. 

4. Clarify whether your values are descriptive or prescriptive 

Many organisations mix descriptive values (how we are, our norms) with prescriptive values (what we aspire to become), with predictable confusion and alienation as a result. It is cool to be aspirational, and you should be. But it is not so cool to pretend that you are ‘leaving a better world for tomorrow’ if you are clearly not perceived to do so by the general public. So, calm down your branding department a little if you know you need to change and be transparent about it. That is surely less grandiose but much more real and credible. 

Make sure to be clear about what you are saying and asking for. Hint: for cultural preservation, descriptive values help you stay true to yourself despite turmoil and pressure. For cultural change, prescriptive values that require effort highlight the need to be mindful and diligent to succeed. And research shows that more abstract formulations about aspirations work better than the concrete. For behavioural instructions on the other hand, stay concrete and use verbs. 

Activate your values 

It is perhaps trivial to pinpoint that values only create value and culture when they are lived. To make your values valuable, you must carefully plan and execute their activation. 

Values are part of a greater cultural ecosystem, and therefore dependent on careful activation to move your culture. Integrate the major factors of culture change in your planning and execution and be mindful of consistency, rather than hoping for your values to drive the desired change.

Behaviour is how we observably show up – what we do. Identity is about where we came from and where we are going, what we hold to be true, and how we see the world. This is where your values reside. Context is all the things that guide our interactions: from our titles and organisation through KPIs and rules to the physical and virtual structures we operate in. 

Make sure to balance and align the three cultural dimensions in your planning and execution. Values should describe the behaviour needed and act as design principles for the contextual enablers and constraints. Stimulate, incentivise, and praise behaviour that will create the desired culture and deliver the business results needed. 

Start walking 

To paraphrase Søren Kierkegaard’s famous statement on life in an organisational culture-friendly way: values can only be understood backwards, but they must be lived forwards. Likewise, you identify existing organisational values by looking back – across typical interactions and historical decisions. Values on the other hand come to ‘life’ through concrete, everyday action. They are understood through top-down abstraction and created through bottom-up action. Or put more plainly: walking the talk. 

Nobody changes behaviour when told that the company has formulated new values or by being reminded of existing values. Company values grow from characteristic behaviour across the organisation. Values are an outcome, not the trigger. 

So please avoid the common fallacy of confusing the order of understanding with the order of creation. You will not achieve living values by telling the organisation which values to live by. Behaviours are not delivered by a vending machine you feed with values coins. You nurture the values you want to see by supporting and guiding the behaviour that embodies them. 

At the end of the day, what you want is behaviour. Observable and real impact. Unless you are a poet or philosopher, the description of your movements is less important than the action itself. So, stop talking and start walking.