How 'Valuable' Are Your Values?

One of the most common motives I hear from key people leaving their jobs is, “I’m fed up with the company professing one thing but doing another”.

So what could this mean?

Values misalignment

Over the last decade or so, most organisations have looked at the kind of behaviours they need in their workplaces to get the work done to meet the needs of the various stakeholders. Employers have explored a range of ways to change behaviours that are not consistent with their strategic intent.

One approach has been to examine the organisation’s ‘values’. There is renewed interest in ‘values alignment’, to bring about change in organisations. As Charles Handy said: “The vision and values stuff really matters. If there is no common goal, people put their own goals first”.

In Collins and Porras’s important book Built to Last, they showed how organisations that persist with and remain true to their core values are not only ‘visionary’ but produce consistently and significantly better shareholder returns.

Two examples

Take for example, the company that emphasised ‘communication’, as a core value. It had state of the art telecommunications, a communications department with regular in-house magazine, teleconferencing facilities, email bulletins and six monthly road shows for all staff.

But a closer look showed that communication was always from the top down — and there were no mechanisms in place to facilitate upward communication. Nor was there any regular cross-divisional communication.

'If they don’t want two way communication, that’s fine, but please don’t spend time and money telling us how important it is...'

One very highly regarded senior manager left this company. He said: “the importance of ‘communication’, was painted on the coffee mug, highlighted in the tender documents, demonstrated by size of the IT and communications department and in bold in the Annual Report. But I never found out anything about my Division until after the decisions had been made — even if I had to do the downsizing! No one asked me for my input. If they don’t want two way communication, that’s fine, but please don’t spend time and money telling us how important it is, if you don’t practice what you preach.”

Other core values

Take the company that has ‘respect’ as a core value. Another key employee walked away saying she thought ‘respect’ was a three-way activity ­ for the customer, for the employer and for the employee.

This female manager with two young children, felt that she was disadvantaged because of the timing of significant meetings and discussions. She made a number of fruitless attempts to try and change the time of important meetings to between 8 am and 6 pm.

She had been with the company for three years, was annually exceeding her budget and was generally regarded as a strong performer. The company described itself as ‘family friendly’ and had even entered the Work and Family Awards.

But this manager felt she was not a prime candidate for promotion as she was not able to attend the late night meetings that seemed to count. For her ‘respect’ was talked about but not acted out in the corporate culture.

Does your company practice what it preaches? In both cases, these employees left because the company did not ‘walk its talk’. An important point is that companies often do not know that their culture, systems, structures, processes or policies are not in sync with the stated core values. The practices and behaviours are so embedded as to be invisible.

The two examples above showed that incongruent values increased recruitment and turnover costs, and meant the loss of intellectual capital, corporate memory and goodwill. Neither of these employees is out there as advocates or PR spokespeople for their former employers, if talking to potential new employees.

Walking the talk

What can you do to make sure that your company is walking its talk?

One way is to get some small groups together and ask them about aspects of their day to day work that are inconsistent with the stated core values. My guess is that there will be some common themes.

You could also undertake a review of the recruitment and induction processes, the kind of training that’s done and how people are rewarded and promoted.

Look at your performance management approach, the usual times and structures for important meetings and decision-making processes, the formal and informal communication channels, your security systems (especially if ‘trust’ is a stated value). Don’t look at just the written systems and policies but find out how it actually happens in practice and how this lines up with the firm’s values.

You might also want to contact the people who have left the company over the last six months ­ especially those who you did not want to leave. Now that they are settled in their new role, they may well feel free to talk about the real reasons for their leaving and also be able to contribute their experiences of any value/reality mismatch.

With over 25 years hands-on change management and leadership experience, Anne Riches of The Riches Group is an expert in the field of people-issues in organizations. She specialises in strategies for managing and implementing sustainable organizational change capabilities and developing leadership qualities in executives, managers and team leaders. A former barrister and senior lecturer in commerical and industrial law at the University of Sydney, Anne is also in constant demand as a facilitator at meetings, forums and strategic planning sessions. For more information, visit her website.

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