Many organisations have pithy little value statements hanging from an office wall or filed away in a filing cabinet somewhere. Let me tell you what happened.
Someone in the senior team one day had a bright idea, he or she had heard it mentioned somewhere or read it in a book, it was important to have organisational values. So they organised a leadership retreat, catered, of course, hired an expensive consultant and then for a number of hours they all brainstorm like a socialist meeting held in the local pub and come up with a few values, one for each participant and one to appease the loudest member.
The consultant massages the words, doing the least amount of work for the most money and then moves on to their next victim.
The group pat themselves on the back for imagining such incredible values and pay the consultant for wording them so pithy. Then the chairperson of the party issues an edict, saying, “these are the values that represent us and we aspire to see more of and will now be outworked immediately on pain of death”. Dutiful district commissioners hang most glorious value statement on the wall, next to the picture of the illustrious leader. Never to be referred to again and soon forgotten.
5 years later someone from the senior team has a bright idea…
Let me tell you a secret. Values only matter if you live them. An organisation that is value led will have their values weaved throughout all they do. It will be in the deep marrow of the organisation and be outworked through peoples fingertips. It will affect strategy, the budget, decision making, hiring and every other aspect of the business. Good leaders will call value violations in team members, they will seek to live these values out personally and will bang on about them until everyone is sick of them. Like personal integrity, a value-driven organisation will have congruence with what they say they value and what they actually do.
© 2019 G M Brock
