6 words that show your company values mean nothing

Does your company espouse values like trust, respect or responsibility? Does it signpost values like fairness, caring or speaking up?

I was reminded this week of why values like this often serve no function inside organisational cultures. For this week’s podcast (in fact there are two this week, details of the second one is down the page) I talked to a consultancy that specialises in running culture initiatives inside organisations.

During the conversation with Darren Ashby and Atif Sheihk I was reminded of the ‘6 pillars of character’, a non-partisan initiative that took hold in the 1990s. The project set out to articulate the 6 values that were consistently core to an ethical approach to living life.

When effort had been put in to define ethics, the same terms kept coming up time and time again. The 6 Pillars approach, originally from an organisation somewhat needily named, CHARACTER COUNTS! (Ok, ok, calm down, btw you’ve got your capslock on) came up with 6 universally relevant values:

1. Trustworthiness

2. Respect

3. Responsibility

4. Fairness

5. Caring

6. Citizenship

This framework was launched in 1992. Around the same time the Institute for Global Ethics was founded and over the span of its existence it has published its own six values, the same 6, commonly shared amongst ethical organisations: trust, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, citizenship.

None of these approaches was created in a vacuum, The International Centre for Academic Integrity published their own Principles of Academic Integrity in 1999, adjusting them slightly in 2014 to reach this list: (I’ve re-ordered them from their original publication to enable easier comparison):

1. Trust

2. Respect

3. Responsibility

4. Fairness

5. Honesty

6. Courage

Clearly the first 4 values were shared, the final two in each case being adapted to slightly different needs - although the articulation of courage suggests it is synonymous with what was meant by ‘citizenship’ but re-expressed.

The drumbeat repetition of these same terms clearly tells us something. It serves to highlight that a core set of ethical standards are broadly universal. Doing business with integrity shouldn’t be a differentiator, it’s not the basis of a competitive advantage. It’s clear that very few companies would suggest that they are the opposite of these values, in other words they shouldn’t set any firm apart.

So how should a firm think about their values? Well as the podcast discussion explores maybe the best way for leaders to think about these things is to define a small number, just 2 or 3, behaviours that are expected from employees.

In the case of Intercontinental Hotel Group (which we discuss) they realised that managers were struggling to know which decisions to make, so they gave the direction that employees should ‘think margin’ and optimise for any decision that generated a good return. The insurance company Aviva chose to signal: ‘kill complexity’ as one of its behaviours.

One thing is certain, if your firm is saying ‘respect’ is one of your values, then rather than setting yourselves apart, it leaves an empty space where the other ethical values sit.

This week’s podcast goes into details into how organisations should try to define behaviours that do make a difference. I think you'll love listening to it.

Listen: Apple / Spotify / website

• In the US - where fully remote work is far more common than in Europe - workers are finding that job layoffs are leaving them in a distant location with limited prospects of work

• As of last week flexible working is now a workers’ right in the UK (from the first day of their employment)

• Quarter of your wages on getting to work? For someone who earns the mean average salary in the UK, travelling to the office (and buying lunch and coffee) burns through a quarter of their take-home cash. Combine that with the fact that rent currently accounts for 53.6% of salary in London and your boss’s fond memory of what it was like in his day might be describing a very different world than the one we’re in now

• Google fired 28 employees who protested its $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli military

• Someone has gathered all of the things that the Daily Telegraph has blamed on Gen Z, I miss the good old days when it was Millennials

Two podcasts for you since I last posted. Firstly, as mentioned above, I’m continuing my question to pick the brains of the biggest experts on culture. I saw Darren Ashby from BusinessFourZero present at a conference about how they’d worked with Tesco to change their values.

At first glance BusinessFourZero seemed like the sort of highly paid consultants who charge lavish fees to a firm to help them reposition themselves, but I really liked the way they articulated their approach. It was full of the sort of detail I’m intrigued by.

I sat down with Darren and Atif Sheikh. Stand outs of the discussion:

- Values - before you define your company values you should know that there are 6 core values shared amongst many groups and organisations (sometimes called the 6 Pillars of Character - trust, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring and citizenship). These should not be your differentiator. These are table stakes for being ethical - universal basic expectations. If you're saying one of the six pillars is your culture then you're saying nothing differentiating

- The quickest way to get a snap shot of whether a culture is high performing? Take a look at how internal they are. Businesses that spend too long in internal meetings are generally going nowhere

- Only 28% of workers say they are connected to their company's purpose

- A leaders' role is to bring energy: Satya Nadella told Microsoft’s execs: ‘find the rose petals in the field of sh*t’

- So how do you elevate a culture? Their approach is to introduce 2 or 3 critical behaviours that elevate a culture. And they build a process of how you might enact those behaviours

For example Intercontinental Hotel Group

• Had switched from being a hotel owner to a franchise business

• What did they need? Too many people in the business didn’t understand how they made money - it made spending decisions hard

• So they focussed on the value of ‘think return’ - leaders should feel able to spend money that would make a good financial return

• Additionally IHG had become complacent, so they decided to make‘move fast’ a value

• Finally they agreed to ‘talk straight’ with each other

I think you'll get a lot from this discussion.

Listen: Apple / Spotify / website

Podcast 2: The manager as a therapist

Isabel Berwick is a writer and podcaster who focusses on the evolving state of modern work. I’ve celebrated her podcast Working It many times here (here’s her specials on the 4-day week for example. Her episode on meeting-free days was essential listening). I love its ability to react rapidly to the biggest news stories of the moment and to drop a short, snackable episode midweek.

I talked to her about her opinions on modern work, going deep on the rapidly changing world of employment and where we’re going next.

Isabel has a brand new book out, The Future Proof Career, which she says is for everyone who doesn’t read books about work but want to be better at navigating it.

Listen: Apple / Spotify / website