The other day, I heard a story about a leadership retreat where the goal was to agree upon shared values. They held a vote, and lo, there was an even split between all the values. The group could not agree on which ones represented the company.
This makes sense. Our values are part of our identity. You can’t compromise on your values! That would make you a bad person!
How can we come together, then? Must we fire half the leadership and replace them with people willing to espouse the same values as the remaining half? or can we settle for mutual purpose, and go with a mission statement?
Values
Corporate values are mostly generic. Honesty, integrity, innovation, teamwork, quality, respect, empathy. What do those even mean in the course of a workday?
To communicate that, you need to give examples of how a value is expressed in the workplace. For example:
- Integrity: we do what we say we will do. When this becomes impossible, we communicate clearly and promptly with the people affected.
- Honesty: we contribute our knowledge, especially about the limitations of our knowledge. We thank other people when they bring us surprising information, especially when it is bad news.
- Innovation: we spend 80% of our time working within the system we have, and 20% of our work time improving the system we work in.
- Collegiality: when we have disagreements, we resolve them peer-to-peer, not by appealing to higher management.
Agreed-upon Methods
Once we’ve expressed what we mean with implementation strategies, let’s strike out the names of the value and call the list “agreed-upon methods.”
See, people can’t compromise on values. But we can compromise on methods.
As itriskmanager describes it:
“When they become a team, they do not necessarily expect everyone to adopt the same values and beliefs. In fact, they grow to value and respect the values and beliefs of the other people in the team.”
When we already share a common purpose — success in the company’s mission — we need to agree on how we will accomplish that. We need protocols to coordinate work and encourage dialog. But we don’t need to all emphasize the same basic human values. In fact, balance can help.
That’s why I think we should replace “shared values” with something that doesn’t smack of morality. Something like: mutual purpose and agreed-upon methods.