Don’t Let Good Core Values Go Bad
While most companies today set core values, they can unfortunately be a double-edged sword. At their best values serve as guidelines for the ethos of the company and drive the right kinds of behaviors and decisions. Too often, values end up being a meaningless word soup of business clichés that are buried deep within a company’s website, having no impact on culture or behavior. Even worse still, they can be weaponized and held against employees, or used as a way to dismiss bad behavior or inconsiderate actions.
Good Values Guide Hard Choices
Core values should be positive, aspirational, and help us do right by employees, customers, and stakeholders. When we weaponize core values by using them directly against someone, or as a means to defend bad behavior, it’s manipulative. Values help us define and inspire good behavior and positive results, and should not become negative or demotivating. An example of this might be using a value like honesty or direct as an excuse for having a brash or inconsiderate communication style. When someone is being rude it should not be excused as “He’s just being direct. Isn’t that one of our values?”
Ignoring Your Values Creates Cynicism
Another way that good values go bad is when they aren’t being modeled by individuals throughout the organization or aren’t reflected in day-to-day business operations and strategic decision-making. If one of your core values is around transparency and your employees consistently feel like they are being kept in the dark of company happenings or key business decisions that is likely going to erode trust over time. There’s nothing like hypocrisy to make people cynical. Given the importance of company values, it makes good sense to be thoughtful about creating them, modeling them, and knowing when and how to hold people accountable to them.
Some Values are Harder to Live By
For the most part it shouldn’t be too difficult to get people behind your core values, though some may be more challenging for specific types of people. If you value moving fast even if it means breaking stuff, that might be hard for someone who is very methodical and exact with how they work to fully live by. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t want someone with that working style at your company, it just means that you need to be aware that a given value is going to be tough for that individual.
Values can be Biased
Other values that might be challenging are those that are easier to embody for people who lean extroverted. Like it or not, there is absolutely a cultural bias against introverts, especially in the workplace. Unfortunately for introverts, a lot of the ways we do business and expect people to be in business heavily favor those with extroverted personalities and this can be reflected in a company’s values. That doesn’t mean companies shouldn’t make core values that might be challenging for some types of people, it just means that they should be proactive and thoughtful when evaluating against them.
In the end, it’s important to choose only values that you’re willing to commit to, even when it’s hard. Share them early and often using stories to illustrate what it looks like when people use values as a guide. Revisit them periodically to make sure they’re still a good reflection of what’s most important to you. If you let people off the hook when they fail to live up to your values, it’s a slippery slope.
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