“Leaders continually clarify the values.”

I read the above quote (or something like it) many years ago. Each year it seems more and more profound to me. As I’ve mentioned in prior postings 20 years ago few organizations had their corporate values defined in writing. Now most do but when I ask audiences across the country what the issue today is, they inevitably and unanimously respond that people in organizations don’t demonstrate the values in their day to day work.

The criticism extends both to management and to labor. At some level most everyone observes this, yet very few leaders do anything about it. The values statements become posters on walls or labels on coffee cups that no one notices despite the mega-dollars spent on graphics and printing. They’re hollow and the best of the best within the organization resent the hollowness and worse the customer never experiences the benefits.

Two problems

My observation is the hollowness comes from two sources. The first one goes well beyond our organization or other similar organizations and relates to the huge social issue of saying one thing and doing another. I’ve read certain experts trace this back to advances many years ago in advertising. Madison Ave. types learned a long time ago that if you say something over and over, even if it isn’t true, people will believe it. We have all experienced this time and time again. So now it seems to many of us that more money is spent convincing the public about the quality of an item than is actually spent on improving its basic quality.

Unfortunately, we feel the same is true of far too many human service agencies who have very well written values statements but whose staff act in completely contradictory ways. Hospitals proclaim that “Our patients are our first priority” yet, we find ourselves spending hours in waiting rooms waiting for service or we have to go through way too many phone numbers to get an answer to our questions or worse yet we come out of the hospital will ailments we didn’t have when we went in. Rehab agencies tell us how dedicated they are to their consumers yet they approve behavioral techniques which are medieval.

The result of this is a deadening of our senses. The more of these experiences we encounter, the less sensitive we are to any single occurrence. We have a long way to go in this country to turn this one around.

The second source is that too few leaders have ever worked in a genuinely, values based environment. So they have never learned the role they play in clarifying their values on a moment by moment, event by event, situation by situational basis.

What do we mean?

A few examples may help.

We don’t talk to people who are late for work about the matter as a rules violation. Rather, we talk to them about our values, which we call our Unifying Principles. The People We Serve Come First is our primary principle and we explain how when they are late or are a no show consumer services are impacted. We also seek to help them understand another of our values, Employee Satisfaction and we explain to people this means their satisfaction as well as everyone else’s. We then go on to help them understand the impact on their co-workers when they don’t show up for work or don’t show on time. We also talk about another of our Unifying Principles, Be Dedicated and talk to them about the level of dedication it requires to be on time all the time.

When someone is found to be spreading gossip or losing their temper, again we don’t talk about a rules violation but rather about Communicating Effectively and our Commitment to Excellence. We help them understand that around here those things are viewed as neither effectively communicating nor excellent.

The same is true when developing policies. Anyone who has tried to develop a smoking policy knows how divisive this can be. But no matter how controversial a particular policy or decision may be we have always found that if we bring it back to our Unifying Principles and can clearly show how the policy is consistent with our values, versus a unilateral management decision, staff not only accept the policy but they can thrive within it.

So, over time, the culture is not about power and control but rather about the values. People then need to decide whether they share those values or not. They decide whether they want to help us strengthen the culture, or if they are compromising it. It takes time and it takes effort but the benefits are substantial.