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The passport to working here

By Andrew Mayo (August 2004 Issue)
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Every now and then I get involved in helping organisations either articulate or embed their ‘values’. This really is an area of much rhetoric, confusion and (often) hypocrisy. It is de rigeur today for an organisation to have a statement of its ‘vision and values’. Quite why the two are often so closely linked bears some thought, as they are actually quite different – but they come together under the umbrella of ‘the kind of company we want to be’.

I wrote earlier in the year about Ricardo Semler and his views and practices on business organisations, as described in his book Maverick.1 He avows that ‘organisations do not have values, only people do’. One can see his point, but organisations certainly have characteristic behaviours. Lynda Gratton, in Living Strategy, says that ‘values and culture are not levers for change, but outcomes’.2 They follow on from a clear vision and the actions and processes put in place to support it. The question is whether the ‘vision’ should include a picture of the kind of organisation and organisational behaviour needed to deliver the strategic goals. I suggest it should, and it is immensely helpful to have this. The nice words and statements have to be translated into practical indicators: how do we want stakeholders to see, hear and feel about us?

What this leads to is a description of the aspirations for organisational ‘behaviour’, against which we can test the reality. All our processes, systems and traditional ways of working have to be filtered through the results of this to see if there are any collisions. We put a lot of effort into understanding individual behaviours, and in describing and assessing those we think lead to high performance. Should we not do so for the way we operate collectively? In 1990, Levi Strauss produced a document called ‘The Aspirations Statement’, which was about the kind of company it wanted to be seen as, plus six leadership behaviours needed to put this into reality. Robert Haas, then CEO of the company, explained in an interview:

We always talked about the ‘hard stuff’ and the ‘soft stuff’. The soft stuff was the company’s commitment to our work force. And the hard stuff was what really mattered: getting pants out of the door. What we’ve learned is that the soft stuff and the hard stuff are becoming increasingly intertwined.3

Microsoft®, for example, has six ‘company values’ (which relate to how it wants to behave and be perceived as a company), plus it has ‘great people with great values’ (which includes six sets of characteristics of the kinds of people it wants to have).4 The distinction is helpful to the person who cares about organisational and individual development. On the one hand it focuses on human capital processes, such as recruitment and development. On the other, it looks at ways of working, priorities and what customers should expect. To achieve both requires integrated effort in both organisational change, and personal feedback and development. The popular value of ‘innovation’ thus becomes a reality when we recruit innovative people, and at the same time find ways to encourage and reward it, provide training in appropriate techniques and organise in a way that encourages experimentation.

Over the last two years, I have worked with a middle eastern organisation that is as stereotypical an example of bureaucracy as you could find anywhere. This organisation spent three years developing a ‘strategic framework’ to take it forward for the next decade or so. As part of this, it devised new vision and mission statements, key strategic goals and values. Five values made up the acronym PRIDE – performance excellence, responsiveness, integrity, dedication and empowerment. Three of these at least were highly aspirational, a million miles from reality, and quite contrary to the whole infrastructure and ways of working. If one is serious about values, the first action one would take would be to look for people with these characteristics, but such people would never survive!

Is this all an exercise in empty corporate rhetoric? I think not. Porras and Collins showed in Built to Last how consistently successful companies were characterised by strong cultures and the values that went with them.5 It is hard work to build a culture and it requires determined effort. We only achieve it by having a clear picture of what we are trying to build – the behaviours that individuals can focus on but that are also characteristics of the collective ‘systems’. I like to think of those behaviours that derive from the stated values as ‘the passport to working here’ – the essential core of all recruitment specifications, integrated into the performance management system and known as serious expectations for everyone. But we can only be ‘serious’ if everything else about the organisation in which the people work ‘lives’ the values too.

References
1. Ricardo Semler, Maverick, Arrow, 1994; see Andrew Mayo, ‘Just a minute … why do we do this?’, Training Journal, March 2004, p. 52.
2. Lynda Gratton, Living Strategy: Putting People at the Heart of Corporate Purpose, Financial Times, Prentice Hall, 2000.
3. Robert Howard, ‘Values make the company: an interview with Robert Haas’, Harvard Business Review, September–October 1990, pp. 135–143.
4. To see these values in full, visit www.microsoft.com
5. Jerry Porras and James Collins, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, Random House Business Books, 1994.

 

Andrew Mayo is a consultant, speaker, writer and facilitator in international HR management, with specialisms in people and organisation development. He can be contacted on +44 (0) 1727 843424, at andrew@mliltd.com or visit www.mliltd.com

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