On the Value of Values
3 Minute Read
We wins.
Most every company these days will have some description of what they consider their values, either for internal alignment, marketing to employees and customers, or to position themselves against their competitors. If there was ever an exercise for a business to undertake more fraught with the potential for platitudes and lightweight, underthought pablum, I’m not sure what it could be.
Perhaps the biggest pitfall for pinning down these few crucial guideposts is settling on broad generalizations around biz-speak classics like quality, family, doing the right thing, etc. Basically saying the stuff that everyone else also says.
If you want to make your values truly transformative, they have to be actionable.
What Does Steve Think?
This is where poorly defined ideas fail. Take “Innovation”, for instance. What does this mean as a value? Is this across the board, applied to process or product, or is it meant as some type of general thought that you’re going to meaningfully change your industry? And are you even in a position to do something like the latter? What does Steve think that means? You get the point.
When decisions and behavior can be measured by values, they begin to have meaning. It would be tough to get anything done if, as in the previous example, you weighed every decision against “is it innovative?” Likely, it is not. Are team members exhibiting “innovative” behavior? Again, hard to quantify when attempting to grade an individual’s adherence to such a concept.
Your Non-Negotiables
We try to craft ours in such a manner that we can ask ourselves, “are we taking the High Road if we go this way?” If we feel we are not, we are abandoning what we have agreed upon is important to us. And consciously contradicting a value means you don’t value it. Having these pillars drive behavior and actions reinforce their authenticity, and keep us working in the right direction. These should be non-negotiables. They create accountability and define success.
That’s how you know a value has value.
