I’m going to say something which might be uncomfortable to hear, but I promise you it’s true.
Nobody wants to hear about your values.
I know your employees say they care. Of course they say that. They know you want them to care. So they lie. You ask them if they care, and they say they do. But they don’t. I have never met a single employee who doesn’t make fun of the company the values the moment nobody important is around.
They also don’t learn anything useful from them. They can’t learn anything from them, because they don’t include anything new or original. I can say with almost complete certainty that I already know roughly what your business values are without you telling me. They’re pretty much the same as everyone else’s. All I’d have to do is pick and choose from words like integrity, respect, growth, or creativity, and I’d get there eventually. Business values are like zodiac signs, they give the sense of being unique, whilst applying to everyone.
They also don’t change anything. You can write your values on the wall as much as you like, but if you don’t live by them yourself, nobody else will, no matter how many posters you have, or how many policies you have tying the values to performance reviews or operational decisions. People are not stupid. If the business leaders themselves don’t follow the values, the people will ignore the values. But more importantly, if the business leaders do follow the values, then the people won’t need them written down anywhere. If you think your business is struggling, and you think the reason for that is that you don’t have a written set of values to bludgeon people with, I’m almost completely certain that the problem you are experiencing is simply the way the leaders behave, and the decisions the leaders make.
The way companies try to use values to achieve their goals is often completely disingenuous. The values are often manufactured to fit a template that covers specific areas like diversity, empowerment, teamwork, and commercial awareness. The very nature of what it means to have values is diluted to a homeopathic level of meaninglessness. What you’re left with is not a set of beliefs that are deeply held by the leaders of the business, but a list of instructions for how the little people should behave. It’s soulless, and that’s why it almost always achieves nothing.
I believe we’re often fooled into thinking this piece of work is valuable through some faulty reasoning when we look at a company like Netflix. We look at these companies that achieve great things, and we often see that they have a written set of values. Then we think to ourselves, “Wow, so to be like Netflix, we need to have a written set of values too”. Then we go and try to work out what our values might be. The thing is though, I’d wager that every single hugely successful business that has a written set of values wrote them because they already had them. They were documenting them after the fact. They didn’t come up with them because they thought they needed them, they already had them. That’s what made them successful.
The good news in all of this is that you don’t have to do any work other than actually living by the values you have. Several years ago, the founders of a business I worked for exited the business, and I ended up taking over. Everyone – not least myself – respected these founders immensely. They had values that they absolutely lived by, and you didn’t have to look closely to see their personality had touched almost every part of the business. They were extremely positive and charismatic people. But whilst I thought the world of them, I knew I couldn’t be anything like them. My personality is completely different. I will give an example which I hope illustrates what I mean. When the founders ran the business, during the weekly all hands meeting, they would do the usual thing of catching people up on the events of the week, and someone might present something. There would always be clapping at this event. It didn’t matter if we’d achieved anything good or not, the clapping was always there. We all got a clap for the attempt. When I took over, I pretty much banned clapping. I only wanted it to happen if we’d done something that was actually impressive. I wanted the clapping to mean something. The partner I picked to help me run the business had a similar attitude, obviously because I picked someone who gelled with me. We were both people who cared about our people. who wanted the best for everyone, but we were also impatient, a bit cynical, and extremely driven.
We then went about behaving the way we behave. We didn’t write any new values, we didn’t tell people that the business had a new direction, we didn’t do anything other than be ourselves.
And the values of the business changed.
What happened was simple. The people who loved the “old” company values all eventually moved on, and the people that liked our new values thrived and stayed. Our way of working changed as the people who responded positively to the behaviours of leaders were able to have an impact. We ended up being a very different collection of people to the collection of people we were under different leaders, because the leaders had behaved differently.
The founders I had taken over from had lived and worked according to the values they had as people, and the business naturally reflected that. When I took over, I did the same, and business followed. There was no right or wrong approach. We just led authentically, and the people who liked it followed us.
I guess I could have written down my values when I started, but I really don’t think it would have made any difference. I’m pretty sure in the colosseum they didn’t have posters up everywhere that said “We try not to get brutally killed with swords”. Everyone probably just picked up on the vibe.
Matt Casey is a management expert, the co-founder of DoThings.io and author of The Management Delusion: What If We’re Doing it All Wrong out now, priced £11.99
