FROM OUR CEO, Andy Sharpe
I recently gave a talk at IMEX America in Las Vegas: ‘The Connected Culture: Making Values, Purpose, and Strategy Stick’.
I didn’t do a scientific analysis of the ages of those in front of me, but I can tell you they were younger than I expected. That confirmed what many of us already know: authentic values are extremely important to our younger managers and employees.
I wanted to make this session practical, interactive and instructive, so I did a check-in with my audience about their company values. It took five minutes, and most of their answers landed them in the same place: somewhere in the middle, where their values were understood but not consistently put into practice.
Values that work some of the time
The point I wanted to make, based on 22 years of working with a wide variety of companies and brands, is this. Strategy tells people where they’re going. Culture decides whether they get there. Values link the two together.
They’re the hard-working glue in any organization. When they’re transparent, authentic and memorable, they’re a powerful commercial driver.
I believe they’re also an underappreciated and underused business tool.
Most companies already have values (or think they do!). They’re on the website, pinned somewhere in Teams or Slack, and on the kitchen walls too. But I wanted to discover if anyone at my session was actually using them to make decisions.
It’s my belief that communicating values is one thing. Living them every day, across the whole business, is where the real payoff lies.
A simple values health check
So, I ran a simple values health check. Here are four of its 10 questions so you can try them on yourself and your teams.
- Without looking them up, could most of your employees name your company values?
- Have your values shaped a significant business decision in the last six months?
- Do people across different teams and locations interpret your values in broadly the same way?
- Do your values still feel relevant to how your organization works today?
If you hesitated on one or two, you’re in good company, in that fateful middle ground.
We’ve been there ourselves. When SongDivision doubled in size during COVID, we hit real growing pains. We found that two of our values had no teeth. They didn’t help us make better decisions, and they were hard to remember and apply. So we replaced them.
Today we use our values to decide who we hire, which clients we take on, and what we say no to.
Top performers shouldn’t get a pass
The hardest test, for us, has been top performers. It’s tempting to give a star a pass when they ignore the values. But everyone else notices, and it’s a corrosive move.
We’ve come to believe that skills can be taught, but values are much harder to teach. Remember this when you recruit and you’ll save a lot of time, money and disappointment.
Over 22 years, we’ve worked inside thousands of company cultures. The teams where values stick seem to share one habit. They talk about their values and use them in everyday decisions. And those values are always clear, short, easy to remember and true to the company or brand.
What the data shows
In their Harvard Business Review research article, ‘What Does Your Company Really Stand For?'(2022), Paul Ingram and Yoonjin Choi argue that when employees’ personal values line up with the organization’s stated values, the result is associated with lower turnover, better collaboration, and greater employee contribution.
A question or two worth sitting with
If you asked your team which company value you actually live, and which you only talk about, what would they say?
It only takes five minutes to find out. Here’s the link.
Thanks for your company today,
Andy
