Can company values do more than just pay lip service?

Most companies have ‘values’ they display on their website and marketing material. Some list a few words, others have phrases, sometimes they come with definition sentences or paragraphs beneath them. In addition to Mission, Vision, Purpose, more and more companies are now including Values as part of their corporate definition.

But to what end?

What purpose do values serve in the workplace? Who benefits from them? How can they be used to create success? Are they a big waste of time, useless jargon, and just paying lip service to the idea of higher purpose?

Benefits and Drawbacks of Company Values

Numerous articles and books have been written, telling us how to select company values. They can be used to showcase a company’s culture to potential customers or hires. Or as a north star for strategic decision-making, hiring, mergers & acquisitions. Company values can provide the basis for ensuring behavioural alignment across an entire organization. But they can also be empty statements, inadvertently leaving employees and customers unsatisfied.

The companies I’ve worked for all had different interactions with their values. From no explicit values; to values painted all over marketing material but nowhere in the company culture; to embodying them fully into every aspect of work. I used to think company values were just paying lip service to the general public. A quick way of telling the world what the company ideally stands for, but with no actual meaning beyond that. Words that bear no weight. It’s shocking how little we think of their usefulness, until we’ve been exposed to a company that gets it right.

After working for an organization that lives and breaths values in the workplace, I’ve often thought: “How was I ever managing before?”

Being surrounded by people who embrace an aligned mission and values is empowering. It makes it infinitely easier to feel good about what you do, or conversely, confident it’s time to try someplace else.

Values in the wild

Negativity breeds negativity

I once won a prize at work. It was a coffee mug with the company’s logo on one side and the values listed on the other. These words were likely thought up by corporate leaders during some workshop on branding, or similar. Powerful? maybe. Meaningful? not particularly. Inspiring? certainly not. Sure, the words resonated with me personally, if I thought about it long enough. But I didn’t feel the connection between these words and the culture I experienced in my day-to-day at work.

It was more of a joke with the staff as well. Asking the question “what are the company values?” would invoke *shrugs*, *laughs*, and *points* at corporate material, including those coffee mugs. The company did lots of great work, but staff turnover was high, and the company culture had little – if anything – to do with the nice words painted under the company slogan.

That company has since re-organized their public image and internal way of operating, including redesigning their marketing material. I still have the old mug though! And every time I now drink from it, I am reminded of the impact values can have. It helps me remember the importance of being honest and keeping true to your values, and the negativity that stems from misusing them.

On the flip side

I’ve also worked for a company that genuinely embodies their values in everything they do. During the hiring process, applicants would frequently ask: “what do you like most about working for this company?”. Nine times out of ten, my colleagues and I would say, genuinely, “the values.” The company we worked for believed in those values through and through and it drove all the work we did.

Everyone in the company was ‘tested’ on their values before being hired. It allowed us to align on everything. From how we did our hiring and performance reviews, to how we ran projects and developed new systems and products. Having this strong commitment to values, from leadership outwards, was an integral influence in the company’s success.

With every decision centred around common language of the values, everyone, no matter what team, function, or role you’re in, can relate to and freely collaborate with anyone else in the company. This was especially noticed when we’d do cross-team events like Hackathons, or quickly pull a team together for strategic projects. People would easily step into stride working with folks they had never worked with before. It’s a rare and special thing. This experience has helped me be more open to variations of corporate culture, and develop an appreciation for the value in values.

Different Types of Values

Patrick Lencioni, author of various business management books and co-founder of The Table Group, describes how to ‘Make Your Values Mean Something’ in this Harvard Business Review article from 2002. Through his work, is where I first became familiar with structured language around the different types of company values.

Lencioni talks about 4 types of values, or “behavioural traits”, of an organization: Core, Aspirational, Accidental, and Permission-to-Play. In this post, I am going to focus on core and aspirational ones, where they are important to identify and where it can be dangerous to misconstrue. I will also discuss ‘personal core values’, which are often overlooked in the workplace, but can be just as important.

Core Values

These are what everyone thinks of when you hear the phrase ‘company values’. They are on the coffee mugs and conference banners; part of the new employee handbooks; and are the words or phrases employees think about when asked “what are your values?”

Core values are the most important for a company. They represent the heart, soul, and mind of an organization. These values drive everything a company does from social events to strategic decisions, from hiring and firing to management training and operational practices. They are also not chosen for their saleability. Rather, core values are inherent to the company’s very existence. If you could do what you’re doing without considering these values, they really aren’t core values. If your leadership team doesn’t embody them, either the values are wrong or the leadership needs to change.

These guide words or phrases should be straightforward. When your customers or employees think about the inherent behaviour that drives the company’s success, these core values should come to mind. They are what leadership embodies. What influences every decision, from the CEO to an intern. Words that you can proudly say represent what you do. Core values represent a litmus test for culture fit, and if they invoke eye rolls, you know there’s a misalignment somewhere.

Aspirational Values

Those values that you want to embody? That you truly believe in and find imperatively important? But that you know aren’t at the core of who you or the company is? These are aspirational values.

“I love fast iteration, agileness, and innovation pushing the envelope of what is technically possible. But we need to carefully consider processes and resource constraints enabling future scalability.” This leader might choose a word like ‘innovation’ as a core value, but it’s possible it belongs better as an aspirational one. “We want to work as one inclusive team and help lift each other up, but we recognize sometimes you just have to get your best person on the job to get it done.” This group might select ‘teamwork’ as core, but doesn’t it sound more aspirational than at the core of how they behave?

Being careful not to choke on our aspirations

Aspirational values often come from both passion and intellectual decision-making. It makes sense for them to be embodied by the organization. Leadership loves their idea of driving everything they do. But if they aren’t truly ‘core’ to an organization: the organization wouldn’t be what it is today without them; they drive the direction and strategy of the company; and, they govern all decision-making no matter how big or small. You’re only going to introduce cynicism and mistrust into your organization touting flakey catchphrases.

It’s more beneficial to admit that a value is on the aspirational side of the pie than to lie to yourself and your team and shove it into the core. It doesn’t mean it isn’t important, or that you shouldn’t ever think about it. Adhering to an aspirational value just doesn’t have the same necessity as aligning to the core aspect of the business.

Personal Core Values

Personal core values are what embody you as a person. They are what drive your decisions, personally. The more you are living true to these, the more whole you feel. And vice-versa, the less you’re living in-line with them, the more ‘off’ you feel. Spending more time catering to and living in your personal core values makes you happier and more fulfilled. Those who prioritize purpose-driven work, need to be working in-line with their values or they find their energy drained at the end of every work day. You certainly don’t need to be in tune with your personal values every day, but if you are it feels pretty awesome.

What are your personal core values?

If you don’t have your personal core values identified, that’s okay, there are a few ways to establish what they are. Here’s one suggestion:

1. Try starting with someone else’s long list of possible words, such as this top hit when I Google ‘list of core values’.
2. Pick 5-8 words that resonate with you. These can be words from your found list, but feel free to add your own.
   • What makes you happy?
   • Which words help guide you when making difficult decisions?
   • Does embracing these values make you feel good about yourself?
   • What makes you feel fulfilled?
3. Order them by importance.
   • Which ones represent you to the core?
   • Would you still be you without them?
4. Take your top 1 to 3 and re-affirm these make sense.
   • Would you feel right telling people these are your personal core values?

Reviewing, Changing, and Evolving

I recently participated in a leadership training course ran by Jen Curleigh. Jen specializes in emotional intelligence and leadership development. The company’s head of People & Culture chose Jen to guide their leaders through the process of defining and setting their management culture.

Before the course, I had a good idea what my personal core values were. They corresponded almost identically with the values of the company I worked for. During one of Jen’s workshops, we focused on defining our personal values. Her framework emphasizes we only pick one or two, maybe three words to represent our core. The work made me take a long, hard think about why I resonate with each of those company values (there were more than 3). It was a great exercise, and I ended up changing the words I use to describe my personal values after that session.

In a more practical sense

Let’s assume a scenario where your company has chosen core values wisely. These 2 or 3 values are what make the company tick. Every staff member embodies them in their work. They’re above and beyond what is merely expected from your industry. They were consciously considered by leadership and picked because they represent the highest performers and most admirable leaders in the organization.

A few years down the line, new management has been brought in to help the company grow to its next stage. Your company has evolved naturally over time, and this new leadership wants to re-assess the structure and governance of the company. This is a good time to revisit, are your core values still at your core?

It is okay to change

It’s natural for people and organizations to evolve over time, and sometimes those changes can go all the way down to the core of our existence.

If you keep setting goals and move towards objectives without checking back in on how you’re getting there, you can introduce ‘accidental values’ and cultural changes. Often, a changing culture is inevitable in high growth companies or rapidly changing industries. But how much your company’s culture changes, and in what way, can be directed by an organization’s leader if actively paid attention to.

Future proofing your values is not about setting ones that will never change. Rather, it’s about incorporating a mindset that they may change, if it’s what’s best for your customers, employees, and yourself.

Looking at examples

Take the technology company and e-commerce platform Shopify, for example

In 2021 they had over 10,000 employees. Shopify is arguably one of Canada’s most successful start-ups, and for years built a culture of entrepreneurialism, embracing individuality, and pushing the envelope on technology innovation.

They’re still a great, and successful company. But listening to their recent corporate announcements and what “Shopifolk” have had to say over the last five years, it’s clear the company culture has evolved. Shopify staved off “corporate-ness” for as long as they could manage, keeping the entrepreneurial spirit of a start-up well past going public and becoming profitable. I would credit their leadership with fortitude and commitment to this culture. They recognized how much of working for Shopify, their product development, and their financial success was dependent on the culture they had curated.

It was only when absolutely necessary, from the sheer size of the company (well over 5,000 employees), did they start putting in clunkier but more robust systems in place to allow for continued success and growth as an organization. You can never make everyone happy, and this culture shift evidently didn’t work for everyone. People left the company. Key leadership roles changed.

Consciously reviewing and choosing to keep or change your company values, helps plan for the future.

I recently read this story of Daiya from a few years ago

Daiya makes plant-based foods and started with the belief that “plant-based living [is] better for our health, better for the planet and better for animal welfare”.

In 2017, Daiya made a choice incongruent with their core values, and were acquired by a pharmaceutical company that (like most pharmaceutical companies, I assume) tests their products on animals. The company is still around and seems to be doing okay, but they encountered an unexpected backlash from their growing vegan customer base. Many restaurants and retailers boycotted Daiya products as a result, and a handful of their customers petitioned against them.

I don’t know if Daiya considered it’s core values when they decided to pursue the acquisition, but it’s a good example of the effect going against your values can have on a customer base. Perhaps their leadership made a calculated risk to reach a bigger market. Or maybe they were happy to exit the company after successfully building a product that changed the cheese game forever.

In conclusion

Today’s world of business is proving more and more challenging for companies to find, hire, and retain employees. While not everyone cares about working for a values-driven company, no one is going to complain if their work gives them more energy than it takes away. Values-driven companies have this advantage over others, and in a competitive landscape, one more advantage could be the tipping point between an organization’s success or failure.