Values

What they are, in practice

Values are the scale you decide on. Where you want to get to is what the Vision says; which game you’re playing is what the Mission says; and the values say how you behave along the way and by what means you’re willing to get there.

Every organisation has them, whether it has noticed or not. What separates companies is being able to name them.

They’re for when the instructions run out

No organisation can anticipate every situation, and the bigger it gets the less it manages to. The case no procedure covers will always arrive, and at that moment whoever meets it has to decide alone.

Values are what makes it possible to decide without going back up the chain to ask. That’s their concrete use, and it’s also why writing them down and hanging them on a wall produces nothing: they have to be clear enough to guide a choice nobody had anticipated. A value that works is a lighthouse at sea, a fixed light that tells a ship where the passage is without anybody having to radio ahead.

Two good values can be in conflict

This is the part people discover late, and it does the most damage. Values don’t divide into right and wrong. They can all be defensible and still be incompatible with each other in one particular situation.

A company that wants to be discreet and transparent has chosen two good things. Sooner or later the case arrives where it has to be one of the two, and if nobody has established which comes first, the choice gets made by whoever happens to be standing there, as seems right to them. The same goes for innovation and tradition, or for speed and precision.

That’s why work on values isn’t finished when the list has been drawn up. It’s finished when the list has been put in order.

The list you almost always find

The words that come up in companies are largely the same ones. Transparency, honesty, fairness, integrity, equity. Trust and respect. Customer satisfaction. Improvement, innovation, creativity. Precision and punctuality. Responsibility and reliability. Growing people.

Resembling each other doesn’t make them false. It makes them unusable while they stay a list: they’re all agreeable, and none of them says what to do when two of them get in each other’s way.

An example of values actually deciding something

You need one more person. You can look for a fully formed professional, who brings the skill immediately and costs accordingly. You can bring in someone with a long horizon, who’ll pay off later. You can take on an intern, with a modest initial impact and skills still to be built.

All three routes solve the starting problem. Which one you take depends on what you’re building: a team, a brand or a story. It’s the value upstream that decides, and when that value hasn’t been made explicit, the budget decides instead.

The more the declared values line up with what the company actually does, the more recognisable the company becomes from outside. Consistency between the two gets noticed, and its absence gets noticed a great deal more.