Your Values Aren't What You Write On The Wall

If your company has any sort of “core values” you’ll want to give this a read.

I’ve talked with so many leaders who tell me, “Hamish, we have great corporate values, we built them at this three day off site resort, we all got together and did these team bonding exercises and the food was amazing…  we then came home and carved our new values into the granite of our office for everyone to see and live by”

And while that sounds great, my usual response to something like that is…

“Congratulations, I’m glad the food was really good.”

Your values are the behaviors that you allow the world to see. Your culture does not come from your values, your values come from your culture (not by carving some words into a rock).

It’s easy to get caught up in the aesthetics of values — those beautifully crafted statements on your website or office walls. However, the real challenge is to embody these values every day.

Regular reflection on how well personal and team behaviors align with these stated values is crucial.

We usually consider holding quarterly reviews focused not just on performance metrics but on value alignment as well because otherwise you might become familiar with a story like this…

Several years ago, my ex, who’s a geophysicist, got this new manager on their team. (Let’s call them Dave):

Dave came in and talked about an incredible game about “Accountability and Reliability.”

But then this crazy ironic thing happened…

Dave, a few weeks later, started missing team meetings. She also started rescheduling one on ones. To make matters worse, their team members then started adopting Dave’s behaviors becoming less reliable and accountable as well.

It’s times like these when we need to consider…

 “Where is the incongruence between what I am saying and what I am doing?”

Ask ourselves, what is the behavior that demonstrates the values that I portray because it's my actions that will leak my values into the world, not what I write on the wall.