Many companies publish (internally or externally) a list of their core values – principles that the company claims guide their actions.  Those core values are there to inspire employees and demonstrate that when the going gets tough, the company will do the right thing.  There are dozens of articles about how to select the right organizational core values and how to communicate them effectively.  Consultants run day-long workshops to help executive teams construct them.  And frequently, they have no basis in reality.

I’m not saying that the executives who create these lists are deliberately lying, although this can happen.  (Enron had “Integrity” listed as one of its corporate values in its 2000 annual report, shortly before they were caught engaging in massive systemic accounting fraud).  Often, corporate values are aspirational – something the executives want to be true.  But when it comes to actually doing the work (or spending the budget) to make them true, there is a lack of knowledge or resolve.

Last year, while preparing to give a talk on company culture and how it limits process change initiatives, I asked my connections on social media for examples of empty value statements made by their own employers.  I was inundated within minutes.  The question really seemed to strike a nerve.  Here are some of the responses I got:

So how do we hold a mirror up to the actual core values of a company?  If a thing is actually valued, then a company will prioritize it, work on it, and spend money on it.  You will see the value reflected in the everyday operations, policy, communications and interactions in the company.  If a company says it values accessibility, but their website isn't WCAG compliant and their workplace is up a flight of stairs with no work-from-home policy, maybe they aren't being completely honest.

This is how culture is transmitted at a company:  New employees observe and absorb these everyday interactions and ways of working (what I call “cultural signals”), and after a while come to understand “that’s how things work around here”.  By taking the time to examine the cultural signals in your own workplace, you can illuminate the actual values your company has – or lacks.

Let’s look at some commonly proclaimed core values, and some cultural signals you can look for to see if the value is real:

Empowerment:  For empowerment to happen, leaders must trust their staff to make decisions in their areas of expertise and to manage the associated risks.  If you are trying to run Agile teams, this is critical to success.  (I’ve seen supposedly Agile teams being managed by tracking their progress against a big fixed feature list.  These teams did all the Agile rituals each sprint, but they were certainly not trusted and not Agile.)

Does your workplace value empowerment?  Ask yourself these questions:

• Are decisions routinely delegated to the people who know the most about the situation?

• Do leaders support those delegated decisions, or do they casually override them?

• Does your team ever have to work on some senior person's pet project that everyone on the team knows is a bad idea?

• Have you ever been discouraged from even trying to change some aspect of your work process or environment because it “won’t be allowed?”

• Does everyone on the team know the company strategy, and understand where their work fits in?

Diversity and Inclusion:  This is a huge topic, so for the purposes of this article I’ll just focus on one of the key business benefit of D&I:  diverse teams make better decisions.  This better decision-making does not happen, however, unless certain conditions are met.  First, everyone on the team must understand and respect that others have persectives and knowledge they lack; there must be psychological safety on the team so people feel safe to share and disagree; and meetings must be facilitated in a way that effectively elicits and synthesizes people's perspectives and knowledge.  Companies that value D&I need to work on all of this.

Here are some cultural signals that will tell you whether or not your organization really values diversity and inclusion:

• Is there visible diversity in teams at every level of the organization?  Or only at the lower levels or in certain roles?  How are these numbers changing over time?

• Do the people being promoted to leadership bring more diversity to the leadership team?  Or are they all buddies from the same frat?

• Are decision-making teams put together thoughtfully to represent key perspectives?  Or is it always the same group of people making all the decisions?

• Do hiring managers automatically assume that foreign work experience is inferior to local?  Or do they wonder what the team might learn from an outside perspective?

• Do new hires tend to be very similar to existing people on the team?  Or does each new hire bring a perspective or skillset to the team that they did not have already? (This is the difference between "culture fit" and "culture add")

• Is inclusive meeting facilitation seen as an important skill?  Are managers trained and evaluated on it, or experts brought in?  Or are meetings unstructured, with some people's participation routinely excluded?

• Is Diversity work talked about like it is an annoying chore, or a quota?  Or is it driven by curiosity -- a desire to deepen understanding and improve the organization's thinking and reach?

Psychological Safety:   In a psychologically safe team, people can have hard conversations respectfully, they can raise bad news, and they can drive innovation – all of which are key for good decision-making.   This can’t happen in corporate cultures where disagreement with leadership is seen as disrespect, where toxic behaviour is tolerated, or where changing your mind is seen as weakness.

Does your workplace value psychological safety?  Ask yourself the following:

• Are toxic workplace behaviours shut down immediately?  Or are they ignored in senior or "high performing" people?  (i.e. are toxic bosses fired, or promoted?)

• Do leaders display vulnerability and admit their mistakes?

• Do leaders routinely elicit disagreement from their staff?  (“What might go wrong with this plan?”  “What am I missing?”)

• When things go wrong, is the focus on learning, or on finding someone to blame?

• Does the company measure the psychological safety of their teams regularly?

• Are managers expected to be able to foster psychological safety?  Is that skill a requirement for promotion or raises?

• Do people in meetings routinely raise difficult topics?

Teamwork:  A team isn’t just a group of individuals.  Over time a good team builds relationships, trust, respect, and team norms that allow them to perform more and more effectively.  Companies that value teamwork understand how valuable that investment is and try to maximize it.

Does your workplace value teamwork?  Check for these cultural signals:

• Are high-performing teams kept together?  Or are teams routinely broken apart and reformed around new projects, throwing away all the investment made in developing team knowledge, trust, and norms?

• When teams do well, who gets the credit?  I’ve seen situations where the credit goes just to the leader, or to one function within the team, or worse yet to a single “rock star” team member, which really demotivates everyone else who contributed to the joint success.

• Are team members evaluated only on their individual accomplishments, or also on team accomplishments?  On high-performing teams, individuals will at times need to sub-optimize their own work to support the success of the collective team goals – this is pretty much the definition of teamwork.   If you evaluate team members only on their individual accomplishments, you are actively disincentivizing teamwork.  It turns collaboration into competition.
  
  Similarly, you need to hold teams jointly accountable for all outcomes.  I know of one organization where developers were held accountable to development goals (defined as feature completion and bug fixes).  Designers were held accountable for the usability of the product.  Of course, the design team couldn’t impact the product without developers implementing their changes, but since design improvements didn’t count as features or bug fixes on this team, they were constantly deprioritized by developers.  The incentives set up the team for overall failure.

Innovation.  Many companies want to be innovative.  This requires empowerment, which we’ve touched on above, but also risk tolerance and a learning mindset.  Are those valued at your organization?  Here are some cultural signals to look for:

• Is your company or divisional “strategy” just a feature list?  This is a bad sign, as it probably means that it will be very hard to change course as you learn new things.

• Are people punished for an experiment that fails?  Or is failure seen as a normal part of learning?

• Do you see people on teams trying to shift blame, or avoid responsibility for risks in the first place?

• Are teams adopting vanity metrics that make the results of their experiments always look good?  For example, are they measuring what they deliver rather than the outcomes of delivering it?

• Do teams and leaders talk about their "portfolio of risks"?  (i.e. do they see innovation as an investment, and not something to be feared).

Employee Engagement.  Every company wants this – engaged employees have higher performance and they stick around.  Companies with high employee engagement have better shareholder return.  People love their jobs.

Engagement is driven by a number of factors, including psychological safety, relationships with co-workers, and the meaningfulness of the work.  But engagement is limited by the energy people have left for work after they take care of life’s other necessities.  If people are worried about what’s happening at home, they won’t be focused on their jobs.

Does your workplace value employee engagement?  Here are some signals to look for:

• Are there policies in place to support better work/life balance? (i.e. flex time, work from home, etc.)

• Are people praised and treated like heroes for sacrificing their home life to work long hours?  Or is that seen as a management failure?

• How does management react when people need support in a crisis?  Are employees shamed for needing time off, or are they supported?

Integrity.  Lack of company ethics can kill employee engagement, and make you lose your best employees. No one wants to work on the Death Star.  The signals that your employer does not value ethics are pretty clear:

• Are the ethical implications of decisions ever discussed in meetings?  Or is that topic avoided?

• Is the company proud of and open about their business model, or do they try to hide or obfuscate it?

• Are people told to “not worry about” certain laws, regulations or standards?

• Are dark UX patterns deliberately used in products?

• How does the company deal with employees who are caught violating ethics?  How about senior managers?

• When a staff member raises a serious ethical concern (say, about AI systems), does the company take them seriously?  Or does it find a reason to silence or get rid of the staff member?

I didn’t write this article to shame certain companies – I think sometimes public value declarations are a statement of intent, and leaders need to figure out how to overcome organizational inertia and embody them.   Change takes time, so sometimes it's more revealing to look at how an org is evolving -- are they making changes to bring them closer to their stated values?  Or is it all statements and no action?

It's important to understand your organization's current culture if you plan to do any kind of signficant change work -- such as adopting new processes.  A new process can only succeed in a culture with aligned values.  For example, if you try to adopt Agile into a command-and-control culture, you will end up with something that is still command-and-control, and doesn't deliver the benefits that Agile should.

My hope is that this article will help spark more conversations about culture, and help people find ways to talk about what it means more concretely.   Every leader is, like it or not, a culture architect.  Culture is what happens every day, in every interaction, in every policy, budget, and meeting, so you might as well be deliberate in what you want to create. 

More from John  (or follow his RSS Feed )

Psychological Safety Gaps - How leaders are getting it wrong

How do I know if my team is Psychologically Safe? - This scorecard might be for you

Toxic Legacy - Why losing your toxic employees is only the first step

Why don't people participate in meetings?    or, Why can't I get a word in edgewise?

Whose Opinion Matters? - How culture can make or break your decision making

Micromanagement and Psychological Safety - How a toxic management style impacts team health

The Authentic Team - The problem with bringing your whole self to work