Core Values?!
How much work went into your organizational core values, and what does it really mean? Well, if a new CEO / leadership team comes in and claim they need to be changed, odds are they won’t mean that much. It is easy when new leadership come in to disregard work performed by the prior team without spending the time to understand and study the values already in place.
In some instances, the incoming leadership may not simply be disregarding the existing work previously performed, but rather they see this as an opportunity to perform a team building exercise. However, dismantling an already effectively written set of core values may not be the vehicle to perform team building, and could reduce credibility with the existing staff. And, quite frankly, it highlights how hollow core values are at most organizations.
Core values are meant to reflect the culture of the company, as well as what the company values. They educate both internal and external stakeholders about the intent of the organization.
Producing statements that align with the philosophy and culture of the organization are not easy to do. Not only will the words suggested provide debate, so will the order in which the statements fall on the poster that hangs on the conference room wall. If your core values were produced with little discussion and went together too easily, you may not have had the right mix of people working on it.
An excellent example of core values I’ve witnessed were performed by a committee of 6-8 managers and front-line staff – no executive leadership involved directly in the process. We utilized a third-party management consultant who helped pull all the ideas and statements together. We were left with a set of values that were easy to digest and very relative, with no direction by leadership. These values have since been replaced by another set of words that are also easy to digest and are relative, but the need to expend company resource on this activity should be questioned.
Core values are still a worthwhile exercise, and there certainly may be times when an old set of values need to be freshened up. However, try to avoid the temptation to put executives on the committee, certainly not the top executive. Allow your staff the opportunity to oversee this process as you will get more employee buy-in once completed.
