Company values: decision rules for teams from different cultures

What a meeting room taught me

One of my clients had five core values. They were displayed on the wall of the large meeting room, the one used by the executive team and for receiving clients. There was also a second, smaller room, used far more often by the company's project groups. For lack of space, only four of the five values were displayed there.

We then assessed which values were the most active and the least active in the company. I will let you guess which one came last: the one missing from the wall of the small room.

I am not claiming that a display explains everything. But the episode shows something simple: a value lives where people work, at the moment they decide. It does not live in the reception area. The room where projects are debated is where a value is played out, and when it is absent from there, it disappears from the conversations.

That is what convinced me that a value is worth only what it allows you to decide. This article, the third in a series on organisational culture, shows how to turn values into real decision rules, even when teams share neither a language nor habits. The overall framework is in Organisational culture: putting it into words with a vision, a mission and values in an international group.

A value is not a virtue

A virtue is a personal quality that everyone approves of: honesty, generosity. A company value is something else. It is a choice of priority that the organisation takes on, together with what it costs.

Saying "we value autonomy" only makes sense if it changes decisions: for example, by accepting that a local site chooses a different method from head office. A value that never costs anything is of no use to anyone.

A usable value has three properties:

• it helps to arbitrate between two defensible options;
• it has a cost: sometimes it forces you to give something up;
• it can be observed: you can see someone putting it into practice, or not.

The trap of universal words

A group's values are often written in one language (English or French) and then circulated as they are. That is where meaning gets lost. Erin Meyer's work on communication across cultures shows this well: direct feedback is seen as a sign of respect in some cultures and as a lack of tact in others.

So every value must always be defined by precise behaviours, not by a single word. "Frankness" then becomes, for example: "when I see a problem in a colleague's work, I talk to them about it in person within 48 hours." That sentence translates better than an abstract word, and it leaves each culture to find its own way of putting it into practice in form.

The dilemma method

Rather than asking a team "what are your values?", which produces interchangeable lists, I ask it to describe real, difficult decisions. The method has four steps:

1. Collect five to eight dilemmas that the team has actually lived through: a client to lose or a rule to bend, a colleague to support or a result to protect.
2. Have each person decide separately, then compare. The disagreements show where the real values differ.
3. Settle it as a group and note the reason: "we chose this because…"
4. Pull out the reasons that keep coming back. Those reasons are your real values, expressed in the language of decision.

This method avoids empty words. The values that come out of it are already tied to situations everyone recognises, in any country.

An example, invented for illustration: a subsidiary has to choose between delivering on the promised date a product with a minor defect, or delaying by two weeks. Depending on which reason wins ("the client comes before the calendar" or "our word given to the client comes before perfection"), you do not end up with the same value.

When two values conflict

A good set of values contains some that occasionally conflict: speed and rigour, autonomy and consistency, demand and kindness. That is not a weakness. You simply need to say in advance which one prevails, and in what context. For example: "where safety is in doubt, rigour always prevails over speed." This saves managers from reinventing the rule at each conflict.

Building them into HR practices

A value that does not enter HR practices remains a poster. Here are the four moments where it must appear:

• recruitment, through questions about real situations ("tell me about a time when…") rather than questions of principle;
• induction, through concrete stories rather than a booklet;
• appraisal, where the expected behaviours carry weight alongside results. A 360-degree appraisal is particularly suitable, since it gathers several people's views on how someone applies the values;
• promotion, which is the strongest signal: you do not promote someone who gets results by contradicting the values.

Bringing values to life every day

I advise against launching all the teams at once. An approach that works well follows a cascade: the leadership first applies the values to its own decisions, then each manager discusses them with their team and illustrates them with local cases. That last point matters a great deal in an international group: a team that supplies its own examples makes the value its own, in its own culture. This ties in with the questions I deal with among executives about their own stance.

How to tell whether values are working

A few concrete signs are worth more than a survey:

• do managers cite the values to justify a difficult decision?
• does an employee dare to remind a manager of a value?
• do the people promoted embody the expected behaviours?
• do exit interviews mention a gap between what is said and what is done?

FAQ

Going further

• Organisational culture: putting it into words
• Vision and mission: the horizon and the road
• Executive coaching for senior leaders

This article was written by Marc Prager.