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Early on in my career an executive told me that the #1 criteria she used to evaluate her fit to a company was its values. My reaction was “You’ve got to be kidding.” I was young, ignorant and broke and culture seemed so abstract. I could not begin to comprehend how tangible and important it was — and still is.
Decades later, I’ve come to appreciate how stunningly right she was. Through the ease of social media platforms like Glassdoor, Instagram and YouTube, current and past employees openly share their culture experiences for all to consume. Companies have created specific roles to respond to these posts, offering apologies and/or explanations that represent their perspective. Before the days of social media, “listening” typically took the form of employee engagement or pulse surveys. In addition to being cumbersome to administer and analyze, these surveys lacked the real-time transparency of today’s social media platforms.
In our post-pandemic, multi-generational, hybrid world of work, we are experiencing the transformation of our business leaders. They are grappling to define what actions they should take to retain their pre-pandemic cultures, while struggling to adapt to a labor market that has a new range of expectations.
Culture Defined
While there are many viable definitions of culture, in essence it is shared norms, attributes and behaviors. Whenever I’m asked to lead culture work for an organization, I start with their organizational values. Values are a strong proxy for culture, as they are an explicit expression of the belief system that guides decision making. When I reflect on my detachment from culture and values early in my business life, I can see the mistakes I made in career choices. I joined companies with leaders whose belief systems were quite different from mine, which in fairness made them and me uncomfortable.
Related Podcast: Melissa Daimler on How to Intentionally Design Corporate Culture
Social Science Research Has a Lot to Say About Culture
First, the single greatest influence on culture is the behavior of leaders. Organizational leaders are seen as role models, not just for acceptable behaviors, but for desired ones. Their behavior becomes “contagious” as others internalize their actions and adopt those behaviors as their own.
Second, a leader’s actions speak louder than their words. The human brain is a fantastic error detection machine. Without us even asking, the nonconscious parts of our brain assess our environments to minimize risks and keep us safe. This error detection process includes noticing when things are decoherent — when pieces don’t smoothly fit together or make sense.
A clear example of workplace decoherence is when leaders talk about the importance of organizational values, yet behave in opposition to them. Remember this phrase — “People are our most important asset”? Aside from the fact that referring to people as an “asset” implies they are fungible, interchangeable cogs that can be deployed at will, the bigger disconnect is when leaders behave as if people are their LEAST important asset. Disrespectful interactions, failure to listen, ignoring career aspirations, taking advantage of colleagues during vulnerable economic downturns — all bad signals. When decoherence exists between a leader’s actions and their words, actions will “win” every time, as their actions reflect what they really value.
Third, is our fundamental human need for certainty. When certainty decreases, so do our cognitive abilities. Decision making is hampered, emotional self-regulation is reduced and prosocial behaviors such as offering help and expressing empathy are diminished.
Values represent a form of certainty — decision-making guardrails that apply equally to everyone.
Values not only help you know what is expected of you, they tell you what to expect of others. The certainty of values goes hand in hand with a reduced sense of risk, as employees know the behavioral boundaries. The combination of certainty and a reduced sense of risk enables organizations to be more adaptive, more innovative and more inclusive. There is less second-guessing about what is acceptable, so efficiency measures around speed are enhanced as well.
Conversely, without certainty, people are more likely to cling to the status quo, as the future is unknown, and the risk associated with action is too high.
Related Article: The Skills to See You Through Times of Uncertainty
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Revisit Your Core Values
Here are a few tips on how to revisit your values:
- Gather organizational artifacts. Pull together the baseline of how the current values are embedded in the organization. They likely will be posted on websites or on office walls, but you also will find them tucked away in performance management and other talent review processes, as well as in onboarding and leadership development programs.
- Interview key stakeholders. Connect individually with the most important and influential leaders. Ask them to describe the current state of values, as well as the desired future state. Keep going until repetitive behavioral patterns start to emerge — it won’t take long.
- Crowdsource meaningful words. Solicit input from a healthy cross-section of colleagues about both the “from” and the “to” states. It’s totally OK (and even desired) that their words are emotive. They should be.
- Draft, review, iterate. Your role is to distill, clarify and simplify what you’ve heard. This will be a “less is more” exercise, so the hardest work will be towards the end.
- Avoid group writing. Writing is not a team sport and leads to painful wordsmithing.
- Finalize with the executive team. Involving leaders in the creation of the values will foster a deeper sense of ownership and commitment. Executives are your culture carriers. If they don’t believe in and demonstrate the values, no one else will.
