Most company values are worse than worthless.
We had a revamp of the set that we have at one of my agencies because we realised they were actively damaging the business.
There’s a weird thing that happens in agencies when your staff get used to the paycheck and forget who they’re working for.
Values like “passion” just get turned into an excuse for rampant over-servicing, avoiding push-back and in the long term, devalue what you do in the eyes of the client.
We realised that a word in a pretty typeface and a snappy subheading wasn’t giving us what we wanted. In fact it was eroding the agency, so we looked at why.
A way to look at values is this:
“I would turn down a sum of money in order to maintain X.”
You literally place a value on upholding a principle. This might seem hard in the short term, faced with cash, but we know that in the long term, failing to uphold a value like “integrity will erode your trust worthiness and cost you far more.
So what about if you were offered £10million to tell a big fat lie?
Well, we can all bullshit that we wouldn’t take it, but in reality, we probably would. I know I would.
Why?
Because outside of all the corporate values, what I really value is security and a good life for my family, and £10million would give me that in a single stroke.
So that’s the first lesson. Your staff have their own values, and some of them will outrank your company ones. If you can tap into that, you have something far stronger.
Values are relative. I value integrity, but I value my family more. Understanding that is core to a strong culture. Otherwise you can pick any words off a list and people will say “yeah, they’re important”, but where on the pecking order are they compared to valuing, say, status?
A good exercise is to run a list of values through a tool like prioritypicker.com and see which ones come out top. (Trim them down a bit first!)
The next thing we realised is that values exist in relationship transactions, and how they show up depends a lot on who that transaction is with.
In every transaction with a client, you’re also making a decision about your colleagues and your employer.
This is where we did the most work, describing how that value shows up, and how a behaviour towards one person might be a negative elsewhere.
The word “boundaries” came up. A lot.
When you don’t put boundaries on relationships, being wonderful to your client can easily become toxic to your teammates and your business, so getting people to look at more than the immediate want in front of them has been a revolutionary step.
Values need explanations, examples and a recognition of what happens when they run uncontrolled.
Think about that the next time you see them lit up in neon in someone’s reception.
