23 Sep Don’t advertise your values. Show them
A lot of things benefit from advertising. It’s hard to sell many products if people don’t know about them, but that kind of promotion rarely helps values. And luckily there are other ways they can flourish.
I often say, “Don’t put your values on your web site”. But why stop there. Remove the posters (or decals) from the walls, ditch the desk dwelling table-tents, and let swipe cards be for security (to name a few other popular advertising methods).
The idea to not paste your values onto everything that moves is akin to heresy. Don’t tell people what your values are. Show them. More commonly, people go for tell AND show, which always leads to a heavy-handed emphasis on tell.
Show is hard. Show takes work. It’s a messy and inconvenient commitment which often calls on people to explain what the value stands for beyond the handy slogan.
I’m on a mission to liberate values from the confines of telling. And, to get you on an advertising-free path, here are three areas to show your values and help people see what you believe.
Side note, this assumes you know what they are …
Start the way you mean to continue
Setting the tone starts well before you hire anyone. If you remove the rote list of values from the ad, does anything demonstrate them? The language. How you want them to respond. What they need to send you. How you review applications. For example, with a value of ‘equality’, get someone from the frontlines to help review applications and interview candidates.
Once you decide who to hire, those first few weeks and months are make or break. These days, assigning ‘buddies’, putting people through a culture indoctrination session, and having lunch with the boss pass as standard fare. So, if you genuinely want people to see what you believe dig a bit deeper.
A friend who recently joined Amazon reports a multi-month ‘on-boarding’ calendar. By that measure, most organisations processes are positively puny.
Still, compared to walking people out the door, the welcome wagon is paved with gold. In these days of online reviews and social word-of-mouth, how you end things is perhaps more important than how you begin.
Values often go out the window when the organisation, employee relationship is opened up to disappointment and hurt feelings. And while treating someone the way you’d want to be treated is a good place to start.
Use your values to go further. If generosity is a value, does your severance go beyond industry standard? How about integrity. Did you break any of the promises you made in the heat of the honeymoon period? A heartfelt “I’m sorry this didn’t work out” goes a long way.
Talk about them and then keep on talking
Even when values are absent from walls and web sites, they can still circulate. Advocacy remains the most potent mechanism for spreading what’s important. So, start talking about them. Then keep on talking.
Build values into meeting agendas. Mingle them with casual conversations. Sprinkle them throughout update emails and speeches. Don’t make a decision without checking in. Spotlight new ways to solve a problem.
You get the idea. Think across the conversations you have every day – where can you use your values and where they are awol?
Weave them into what you sell and how you sell it
Most people’s most tangible experience of what’s important to an organisation is via the products and services they sell. Not just the book-end selling and delivery, but the inherent nature of what they are.
Outdoor apparel company Patagonia takes a holistic approach to designing its products using a ‘do as little harm as possible’ yardstick (among other environmentally-friendly values). They don’t just wear their values on their sleeve; they make the sleeves out of them!
Whatever your things are, they need to show up when you’re designing products and imagining services. Push them into the corners. Leave no detail unturned.
Look across every area of your org or individual operations. All areas, including finance. Where and how do the values show up?
It doesn’t have to encompass all the values all the time, but some of them all the time should be non-negotiable. Can you easily populate this sentence for every area … “Our value X shows up in Y when we Z”.
Yes. Gold star and an elephant stamp for you. Keep up the fantastic work.
No. Keep going until you can, because you’ve got work to do that goes way beyond something a poster can fix.
Thanks for reading