I’m talking values today. Take a guess. What percent of organizations actually live their values? Is it?
| A) 78%. Companies, not-for-profits, public sector organizations are all-in on values because they know their people need a North Star to make the right decisions. |
| B) 10%. Organizations believe values are nice to have but not all that important to getting things done. |
| C) 47%. Organizations have recently seen the light so the percentage of those articulating and living their values is up after years of being out of favor. |
| D) No one really knows because no one has studied the question. |
| E) None of the above. |
People, sadly, the answer is B. 10%. Yikes! Just 10%. That according to University of Houston professor Brene Brown, who writes about values. Her more nuanced definition: The percentage of organizations that actually operationalize their values into teachable and observable behaviors used to train their employees and hold them accountable.
Values Are Essential
And yet, it’s clear in the research and in real life experience: Values are essential for enduring greatness. At the corporate, group and individual levels. More than 25 years ago, author Jim Collins enshrined that basic truth in his study of visionary companies in his 1994 book Built to Last.
Recent research shows where values are operationalized, cultures are constructive. Where they aren’t, cultures turn defensive. People are bummed out if they’re in environments where they can’t do their best work, where the way people are expected to behave is, for example, to be the center of attention or lay low when things get tough. Leaders leave themselves open to serious organization failures when values don’t help their people make the right moves in a crisis.
Vioxx and Values at Merck
Merck, the pharmaceutical company, was one of those organizations Collins singled out in his book as being built to last, as one of the companies that lives it’s values “deep down to our toes.” George Merck II, son of the founder, set the expectation in a speech at the Medical College of Virginia in 1950. “We try to remember that medicine is for the patient…it’s not for the profits.” Collins opined again in 2001 in his subsequent book, Good To Great, that Merck did not view its ultimate reason for being as making money. And he pointed as proof to Merck developing and distributing a drug to cure river blindness in the Amazon region of South America.
Meanwhile in 1999, Merck launched a study of its new painkiller Vioxx. By 2004, a number of studies by Merck and others showed Vioxx was the cause of thousands of deaths. But Merck withheld data about the risks of using its drug and kept on marketing it. Ultimately, one prestigious publication estimated 88,000 Americans had heart attacks from taking Vioxx and 38,000 died. In 2011, the company agreed to pay a $950 million fine and plead guilty to a criminal charge over the marketing and sales of the drug. Ummm. True to values?
Now Opioid and Values
Now, we read how Walgreens, Purdue Pharma and others who make and sell medication fed the deadly opioid epidemic ravaging Americans for nearly two decades. Collins included Walgreens on his good-to-great list. I looked up Walgreens values on the Internet. They are: Honest, trust, integrity. Quality. Caring, compassionate and driven. A strong community commitment and presence. Purdue lists theirs as integrity, courage, innovation and collaboration. Again, true to values? No.
People, how much damage could we head off if we really lived our values in our organizations, in our groups and by ourselves, individually? How much more good could we do? How much better could our workplaces be? And our ROI, for that matter.
Values Conversations Go Deep
I work with organizations, especially leadership teams, leading critical conversations to help team members discover how best to articulate and operationalize their organization’s values. To do so, I set up safe space – visualize an impervious container – for people to go inside to have safe conversations necessary for articulating an organization’s values and agreeing on accountable behaviors. Once inside the container, I facilitate the conversations keeping people in collaborative rather than defensive mode.
The exchanges on values I’ve witnessed often go deep. People summon the courage to have conversations they have wanted to have, needed to have, but have not before had in the regular course of working with each other. The results have yielded high degrees of insight, leading to deep change which, in turn, have brought the values to life.
A Handle on Your Values?
If pushed, you might admit you don’t really have a handle on what your own values are. Or your organization’s. You would not be alone. You can fix that.
In articulating your values, know you can’t have one list of professional values and another of personal values. We have only one set of values, writes Brown. People, that means we are called to live in a way that’s aligned with our values even if they’re in conflict with the organization we’re working for. Easy to say; tough to do.
There is no right or wrong value or number of values. But no more than six works best. In the many values workshops I’ve led, integrity has almost always been circled. Hence, I like to call it a meta-value. I like Brown’s definition of integrity: “Choosing courage over comfort; choosing what’s right over what’s fun, fast, or easy; and it’s practicing your values, not just professing them.”
Operationalize with Behaviors
Practice, not profess, people. Which means you must call out specific behaviors supporting each one of the values you’ve articulated for your organization. And slippery behaviors or actions your organization is tempted to do that would run counter to 
its values. The ones that would be the easy way out. So you can see the difference. Highlighting a time when you were fully living each value helps to make a value more concrete, give it more meaning.
Okay. You’re out of the container so to speak. You’ve nailed your values and you’ve articulated how to teach them and monitor whether your organization is living them. Surprise, you’re not done! Every day, you’ve got to challenge yourself and your organization to demonstrate all are taking action to live them. Operationalizing values can’t be a flavor-of-the-month thing.
Empathy and Self-Compassion
You don’t have to have all the answers when operationalizing values. Even with the planning to do so. No one ever does. Which is why empathy and self-compassion are critical. Invariably, the values decided in the container lead to and require deeper, more thoughtful interactions among all in an organization. It means working through difficult problems where people on different sides have alternate, yet viable perspectives. And all, at the same time, wanting to be true to values.
Operationalizing means leaders being there for others as the difficult conversations occur. It means seeing them. Hearing them. Telling them you will keep listening and asking questions until you all together figure it out. It’s the only way to high performance consistent with high values.
And why self-compassion? Because if you can’t cheer yourself or your organization on, you shouldn’t expect others to do it, Brown, correctly, observes. And because if you don’t make your own values your priority, you shouldn’t ask others to do it for you.
When someone is properly grounded in life, said the ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus, they shouldn’t have to look outside themselves for approval.
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