Corporate values redux.
I was talking to a new reader of the blog the other day who said that she didn’t agree with some of what I’ve written about values. She saw people’s individual values as being important.
I realised that my opinions about shared values may have been interpreted to mean that I don’t think personal values are important. Quite the contrary.
I think that personal values are very important and are experienced as a kind of voluntary compulsion of what it feels right to do. They provide an uplifting experience that feels good and right to us. This is a very important aspect of being human.
On the other hand, I do not think it is important to work out what values an organisation should have and to write them on a wall chart, and then to try and get people to "align" themselves to those values.
1. The values that are written down are generalised abstractions. GH Mead called them "cult values" to remind us of their generalised nature, and that when they are applied directly regardless of the circumstances, this amounts to a cult.
2. Values are always in conflict and are negotiated in particular situations. For example, should the CSR answer the telephone within 3 rings or attend to the customer standing in front of them? This conflict is never resolved once and for all, because the next time the phone is ringing and there is a customer in front of them, the CSR has to negotiate the conflict all over again.
3. If everyone has the same values, then you have a homogenous organisation in which the agents are very similar. By analogy from complexity theory, when similar agents interact, the patterns of interaction that emerge have significantly less novelty, innovation and change than when the agents are dissimilar.
4. Organisations are not people and cannot have values. Organisations are habitual patterns of relating, always with the potential for novelty to arise from any particular interaction.
5. People cannot design their values in advance, but they can discover or become aware of their values through reflecting on problematic or difficult situations, and working out what has been important to them in negotiating that particular situation. So it makes no sense to try and design the organisation’s values and commit them to wall posters and other artefacts.
Interesting five points, and I agree with you.
There’s been an interesting discussion on Nick Milton’s blog about an exercise he did during a KM masterclass. Participating in that and having found this blog entry of yours on corporate values via a tweet by David Gurteen (http://twitter.com/DavidGurteen), I realised that you could almost replace the word ‘values’ with ‘knowledge’ in those five points, and it would make sense.
Comment by Mika Latokartano — July 8, 2009 @ 9:28 pm
Forgot that link to Nick Milton’s blog. Here it is
http://www.nickmilton.com/2009/07/tacit-or-explicit-transfer-which-works.html
Comment by Mika Latokartano — July 8, 2009 @ 10:07 pm
Interesting post Stephen. I would agree that an organisation in and of itself cannot have values, and would, like you, be very wary of anything written up on a wall chart – heaven knows I have come across that in many places and found it generally to regarded as a joke and make management a hostage to fortune. But do you think shared values which have perhaps played a part in attracting people to work together under the umbrella of an organisation or shared values that emerge and become apparent over time amongst the group of people in an organisation have any application or use?
I say this as the finest organisation I have ever worked for did have a very rigorous recruitment process which was interested in understanding peoples values as these set a moral compass for the individuals to act relatively autonomously in complex situations. As you say there is a danger of recruiting in a common image but only if it gets very precious and picky – which they weren’t
I wonder also if values played a part in the recent financial meltdown, or indeed if we look back a bit further to the Enrons of this world? It is not often that I have found myself in agreement with Alan Greenspan but I think what he said then was pretty much on the button “rules cannot substitute for character” and values invested in the individual have some relevance in character it seems to me.
Comment by Tim Wright — July 8, 2009 @ 11:03 pm
Point four sounds decidely Weickish – is it?
Lovely set of comments, I really like them.
Comment by Jonathan — July 9, 2009 @ 12:02 am
Point 4 I have derived from Stacey rather than Weick. The idea of organisations as complex responsive processes of communication comes from Ralph Stacey’s work – his book called Complex Responsive Processes in Organisations is a good place to start – find it on Google.
I have found some of Weick’s ideas very useful, and he may have written about related ideas but I did not get this idea from Weick.
Comment by Stephen — July 9, 2009 @ 12:14 am
I think it’s an important point that not having shared values does not mean values are not important. Interesting how people come to that conclusion. Some readers of this blog might be interested to read a bit about our strategy… which incorpoarates the concepts outlined above and does not include shared values: http://www.tms-americas.com/blog.cfm?id=231691869
Comment by Tom Gibbons — July 9, 2009 @ 12:35 am
Interesting thoughts and outline…although maybe I misunderstood my recent Stacey reading (granted it was Complexity and Management, and will have to get and read the next in the series as you mentioned); but Organizations have values through the collective Complex Responsive Processes and the complex systems framework with establish to facility activity and communication. We are individuals with values and perspective, and yet we are also groups/units/departments and even organizations which are the “responsive processes” regardless of what is on the wall, and often in contrast to.
Comment by Dan Nienhauser — July 9, 2009 @ 6:53 am