I picked up this insight from a recent article in Harvard Business Review, “Will Your Organization Stand By Its Values—Even When It’s Hard?” by Nick Hobson and Margie Warrell. The article pinpoints exactly why so many organizations communicate what they stand for, yet fail to truly live their values. The authors identify an important reason: too much focus goes into what people in the organization must do, and too little into what they must not do.
Values have something universal about them. Customer focus, innovation, collaboration, integrity, safety: at Beanmachine we encounter these values regularly with our clients. They’re values that almost every organization can get behind. But a value only proves itself once it comes under pressure. Do you keep holding on to it as an organization, even when short-term interests push against it? Because it’s precisely when time and budget are tight that it becomes visible how important a value really is.
This isn’t only about the big decisions made at management level. More often, it’s the small, everyday choices made by people throughout the organization that undermine values, under the banner of “just this once.”
At Beanmachine, we regularly guide leadership teams and other teams to clarify their organization’s values and bring them more to life. We do this by translating values into concrete behavior: what should employees actually do to embody a value? But we also look at the flip side: what behavior once served a purpose but no longer serves the organization? Which behaviors are we better off leaving behind?
Strengthened by this article, we’ll be pushing teams even further on that last point: what will we, as an organization, never do: no matter how difficult the circumstances?
Because it’s precisely in those difficult circumstances that it becomes truly visible what an organization stands for.
Sara Bastiaensens holds a PhD in Communication Sciences and spent 11 years as a researcher at the University of Antwerp and Antwerp Management School. Today she works as a facilitator of leadership and team development at Beanmachine and still teaches at Antwerp Management School.
