The Ourhouse Weblog: Values - ideal or real
John Moore has started his own blog via his consultancy site Ourhouse
I am very much in tune with John's approach, not to mention he keeps bloggin me on the Beyond Branding blog! Anyway:
...We both agreed that the trouble with many statements of values that companies produce is that they are so poorly connected with reality.
If that's true, then making statements of ideals simply undermines credibility and probably reduces an organisation's ability to live up to them.
Absloutely. And I quote from ntl's statement:
"ntl aims to become the UK's leading communications company [define a communications company! Perhaps we should aim to enter the postal market?] earning the loyalty and respect of our customers, associates and all stakeholders throug the way we run our business and the results we achieve"
What does it mean? Has any one tried to define this in realistic terms or even refer to it after its launch? Well you know the answer...
The above is ntl's Vision statement and there is also a Mission and a set of values. To outline John's critique above one of the statements from the Values is: "Speak up when something's not right". Great! I'll do that and of course in the right culture and context I should expect reward. In the wrong culture it looks like either passing the buck, whistle blowing or even worse criticism of the people above you in the hierarchy. It goes back to if a senior team do not live these types of statements to the extreme then how do they expect the rest of the organisation to respond?
of course an organisation doesn't need to be run this way to be successful. Autocracy or dictatorships can work very well up to a point. But if you are going to express a firm's value's in terms of an open hierarchy then this must be the approach, otherwise you are lying to yourself, you staff (associates) and worse your customers.