The Culture Nerds - A Leadership Podcast

10 Reasons Your Workplace Values Are BS

• Simon Thiessen & Kirralea Walkerden

Share episode

Text us your thoughts or questions

Summary

Does your organisation have values that should make a difference - but don't? That people think are bullshit or tokenistic or lip service?

Do they look great on the poster but mean nothing in the way people behave, work, and treat each other?

If that's your organisation, your missing a HUGE opportunity to create a workplace culture where both morale and performance are high. Fortunately, this episode is packed with tips to make your values real.

Links and resources mentioned in the show

The Authentimeter (free culture survey with option for detailed analysis of results)

Plenty in 20: Holding People Accountable when you Can't Afford to Lose Them (free, on-demand webinar with actionable strategies and tips)

The Culture Nerds Newsletter, a free monthly summary of subscriber resouces

Organisational Culture Surveys for those who want to explore our services

What's next?

Talk to one of our culture and leadership experts - a free 30 minute consultation to problem solve any issue you are facing.

Detailed show description

Workplace values should be the most powerful tool for shaping your organisation's culture, but that is rarely the reality. Often, values are reduced to meaningless phrases on coffee mugs and posters that no one can remember or explain.

In this episode, Simon Thiessen discusses the disconnect between proclaimed values and actual workplace behaviors. He unpacks ten critical reasons why organisational values fail to drive meaningful change. From values that no one can name to those that create cynicism because they're never enforced, this practical guide exposes the common pitfalls that make values ineffective.

Drawing from real-world examples, Simon explains why overcomplicated processes, values dictated from above, and attempts to replace human judgment with rigid rules all undermine cultural alignment. The most damaging practice? Allowing certain people to be exempt from living the values while holding others accountable—creating a culture where 'that's just how they are' becomes a way to validate unacceptable behavior.

You'll discover how to transform your values from tokens into genuine drivers of great workplace culture by ensuring they're behavior-focused, universally applied, and reinforced through peer-to-peer accountability rather than top-down enforcement. The episode concludes with an immediate, actionable strategy you can implement today: consistently celebrating when people embody your values.

******************************************************
Want some insight into your workplace culture? Take our free online Culture Survey here

Visit our website The Real Learning Experience

Thanks to our producer, Josh at Deadset Podcasting

Speaker 1:

Before we get into today's episode, we want to acknowledge the privilege of living and working on Aboriginal land and we pay our respects to the Elders, past, present and emerging. Welcome to another episode of the Culture Nerds a leadership podcast. My name's Simon Tyson and I'm one of the Culture Nerds a leadership podcast. My name is Simon Tyson and I'm one of the Culture Nerds. As with every month, we focus on a monthly topic for our listeners and for our subscribers to our newsletter. Our goal is to provide you with a suite of resources you can use to tackle issues that you face as a leader in your workplaces, and this month's focus is all around organizational values or team values. It depends what level of the organization you sit at. So you may be looking at broadly the values for the whole organization, or you might be looking specifically at your teams, and the topic of the podcast is 11 reasons. Your values are bullshit. Now, if you've got the kids in the car, that's the last time I'll swear, so you don't need to turn the podcast down. I'm also going to give you solutions to those 11 reasons and I'm going to give you one quick win that you can implement immediately to start making your values real. Just a quick word on the other resources in this suite that we'll create this month. There is a Plenty in 20, our short snappy, as the name implies 20-minute online webinar, and they're available on demand.

Speaker 1:

This month it's all about embedding values in your workplace, so not just having them, but how do you embed them. We've created a resource for you, which is a quiz, and it will draw a little bit on the topic of this podcast. We really focus on how real your values are and you'll get a score and from that you can make some decisions about how you proceed. There's a bonus resource that you'll receive after you do that quiz and that's the anatomy of a great team or organisational value, including some examples that are not so good so you can compare how we translate that one into one that works. And we've got a product page for those of you who need more support from us, who want to engage with us to help your teams, and the product page this month is all about how we support organizations and teams to set and then critically live their values. So this is a process that we can support you through and would love to do that if you want to engage with us. All of these links will be in the show notes and, as always, there is a newsletter you can subscribe to, which comes out at the beginning of each month. That summarizes and links all the resources, almost all of them free from the previous month.

Speaker 1:

So let's get into the topic of this month's podcast, which, as I said, is all about 11 reasons your organizational or team values are, and you fill the blank, plus one quick win. I really want to emphasize here setting team and organizational values should not be complicated. I get that the bigger your organization is, the more complex that's likely to be, but I still don't buy that it has to be that complicated. If anyone is recommending or worth still charging you for multiple rounds of consultation, focus groups, a whole lot of backwards and forwards, et cetera, then you're wasting time and money. When the process of setting your values becomes overcomplicated, it becomes more about the process than the actual outcome. Your people will lose connection with the values. They won't be able to remember why you were doing them in the first place.

Speaker 1:

Organizational values are either rubbish or they are the single most powerful tool you have at your disposal to define the culture you want to work towards and to hold people accountable to it, and I know that's a big, big claim, but it is in no way overstated single most valuable tool that you have at your disposal to align the way people behave with the outcomes, the results and the culture you would like to have in your team or organization. If they're not doing that for you now, you've got a massive wasted opportunity, but also a massive opportunity to turn that around and see pretty quick and pretty stunning results. So, if you're going to do values with your team, avoid these things I'm about to talk about and obviously do the opposite, but don't overcomplicate the process. You've absolutely got to consult people, but if there are multiple rounds and all sorts of fancy things go backwards and forwards and drafts and templates and so on there is a process that we use when we do this for you and you should create your own simple process that ensures people are consulted, but that it's a reasonably fast moving process. So the first sign that your values are and I'm going to use I'm going to replace the adjective I used before with aren't real or mean nothing. So the first sign that your values mean nothing is no one knows what they are.

Speaker 1:

Now this sounds really obvious. You would be amazed, amazed and again, maybe just reflect. If you had to write down the values of your team or your organization right now, without looking at your screensaver, or the coffee cup, or the chart on the wall or the poster on the back of the toilet door or whatever it is, could you write them down? Could you not only write them down because you get them all right, and could you and we'll get into this one in the next point talk a bit about what they mean? You would be surprised how many managers that we're in a conversation with and we'll ask them one of the questions if you call us, if you make an appointment to speak with us, one of the questions we're going to ask you. So here's a little bit of a cue for you.

Speaker 1:

You can do your homework first is do you have organizational values? And when people say yes, we say what are they? I would say, conservatively, two out of three managers, not just any team member, but the manager of the team or the manager or a senior manager in the organization, even people in culture managers, have to say oh, let me have a look. And if you can't tell me what the values are, they mean nothing, they are surface level. They're for show. They're for putting on a shiny plaque in the lobby to put in the annual report. They make us all feel good because we can go tick, we've got them and they add nothing. That's actually not true. They add something. What they add is cynicism, because people look at these things and say, yeah, we say that but we don't do it, and that gap creates cynicism and means they buy out of other initiatives. It's really common for us to see people have a lot of resistance to refining or even implementing values because their past experience is they mean nothing.

Speaker 1:

When we go into organizations and we've got a process that we use to establish how well embedded the values are, typically the rough number about 10% to 12% of people can name all of the values, even where they're remarkably visible. We've been into organizations where they're on the walls in the room that we're talking about, and people still can name maybe half or more and maybe 20% can name one and 30, 35% can't name any of them. Actually, sometimes don't even know that you've got them. There's number one sign that your values mean nothing. The second sign that they mean nothing and I alluded to this a moment ago is no one knows what they mean. So they're phrased and we'll touch on these in some of the other points as well but they're phrased in ways that people go I actually don't even know what I'm supposed to do. I don't know what that means. They're overwhelming, they're overwordy, they use jargon, they don't talk to me in a language that we actually use around here and that I can help to regulate or make choices.

Speaker 1:

There's one major organization we've had dealings with in the past. They had a new leader come in and the culture started to take a major dip, largely because of the CEO style, and that then flowed down and became normalized. So this CEO decided to introduce a manifesto. Now I have so many problems with that I'm not even going to start because we'll go down a rabbit hole and never come back out. But in this manifesto he listed something like 30 principles. He didn't use the word values, but 30 principles that he wanted people to live by. Each one was accompanied by a paragraph that was maybe a quarter of a page. No one's ever going to remember that.

Speaker 1:

Not only do they not know what the values are, but even if they knew one or two of them, they've got no idea what they mean and what they're supposed to do. A really good test of that is if you can't tell me how that translates into a behavioural choice, it's not worth the pay for it's written on. So then let's look at the third resin that your values mean nothing. They're all about impressions and not behaviours. Not behaviours or actions, I should add. So, for example, we give great customer service. That's all about and there's a few problems with that one that I'll come back to a bit later as well, but for now, let's focus on the impression. It's a glib, meaningless, clichéd saying and it doesn't define the specific behaviours or actions we'd like to see. So a little window into the anatomy of a great value.

Speaker 1:

I believe it should be really simple. I believe they should be stated in terms of what we do or what we are. So we are honest, or we are honest with each other, or we speak openly, or something like that. I also believe they have to have some code that goes with them, and it just needs to be one or two sentences that tells people what that looks like when they do it in the workplace. So break it down to behavioral actions what we are or what we do and give people a little bit of code that's relevant to your workplace. Don't go to the internet and say what does honesty mean? Don't ask AI, because it knows, it absolutely knows, but it doesn't know what it looks like in your workplace.

Speaker 1:

A side point on that one if your values are arranged into a nice little acronym piece or I can't even think of another five-letter word that we would like there but they're arranged into a nice little five-letter word, ask yourself the question. Or four-letter word, if you have four values, ask yourself did we choose values? Did we sort of shoehorn these values to fit a nice acronym, or did we just come up with values and they happened to form that acronym? My strong recommendation is forget the acronym. I think even if you get there in an authentic way, it tends to create a little bit of cynicism amongst at least some people. The good thing about the acronym is that it does help people remember what they are. Is that it does help people remember what they are? I'd like that memory to be occurring through other mechanisms rather than that's a pretty glib acronym For a lot of people. They look at it and go, oh yeah, right, we just pick stuff that sort of fit that. So do they actually mean anything? And again that cynicism comes out, particularly if they've got past experience and particularly if that past experience is in your organization, of them not actually being lived.

Speaker 1:

And that brings me to the fourth reason, that your values mean nothing. Nothing happens when they're not observed. There is no consequence for living the values and there's no consequence for not living them. For me, one of the ultimate tests when I walk into an organization and I'm trying to help them understand their workplace culture and I'm trying to look at what levers they can pull to improve that workplace culture, one of my key questions is what happens when people don't do these things? And if it's just let go, it's all too hard, we're all too busy, our managers don't like dealing with that, it seems petty to raise that stuff. Or look, we're here for results, we're focused on that and sometimes you've got to break some eggs to make an omelette. Then your values mean nothing. The absolute test of them is if there is a consequence when people don't live them. And of course and this will come later there should be a consequence when people do live them, and particularly when they live them spectacularly. So look around, do your values say one thing and the way people actually act say the other A really massive definer of your workplace culture.

Speaker 1:

One of the key understandings of workplace culture is it's the way people behave in response to expectations, and I touched on this in last month's podcast. I'm going to repeat that the way they behave in response to expectations. If there's one written expectation in your handbook, your code of conduct, your induction, on posters, on coffee cups, on the back of the dunny door, et cetera, but there's a whole raft of behaviours that occur that contradict that, then the explicit expectation written in the values, et cetera, is swamped by the implicit expectation that people infer from what they see around them. And the phrase I used last month and I'll use it here because it's a great measure of culture what you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say. That's all about living values.

Speaker 1:

For the fifth reason your values mean nothing, have no impact is very closely related, but it's so important that it's worth discussing independently that we value harmony over our values. So we don't like to rock the boat, we don't like uncomfortable, we don't like awkward conversations, we don't like upsetting people. And you know what, if we never upset anyone, if we never have awkward if we never have uncomfortable then there are things being let go, there are things not being dealt with. You have a simple choice in a team, in an organization, you either have conflict or you have tension. Conflict is when people have explicit conversations about hey, this morning we spoke and I wasn't comfortable with where that sat with our values. That's conflict and it can be handled really well. That's a whole other topic. Again, we won't go down that rabbit hole. In harmonious organizations, in passive organisations, we tend to avoid those moments and we suppress it. And in suppressing it we create tension and we undermine our values and we create more cynicism. So we can't always have harmony if we want to have values-based conversations. And in fact harmony is a veneer. It's absolute rubbish and I wanted to use that same word again, but I promised you it was a once-off if you've got the kids in the back seat. So harmony is an illusion. The only way we can have the illusion of harmony is to suppress conflict, and that creates a whole bunch of stuff under the surface that bubbles away and undermines morale and performance.

Speaker 1:

The sixth reason that your values mean nothing is when some people are exempt. So this could be that you've got that person in the corner who's really grumpy and no one likes to challenge, and they don't live the values. But oh, that's just them. Now, when you use the words oh, that's just. And insert a name afterwards, what you're about to do is excuse the inexcusable. You're about to try and normalise the fact that they behave badly. You're about to try and make it okay. So if you hear yourself say the words oh, that's just, x, stop and think about the behavior that you're about to sweep under the carpet. Think about the impact that will have on your workplace culture and on the integrity of your values.

Speaker 1:

Sometimes we exempt people because we're scared of losing them. Sometimes we exempt people because they've got a skill set that no one has. Sometimes we exempt people because that's just them. None of those are adequate reasons. So if the values apply equally to different people, that's not what you want. That's not going to drive the outcomes. They have to apply equally to all is what I'm trying to say.

Speaker 1:

And again, the seventh reason that your values mean nothing is strongly related. It's when your managers don't live them. It's when they behave in a way that implies do what I say but not what I do. When managers don't live values. They have no right, but they obviously can, but in the minds of their people. They've got no right to have a coaching conversation around living the values. They've got no right to have that respectful discussion where they say, hey, let's talk about how you might handle that differently with our values in mind, because they don't live them themselves, they have zero credibility.

Speaker 1:

When a manager doesn't live the values, it has two impacts. Firstly, it's one person who's not taking our culture where we want it to go. Secondly, it's an excuse. It's an example. So others look at that person and say, oh well, that's the way we do things around here. It's good enough for managers. It must be good enough for everyone else and for those who don't want to make the effort to change habits, who don't want to make the effort to do the right things, then that's all the excuse they need. On the other hand, when managers embody the values, even when it's inconvenient for them, that's also an example and sends a really strong message and gives them huge credibility to have those conversations. The eighth reason that your values mean nothing is when they're dictated from above.

Speaker 1:

I had a vigorous conversation with a board recently who wanted, as part of their board planning session to set values for the team Team of 300 odd people and the board was meeting for their strategic planning session. They had a couple of days, so they were going to sort of it was a fair bit of time on their hands. There was a lot to plan, but that should be enough. And they said oh well, with the time let's set some values. I had to be very, very strong about how inappropriate that was, because not only did that not engage the team, the board didn't even work there. So the board never had to live these values. The board got to go to a board meeting and they did a great job, by the way they were a volunteer board, by the way did a great job. But they got to go home after each board meeting they read the board papers in the comfort of their home. They didn't spend 40 hours a week in that environment, in that workplace.

Speaker 1:

They shouldn't have a say in the values, let alone decide them. The people who need to live the values need to be the people who are influencing them. I strongly believe that every team member should have input into the values. It doesn't mean that we try and please everyone Having had the opportunity for input and if you do it well and again, this is something we can assist you with you should have fairly high levels of participation, and those who don't, that was a choice they made. It doesn't mean they're exempt from the values, but having had input into the values and having seen them decided by the community who needs to live them, then it's perfectly reasonable to hold people accountable to them.

Speaker 1:

If they're dictated from above, then again people are detached. It's yeah, I know you want me to live that, but they don't actually mean anything to me. I've had many executive teams over the years who want to set the values for the team and, once again, my very strong position on this is that's imposing something from above. Now we have hierarchies in an organization for a very good reason. That's how we make decisions, that's how we delegate, that's how we control things, et cetera, and control things that need controlling and sometimes those that don't. Again, a rabbit hole. Values should not be hierarchical. They define the way the human beings in the organization treat each other, and they should be equal for all, and that should start with them not being dictated from above. So the CEO's voice in establishing the value should be one of all the voices and carry no more weight than anyone else's.

Speaker 1:

The next reason your values mean nothing is that you've either got externally focused values or you've got this weird blend of externally and internally focused values, and that just doesn't work. I can count on I was going to say one hand, maybe one finger, maybe zero fingers the number of times I've actually seen that blancmange work. What we can rightfully expect of each other when we work with each other is completely different to what we might want to promise our customers and the way we might expect our customers to work with us. So I'm very big on separating the principles that we have and I don't care what name you give them. You can call the external ones values and the internal ones principles, or vice versa, or you can come up with completely different names.

Speaker 1:

But you need a set of principles that are the standard that you work to for the people you exist to serve, whether you call them clients or patients or customers or whatever it might be and you need a completely different set of values that guide the way we treat each other, the way we work with each other, the standards we commit to internally. So if your values are externally focused, then that's great. They may be guiding the way you work with the external world, but they're doing nothing to help you define the culture you want internally, in terms of the way people treat each other. I actually I talked before about values are your number one tool, your number one lever in defining the culture you want and helping guide behavior towards it. Sitting alongside that are those external principles, and if you've got both and if you have high accountability to the way you serve the people you exist to serve and high accountability to the way you treat each other what I'm calling your values then you're going to have a wonderful culture. You've got to have those clearly defined and people have got to be accountable to them. They've got to mean something.

Speaker 1:

The tenth reason that your values don't mean anything is they're only reinforced by managers, so the only time there is. So I'll go all the way back to the third principle or the third reason, which is sorry. The fourth reason is nothing happens when they're not observed. This is sort of a version of that, but there's only a conversation about a problem if a manager sees it or hears about it, and of course that means a whole lot of pettiness, a whole lot of childish stuff occurs and is escalated to a manager who's already overwhelmed, who didn't see the issue, who, for them, it's really petty because they weren't engaged in it. So our values need to be.

Speaker 1:

The only way to have real accountability in a team, and particularly your values, is when they're reinforced by all people at all levels. That could be a part-time casual who's been with you for one month having a conversation with the CEO about an interaction they had. That could be two colleagues having that conversation and the manager never knowing, because they solved the problem themselves. So we need, as part of embedding values, to encourage people to have honest conversations amongst each other. That's what the value should facilitate. There are framework they can use for that. Once again, and I'm not going to overplug the products we offer that's one of the services that we offer as part of that values program that you can read about on the product page on our website.

Speaker 1:

And the fifth or the 11th one, the 11th reason your values mean nothing is that we've actually defined rules. Now, rules are great for compliance. They're great when you work in a regulated area, a regulated industry, where there are standards that are non-negotiable, absolutely have some rules. Rules are absolutely rubbish when it comes to guiding human behavior. I work with one organization, an IT team, a big IT team that tried to do this and ended up with a survey monkey of over 75 items, which were really rules that they've created, and they tried to narrow them down. They ended up actually having more because people pointed out the gaps in all those rules and these were really pedantic, silly rules about what you'd wear about and I get in some organizations that's going to have to be a compliance area, but we're talking about people in casual dress, but really strange rules governing that, about how long it would take to answer a phone call, about how you would respond when someone spoke to you, et cetera. They called me, I sat with them and what we recognised is that there were about three or four values that underpinned 95% of the rules.

Speaker 1:

Now, the reason they were going with rules is they were looking for black and white. They were looking for the rules to do all the lifting. They didn't want the awkwardness of those conversations where someone says we have a value of respect, I didn't feel respected in that situation, and the other person says, well, I don't think it was disrespectful. And now we've got an argument. The whole point of values is they should facilitate people having adult conversations. They're not going to do all the lifting for you. They're the basis for that conversation where, hopefully, those two people are encouraged and given the skills to be able to say to each other I'm really sorry, I didn't intend to be disrespectful and it's not the way it sounded in my head, but I get that it's landed that way for you and I need to do better. So I'm going to be really mindful of that next time I'm talking with you.

Speaker 1:

So don't try and define rules that do all the lifting for you. They don't replace leadership. They don't replace adult human interactions between colleagues or between a team member and their manager. So they're the 11 reasons that your values mean nothing, and I'm going to give you one easy win. Now the easy win.

Speaker 1:

Unfortunately, if the other 11 things are going against you, this one won't help, but it's absolutely one of the simplest ways to embed the values and that's to celebrate. That's to celebrate when people embody the values. So if you've got some of the 11 going against you and some of them going for you, it's still okay to give this a try. There's probably some other work to do around evaluating how you can bring your values in line with all 11 of those principles. But celebrate when people so we talked about there's got to be a consequence when people don't live them. There's also got to be a consequence when they do live them. Make sure that you, as the manager, but also peer-to-peer behaviors that are strong examples of the values are called out, that they're noticed. This is a classic example of we've got to catch people doing things right, not just when people do things wrong.

Speaker 1:

That's the end of the podcast for this month. As always, we would love to talk with you and there are opportunities to do that in the show notes. If you would like to have a chat, we even offer a free short consultation, about 30 minutes, to talk about any issue you've got, and we'll throw around ideas. It's not a sales meeting, it's purely a problem solving meeting for you to raise whatever issues you've got, and that opportunity is in the show notes and you'll speak with myself or with another one of our culture nerds, one of our culture experts. We'd love to speak with you. Next month we'll be back with a whole new episode, a whole new focus and a whole new raft of resources In the meantime be authentic.