Inside Out Culture
Cath Bishop and Colin Ellis - two people who have been at the heart of workplace culture for over 3 decades host a regular podcast that offers an insider’s view on culture and provides tangible actions that you can take on the outside.
As best-selling authors and consultants who work with cultures around the world, they not only talk about what's happening in the world of work right now, but also provide evidence and commentary to help you change the way you do things too.
From kindness to toxicity, from values to high-performance, Cath and Colin discuss a breadth of topics relevant to the way work gets done. Both are keen to help leaders, managers and colleagues gain competence and confidence to contribute more positively and proactively to their workplace environments.
Please do send in your questions for Cath and Colin to answer. You can email them at insideoutculture@gmail.com or message them on LinkedIn.
Sign up for the Culture Leaders Action Sheet: bit.ly/iocpmail
Instagram: @insideoutculture
Inside Out Culture
Why are organisations so bad at living their values?
On this episode of the Inside Out Culture podcast we talk about values. Values set the emotional direction of a team culture and yet they are often misused, or worse, not used at all!
We explain what values are, what good ones look like and their importance to business performance. We reference some high profile case studies and also talk through how values can be used to hire people who will contribute to the desired culture.
And we’d love to hear from you as to what your values are and whether you see them being ‘lived’ in plain sight at your organisation.
---
Join us as we reveal strategies to close the gap and craft a workplace where values are not just spoken, but lived and breathed, paving the way for a more authentic and engaging organisational culture.
Instagram: @insideoutculture
Email your questions to: insideoutculture@gmail.com
Receive the Culture Leaders Action Sheet: bit.ly/iocpmail
Welcome to the Inside Out Culture Podcast, where we look at insides of working culture and provide ideas, insights and actions for you to take on the outside. I'm Colin Ellis.
Cath:And I'm Cath Bishop, and in each episode we'll examine a different question or a different organization, and we'll use case studies, research and our own insights and experiences to help you change the way things get done in your world.
Colin:We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please like, subscribe and, of course, let us know what you think.
Colin:Hello and welcome to our latest episode of the Inside Out Culture podcast, and the title today is why are organisations so bad at living their values? Colin, why have we got to this topic? How are we going to dive into this? It's such an important one. This is one that I know is really close to your heart, so let's set up the topic for us a bit.
Cath:Yeah, it is close to my heart and when I think about when I really started to get interested in culture, and so, you know, we never really talked about culture. You know, when I think back to my 30 years as an employee, culture we talked about teamwork, but then really about 2000, kind of 11, 12, post-global financial crisis for those of us who remember that we started to see this real emphasis on culture and what organizations started to do was to really publish the things that were important to them and call them values. These are the things that we value as an organization. We became really interested in this because there were a number of high profile stories of organizations that had values but then compromised them, and the most famous one and we won't go over it here necessarily is Enron and Enron's values, for those of you who remember Enron and it was a real high profile corporate failure, one of the biggest that we've seen for years. Not long after that, we had Volkswagen, another organization that had a really strong set of values, and so values have become almost part of the well, not almost. They have become part of the fabric of organizations and the culture, big part of the culture.
Cath:You know, I always think that values are at the heart of culture and yet, Cath, and yet organizations are so bad at actually putting them into practice. There seems to be this real, you know, and I'm starting working with an organization uh, this week, they've got values that aren't values, and then they wonder why people aren't putting them into practice, and so I think this is going to be a really interesting topic. I think, you know, for people listening, you know, our challenge is for you to go away, look at your organizations. I mean, you should know what they are, look at them and really say, well, are we actually living them? How are we putting them into practice?
Colin:right, yeah, I think it's such a huge topic. It's quite a deep topic. I found myself reaching back to the Jim Collins Good to Great book because it's something that he talks about as being so crucial and the real, you know, again at the heart of an organisation, and of course, the best organisations are the ones that do live their core values. Also, he talks about how you can't sort of artificially create them, and I think when I was reflecting on this subject, I was thinking that it's such a crucial issue, but it is one I find hard to be definitive about.
Colin:Partly, I really haven't experienced many environments where the values have been lived, and in fact I've often experienced some valueless environments. And then the organizations I work with often they aren't really living them, and so to some extent, I'm always thinking, well, what's realistic here? Because you've got values on the wall, but we're so far from that. It's not just about creating a new set. It's about starting to get some alignment, constantly reflecting on how to describe it, how to think about them and how to create the alignment when it is often so absent. So what's your starting point when you're working with organizations? Tell us a bit about how you start to talk about it, define it and work with companies.
Cath:So I always like to you know, particularly when you work with senior leaders, is talk to them about the kind of organization that they want to create. And so interesting. You mentioned Jim Collins. Stephen Covey is another very famous leadership author. He talked about values as being this compass activity, and for me, values are really about well, what's our true north as an organization? What kind of environment do we want to create for employees? And really, values the actual definition of values is principles or standards of behavior, and so I think that's a really good way of thinking about it. Values really define standards of behavior, but they don't actually describe the behavior, and so whenever I'm working with leaders, I always say well, what kind of organization do you want to create? Forget about the results. What kind of organization do you want to be? And this is why values are so important.
Cath:We live in a very emotional age now, and of course, that's because we're bringing our children up differently. We're talking to them about purpose, we're talking about them finding their passion, we're talking about them finding organizations whose values match your role, and we're instilling our children with a sense of value so that they can go and, you know, kind of find an organization that wants to work in the way that they want to work, and so I always say what kind of organization do you want to be? And very, very quickly. From that, you know, I have to make the point that it's not the leadership team's job to tell employees what the values are. It's up to the leadership team to create the time space and money, or to provide the time space and money for employees to define what those values are is a kind of very dictatorial cultures. We tell you what the culture is and we expect you to work in it. And you still see it now, Cath. You still see organizations create values which aren't really values. We'll get into that. And then they produce these PowerPoint presentations and then they send them out and they go there. You go, there's your values. We've taken the liberty of describing what they are. You go live them. Well, that's not the way that culture works. Culture belongs to everyone and it's up to everyone to say, okay, these are our values. How did these relate to our team? How are we within our team going to actually go and live them?
Cath:Now, I did some work with Athletics Australia a few years back and what they wanted to do was really establish a set of core values. They had a head of HR I can't remember the exact title really got culture. She was just like what we need is a set of core values. And we went through the process and I brought them together for half a day and we had ex-athletes, we had coaches, we had a real broad spectrum of people. And they created four values and be bold, to be better, collectively deliver success, know and do what's right, celebrate our people right.
Cath:So we had these four great values that they actually defined. But then the action was you go back with your group and you now determine well, what does it mean to collectively deliver success as a coaching group? What does it mean to celebrate our people as physios, these kinds of things? And this is where we start to see values really start to seep into the work that we do and be absorbed on a day to day basis. Because I think if we get to the point where we're dictating how they should be lived, then there's never any ownership, there's never any accountability and they become those things that we joke about all the time, which are plastered on a wall but no one really gives a toss about.
Colin:Yeah, so that's one of the key ways in which an organization will be poor at living its values is because it actually has gone about it misunderstanding how a value is created and the process becomes one of imposition, one of sort of dictating, which you know is a contradiction in terms, because that's just not. You know, we're not robots or we're not sort of just waiting to be programmed with a value. And so I think that's, you know, a really core area and I think, kind of another area in which I think organizations, a reason why they can be poor at living their values, is because they don't prioritize them, they don't actually see them as core. They see the profit margins or some of those sort of commercial gains as core. And that is, of course, then what leads into the pattern that we discussed in the Boeing episode, that you could see in Enron, that you've already mentioned, in the sports environments, where we're chasing the medals and there's no values, then we start to get the kind of ethical decay into the organisation and that's then deeply problematic, and I think that's something that's interesting. You're talking about working with Athletics Australia. I think it's so important that sport ought to be really good at upholding values. I mean, the whole philosophy of Olympism is one that is founded on values of Olympism is one that is founded on values, and you know. And yet, of course, with the increasing commercialization and sort of you know, emphasis on perhaps winning medals, that becomes the only thing we start measuring. That's how we got into, you know, a whole series of culture crises across sports, where we had toxic cultures, culture of fear, culture of abuse and values absolutely lacking. And I think back to my own time. I mean it almost would have felt ridiculous to have said what are the values? Sort of like, you're here to win a medal, but what are you talking about? And yet it is, of course, so important Now, in the later stages and the later years, it was something that our psychologist was bringing in to think about what sort of athlete do you want to be?
Colin:What do you want to be known for? How do you want to go about the pursuit of excellence in your rowing boat? But it wasn't necessarily something that the whole environment was bought into. It was so crucial when we were putting crews together to have a sense of a code of how we wanted to. You know what really mattered to us every day, how we turned up, you know, beyond just this medal. Actually, this is what we're going to be proud of.
Colin:And you know, there were moments when, actually, I did stand up and, you know, speak up against some behavior that was very unjust, that was trying to treating somebody without respect, perhaps from a coach, and, you know, again, it didn't go well for me. But looking back, I feel like really good that in that moment, you know, I held on to some values there, you know, and maybe I wish I'd done that more often. So I think, you know, I feel that I'm still almost working out that sense of actually your personal values and then the values of the organization you're in, because you need to then have a sense of, actually, are they alignable? Are there some values in this organization that are going to clash with what's important to me? But that requires the organization to be clear about its values, to be living those values, for you to even be able to start to align them yeah, it's a couple of things that I want to I want to pick up on.
Cath:So the the kind of values match a lot of organizations will talk about we hear we hear consultants often talk about our culture fit. There's no such thing as as a culture fit, because the culture can be quite different in different parts of the organization. I still think there's this view that you can create this, and I've talked about this in the past. We talked about this in one team culture. There's no one team culture, but what you have is lots of subcultures aligned to values, to purpose, those kinds of things, and I think what we're looking for is someone who believes a certain set of things. When we hire them. There's a real match with what the organization's trying to do.
Cath:And the other thing I want to mention and I loved what you said here you said a code of what matters to us. That's what values are. It's a code of what matters to us, and values are actually broad statements about what matters to us, and too often, organizations are just lazy in the way that they do this. Just lazy, plain old lazy. Let's call it what it is. They'll have a value.
Colin:Or is it lazy? Is it really lazy? Is it that they don't understand? Is it that they've actually got a different set of values underlying it, that actually they don't really care about some of these things A lot? Yeah, you know, I think other things hide behind that.
Cath:I love that you're trying to steer it away from that. That's just lazy. They just can't be bothered to figure out exactly what they are. Listen, it's all of those things, but it is, and this is real. There's a corporate laziness or there's just a general laziness when it comes to culture I think it's something that also it requires a different way of thinking.
Colin:So when we're just looking at tasks and when we are just, you know, trying to deliver some short-term metrics, we're kind of just in that do-do-do mode, whereas when we're thinking about values, oh, I've got to really kind of just in that do-do-do mode, whereas when we're thinking about values, oh, I've got to really kind of stop and look around me and tune into the environment, tune into the people in that environment. I can't just sort of tick things off a to-do list or a spreadsheet. So I think it's sometimes a mindset that we haven't delivered, that we haven't encouraged when people come into an organization to actually, from the start, connect with the values, align their work to the values. So then suddenly you're trying to build a new habit when you get to a leadership level and it's just not there, because the other habits you've built of you know, driving, activity, hitting sort of certain KPIs those habits are really strong and so that sort of formed almost like a different value set that says, oh, these values that are written down aren't what really matter, because that's not what I've been paying attention to, it's not what I've been praised or recognized for or promoted for.
Colin:So I think there is often just a way in which our instrumental way of operating in organizations means we take our eye off things like values. They operate at a deeper level and we've stopped seeing them, tuning into them almost in order to be able to stop aligning again, connecting with them, bringing them to life, and a lot of what we talk about with culture is it's the human part of our environment, and I think you know from Gordon Gekko on Wall Street sort of in the 80s, you know that onwards our organizations have been sort of just, you know, almost trying quite proudly to say, yeah, it's not about that, it's about profit, it's about the numbers we hit and have failed to fundamentally understand how core it is to human performance to be value led, a human performance in that sense of connection and belonging.
Cath:I think this is what we're looking for now, and I spoke to a senior leader not long ago and he was like oh, generationally, millennials and Gen Z are looking for something different. I'm like, generationally, generation X are looking for something different. Most of them are in the later stages of their career and what they, you know, as we get older, what it's been proven, is that actually what we? You know? We kind of want less hassle, we want to be more human. The world has changed such and actually we're kind of living through our children a little bit and we're like we want to create a world where, you know, we're being respectful and all of these things to each other. I was like so the world has changed and what organizations have to do is catch up.
Cath:And let's just give some of the real facts here, because I still think there are some people out there that think things like values are a bit oh, they're a bit woo-woo. So when an organization has a set of well-written values now that's the key, well-written values and they are seen to be practiced by leaders, employees are 115% more engaged 115%. And so often when I start working with an organization and the leader say, oh, we want to be more productive, I was like, okay, great, if you want to be more productive, what we need is more engagement from staff, staff who care more. They care more about what the organization's trying to do. They care more about the people who are making the decisions. I was like so what we need to do is craft a set of values that demonstrate that the organization is going in a slightly different direction. It's one that's human led, and what MIT Sloan research found and this was two years ago was that 75% of the Fortune 500 companies had a set of core values, but the correlation coefficient between how heavily a company weighted a set of values and how well employees said they did on those values was zero. And so at that point, you're never going to get to the point where you've got this kind of productivity or this performance, because employees are looking at leaders and they're going all right, well, you've talked a good game. We're not actually doing it, and actually our values don't really respect the kind of organization that I want to work for, and what we're seeing now is Generation Z millennials will literally walk away from a job with nothing to go to if the organization doesn't practice the values that it sold to them at interview.
Cath:And I actually spoke to someone about this about five, six weeks ago and she talked to me. She was like I just decided I didn't want to work for an organization that doesn't practice what it preaches on its webpage and I said so what do you do? She's like I'm going to go and work for myself. I was like have you got any leads? She's like no, but I know I don't want to work for organizations that don't do that. I thought, oh, there's a real example and so there's a real benefit, right?
Colin:I mean, it is the employee behavior, employee performance, employee engagement that is directly supported through values. It's also interactions with customers. It's all ends of your performance, value chain, if you like, that are supported by value. So it is about the bottom line and this sort of sense that somehow it's soft is madness. You are literally limiting, holding back your organization, holding back from connecting with customers and employees, and I think, although maybe people are getting bolder about connecting with their own values and questioning the organization because I don't think it's a new thing, we needed this all along to thrive it comes back to the sort of Owen Eastwood's principles, based on, you know, the Maori culture, that we actually need these in order to feel that we belong, feel that that we are part of something that matters, feel connected to the people around us and to that purpose greater than ourselves. So in some ways it's going back to the most yeah, sort of the most original perspective human need and in other ways, actually maybe younger generations are giving us a new lens on it and coming to it and perhaps being also bolder about speaking about values, because one another reason, I think, coming back to our sort of question that why are organizations poor at living values. They don't talk about them or they feel awkward talking about them, or, you know, leaders or people are talking about them in some stilted way that is disconnected from what we're really doing every day and again. One of the things Jim Collins talks about a lot is this alignment piece. It's having the mechanisms that enable you to live the value. There's no point having a great value unless you've got a way in which, as you were asking people when you described that exercise at the beginning go away and talk about how you're going to bring this to life. What's the mechanism, what are our ways of working, that we have to do this? So I think there is something about you know practicing that muscle I have.
Colin:The one of the sort of talks and workshops I really enjoy doing is with Morgan Sindor Construction Group and based on the company started by John Morgan I think, back in the 80s, still now there as group CEO. He makes sure that he comes to all the leadership programs and in the session he's there for a good couple of hours. The only thing that he talks about are the values of the organization and he could come. He could talk about projections for the next year, the profits, I don't know sort of growth areas, structural changes, but he doesn't. Only thing that he talks about is the five values which are still connected to those that when he started. They've evolved very slightly, but often values won't change hugely because they are core to why the company exists and I find it really fascinating to watch that each time. And he actually gets the leaders to think about which one they think is most important. If they're going to drop one, which one it is, you might get them to act out a little scene with them. He really literally tries to get them to think creatively, practically, to bring them to life and to engage with them in a way where they think about them at a deeper level. And that's the really key message that he leaves them with. And he's actually one of the leaders.
Colin:I give that little snapshot in the new chapter of my book that's coming out in the middle of May, the second edition of the Long Win, and I cite that.
Colin:I try and give some examples in the new chapter of leaders who are doing things slightly different.
Colin:What does it mean to have this sort of long win approach, not a short win, short termist, temporary, narrow, shallow approach, and for me.
Colin:I really love that example of seeing him do that every time and he sort of says really his job. He asks them what do you think is the most important thing in my job, what do you think it matters most and where I can have most influence on the company? And they say, oh, driving performance and financial management, all this he says no, it's making sure that I am role modeling this and that I'm going around supporting others to understand how to bring them to life. So that for me is, you know, he's somebody who's really comfortable and actually often the leaders you know are quite uncomfortable have not necessarily even been asked this before, and this sort of just shows we need to create that time and space to think actually, what does it look like in your context, in the marketing department, out on a building site in different parts of the community that we're working? What does that really look like to bring these values to life?
Cath:Yeah, people listening haven't read the Long Win, Cath, they should do. And when you think about values in context with the Long Win, values really are about how do we create that sense of connection and belonging such that it keeps delivering over a period of time. I think often values are compromised too early in the piece and then leaders wonder why they don't have that real sense of engagement. It's like, oh, why aren't people really committed? It's like because you compromised your values at the start and you made it all about the pursuit of revenue, of sales, rather than how do we create an environment where employees really want to perform for the organization? And it all ties back to kind of well-being. Is you know, kind of belonging really instills a sense of collective well-being? And when we feel that we're more likely to bring our all to our job every single day of the week. And there is this direct line but that's not going to happen if either you compromise your values, so you say that you, you know you believe these things, but you don't. All your values are rubbish. And still we see you know you believe these things, but you don't. All your values are rubbish. And still we see you know organizations with these single word values. You know Maitland Group, it's a while ago now, but you know it's still relevant, I think.
Cath:Maitland Group, they're a firm of consultants in the UK. They looked at all of the FTSE 100 companies and they found that four, four values sorry, three values continually cropped up integrity, respect and innovation, which aren't values, though. You know. Being innovative is a behavior, being respectful is a behavior and integrity is what you get if you do both of those things. And and you, we still see this as like, oh, we need to create values, and then they just go about it in the wrong way and then, and then employees look at them and they go well, they're not values. Atlassian are a software company in Australia, meaningless, yeah, meaningless. So Atlassian software company in Australia, they have these really great values, right. So, open company, no BS. So no bullshit, right. So that's the value open company, no bullshit. They also have a value which is don't F the customer, right.
Cath:And I remember speaking to someone at a conference and this guy said to me he's like I could never work for an organization that had a value of don't F the customer, because that's not language that I use. I'm like okay, great, that's exactly what they want. He's like what do you mean? It's like if you don't believe that and are not comfortable with that, then it's not for you and that's great, that's absolutely fine, and that's where values really mean something. Is that actually when we take the time to really think? And they should never state what you do Like. As soon as I see fun as a value, I'm like, well, that should just happen. Naturally, collaborative is a value. Well, if you're not collaborative, you don't really have a company. You should never state the things that you should do by default. And so I think, Cath, and going back to the long that's a really interesting point yeah going back to.
Cath:The long win is. This is where we engage our staff to help us define the kind of organization. What are our emotional principles? What kind of organization do we want to become? Then how do we, as employees, describe those? Generally between three and five things. I've never seen more of it. Well, zappos have 10 values in the US, but I think that's too many. But there are really strong values, like the organization, and how do we create those and then live them over a period of time. So it's a culture that keeps on giving.
Colin:Yeah, so there's a real point there about this meaningful piece. I mean I'm quite keen that people don't feel afraid around these definitions. It's actually once you start to think about it, if you're having conversations, then you sort of naturally should start working out well, hang on. Actually, this is more about a behavior, this is a value. So I don't like to get too kind of. Uh, I think sometimes being too harsh on definitions does put people off the conversation, but at the same time they need to be meaningful. Again, it's a point you're very aligned with jim collins colin, you know it's a point that he talks about. They sort of have to make sense and if you can't really explain them then, yeah, they're not there yet, you're not where you need to. But I think there needs to be this sort of space to actually kind of explore what does this mean and why have we stuck a behavior in here when hang on, that's not a value. I think we need to be able to kind of think that through, because actually we don't learn that at school, we don't learn that when we join a company often. So we're lacking a bit of basic kind of education about these areas.
Colin:And there's another kind of area that really struck me around, why what gets in the way of values is when I was listening to Mike Mansfield the other day this very incredible barrister Casey who has done cases on the Stephen Lawrence inquiry and on Grenfell and on the Birmingham Six and he was really passionate about how the rule of law and wider society was really losing its way because of the lack of values and he cited this sort of emphasis on being adversarial all the time, on binary thinking, on a sort of right-wrong, on always needing to prove someone else wrong, and then you start to again. You know cut corners, cut your values, curb. You know your ethics because I've got to. You know I need to prove my, I need to prove you wrong. I thought that was really interesting and I could see how that plays out into. You know organizations where this sort of there can be an adversarial sense of. You know prove yourself to get promoted. You know where this sort of there can be an adversarial sense of. You know prove yourself to get promoted. You know it debate and and sort of you know have a right wrong approach to things, which of course is very unhelpful if we need to be collaborative and innovative and actually find the better way forward.
Colin:But I thought, yeah, I can see how that adversarial nature creeps into certain sectors, certain organizations. Perhaps is also role modeled at the top, and then that eats away at your values as well. So I mean gosh, we've run through quite a few different ways in which organizations may not be bringing their values to life, and I think there are probably more, and it'd be great to hear some more examples from listeners of those as well. But we should move to our three takeaways, colin. So we always say try and give an action, something to do, something to get curious about, something to uncover. So what's our action?
Cath:Well, I think what people should do is maybe ask each other you know, what are our values, don't you know? Don't look at the wall and the balance be stuck up there. What are your organization's values? I think if they mean something, then you should know what they are. Definitely, if you're in a senior leadership position, you should unprompted know what the values are. So that's something to do. What should people get curious about?
Colin:So I think then, once you know them, it's about let's get curious about the behaviors required to bring the values to life, and those are ones that we need to have ownership of. Again, we shouldn't be parroting those. We should be sort of saying, well, in my role, these are the ways in which I could live it and actually be open to others, supporting us to find other ways as well to strengthen how we bring them to life. So get curious about the specific behaviours required for you to live the values in your role. And, lastly, what do we want to uncover?
Cath:Oh well, probably. What are the unwritten values that are lived in the organisation? I think often there's the stated set of values and then there's some unwritten values behind them. You know, one that immediately leaps to mind is sometimes it is about making money and I'd say, well, just say that, then make that the value. So what are those unwritten values that may actually lurk behind what your stated values are?
Colin:Brilliant. So ask others to list the organization's values, get curious about the specific behaviors required to live them and uncover the sort of unwritten core values and have a look and see if they might be a bit different from what's on the wall. So yeah, a really important, very big topic to explore. We've got some references we'll put onto the action sheet. Really enjoyed that. It's really got me thinking, colin. Great conversation, fantastic Thanks, ken, really enjoyed that it's really got me thinking, colin. Great conversation, fantastic.
Colin:Thanks, Kat. Thanks for listening to today's Inside Out Culture Podcast. Please remember to like, subscribe and, of course, share with others who you think may be interested.
