Organizational Values Statement

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An Organizational Values Statement is an organizational statement that explicitly lists out organizational values.



References

2002

  • (Lencioni, 2002) ⇒ Patrick M. Lencioni. (2002). “Make Your Values Mean Something.” Harvard business review 80, no. 7
    • QUOTE: ... Take a look at this list of corporate values: Communication. Respect. Integrity. Excellence. They sound pretty good, don’t they? Strong, concise, meaningful. Maybe they even resemble your own company’s values, the ones you spent so much time writing, debating, and revising. If so, you should be nervous. These are the corporate values of Enron, as stated in the company’s 2000 annual report. And as events have shown, they’re not meaningful; they’re meaningless. ...

      ... Given the risk, why do executives put so much work into developing values statements in the first place? Because they believe they have to. At least that’s how they’ve felt since 1994, when Jim Collins and Jerry Porras published Built to Last. The book made the case that many of the best companies adhered to a set of principles called core values, provoking managers to stampede to off-site meetings in order to conjure up some core values of their own. The values fad swept through corporate America like chicken pox through a kindergarten class. Today, 80% of the Fortune 100 tout their values publicly—values that too often stand for nothing but a desire to be au courant or, worse still, politically correct. ...

      ... Core values are the deeply ingrained principles that guide all of a company’s actions; they serve as its cultural cornerstones. Collins and Porras succinctly define core values as being inherent and sacrosanct; they can never be compromised, either for convenience or short-term economic gain. Core values often reflect the values of the company’s founders — Hewlett-Packard’s celebrated “HP Way” is an example. They are the source of a company’s distinctiveness and must be maintained at all costs.

       Aspirational values are those that a company needs to succeed in the future but currently lacks. A company may need to develop a new value to support a new strategy, for example, or to meet the requirements of a changing market or industry. The CEO who claimed his company’s core value was a sense of urgency, for instance, was substituting an aspirational value for a core one. ...

       Permission-to-play values simply reflect the minimum behavioral and social standards required of any employee. They tend not to vary much across companies, particularly those working in the same region or industry, which means that, by definition, they never really help distinguish a company from its competitors. ...

       Accidental values arise spontaneously without being cultivated by leadership and take hold over time. They usually reflect the common interests or personalities of the organization’s employees. Accidental values can be good for a company, such as when they create an atmosphere of inclusivity. But they can also be negative forces, foreclosing new opportunities. Managers always need to distinguish core values from merely accidental ones, as confusion here can be disastrous. ...