Your Organisation Doesn’t Have Values. Your People Do.

Almost every organisation has values.

They appear on websites, office walls, induction slides, annual reports and beautifully designed posters, usually accompanied by words such as integrity, courage, collaboration, respect, innovation, excellence or something similarly aspirational about how the organisation wants its people to behave.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that, and organisational values can provide a useful sense of direction, particularly when they genuinely influence decisions rather than simply describing the culture an organisation would like to have.

At PasedaLeader, we think we have become so used to talking about organisational values that we have forgotten something fairly fundamental.

Organisations don’t have values. People do.

An organisation can decide what it wants to stand for, describe the behaviours it wants to encourage and set expectations about how people should work together. Values themselves belong to human beings. They are shaped by who we are, what matters to us and the experiences that have influenced us along the way.

The values somebody brings into work are unlikely to fit neatly onto a poster.

The real culture is visible in what happens

If we want to understand what really matters within an organisation, the words on the website are probably not the best place to start.

Look at what happens instead.

Who gets promoted? Which behaviours are rewarded? What gets overlooked when somebody delivers exceptional commercial results? What happens when somebody challenges a senior leader? Does collaboration still hold when targets are under pressure, and does the commitment to wellbeing survive the week when everybody is expected to work until midnight to get something over the line?

People first is relatively easy when the people decision doesn’t cost anything. We welcome challenge sounds good until somebody challenges something the executive team is deeply invested in.

People notice these things. They notice when the experience of working somewhere bears little resemblance to the words being used to describe it, and over time those words lose credibility.

It affects the relationship people have with their work too. Every day, people are making decisions about how much of themselves they can bring into an organisation and how far they are prepared to compromise on the things that are important to them.

Values are deeply personal

Two people can work in exactly the same organisation, reporting to the same leader and doing very similar jobs, and experience that workplace very differently because what matters most to each of them is different.

For one person, autonomy may be incredibly important, while another may place enormous value on belonging and connection. Someone else may care deeply about fairness, achievement, stability, creativity, contribution, freedom or recognition. None of those things has to appear on the corporate values poster to have a profound influence on how that person experiences their working life.

Being micromanaged may be frustrating for most people. For somebody who places enormous value on autonomy, it can feel almost intolerable.

Watching a colleague receive preferential treatment may be irritating. For somebody with a deeply held value around fairness, it can fundamentally alter how they feel about their leader.

A culture built around constant competition may energise one person and slowly exhaust somebody for whom collaboration and collective success are far more important. A restructure that one person sees as a sensible commercial decision may feel profoundly destabilising to somebody for whom security has always been important.

We often see the reaction without understanding what is sitting underneath it, and sometimes the person themselves hasn’t made the connection either.

We can slowly move away from what matters to us

People rarely wake up one morning and decide to spend their working life compromising the things that are important to them.

It tends to happen gradually.

They compromise because there is a deadline, then do it again when the business is going through a difficult period, and again when everybody else seems to be coping. Eventually something that initially felt uncomfortable simply becomes how things are done.

They may still be performing exceptionally well, receiving positive feedback, delivering their objectives and appearing completely committed from the outside, while feeling increasingly disconnected from their work, becoming more cynical or noticing that things which once gave them energy no longer seem to.

This is part of the territory we describe through The Silent Middle^®, the space between surviving and thriving where somebody can appear perfectly functional, and often highly successful, while being a long way from flourishing.

Performance can hide an enormous amount.

Somebody can be delivering everything an organisation asks of them while becoming increasingly disconnected from themselves in the process. There is no obvious performance problem, so nobody thinks to look any deeper.

Leaders bring their own values into the room

Leaders don’t simply bring the organisation’s values to life. They bring their own values into every decision, conversation and relationship too.

A leader who places enormous value on excellence may set incredibly high standards and create brilliant results, and they may also create an environment in which nothing ever feels quite good enough.

A leader who values harmony may be warm, inclusive and deeply considerate while finding it extremely difficult to have the conversations that might temporarily disrupt that harmony.

Someone who values achievement may create extraordinary momentum while continually raising the bar without noticing that the people around them are exhausted. A leader who places great importance on loyalty may find challenge or disagreement much harder to separate from a perceived lack of commitment.

There is nothing wrong with excellence, harmony, achievement or loyalty. Problems start to appear when we don’t recognise how strongly the things that matter to us are influencing our behaviour, particularly when we assume that everybody around us should care about the same things in the same way.

Asking a leader to role-model respect or integrity tells us very little about what they will actually do when something personally important to them is under threat.

We often see a very different version of people under those conditions.

Sometimes our greatest strengths get in our way

We see this frequently in our work with leaders.

The leader who cares deeply about quality can find it incredibly difficult to let go of detail. Watching something leave their hands at a standard they would not personally choose creates genuine discomfort, so they get involved, check, correct and take things back.

The leader who values being useful becomes the person everybody depends upon. They take on more and more until they are overwhelmed and, without intending to, teach everybody around them that they don’t need to solve things for themselves.

The person who values kindness says yes when they want to say no, avoids conversations they know they need to have and absorbs far more than is reasonable because disappointing somebody else feels worse than disappointing themselves.

From the outside we might call those behaviours control, rescuing, perfectionism or people-pleasing and start trying to correct them.

We want to know what is driving them.

Understanding what somebody has been trying to protect gives us far more to work with, particularly when the behaviour is now affecting the people around them.

Culture is lived by people

Culture is being created every day through what people do, particularly the people with the greatest power and influence.

It is in what leaders pay attention to, what they ignore, what they reward, what they tolerate, who gets listened to and what happens when doing the thing written in the values statement becomes inconvenient.

Corporate values can provide a useful compass. They cannot do the work on their own.

At PasedaLeader, we are far more interested in whether people can recognise the organisation’s values in what it actually feels like to work there than whether they can remember the words themselves.

We also want leaders to understand themselves well enough to recognise when their own values, beliefs and learned behaviours are shaping how they lead, particularly under pressure.

A leader can believe deeply in empowerment and still become controlling when they feel uncertain. They can believe in collaboration and still struggle when somebody disagrees with them. They can talk passionately about wellbeing while holding themselves to such impossible standards that everyone around them learns that exhaustion is what commitment looks like.

Simply reminding somebody of the corporate values isn’t going to resolve that.

If you lead people, start with your own values

For leaders, there is a much more personal piece of work here.

What do you actually value, beyond the words your organisation has chosen? Which of those values are visible in the way you lead? What changes when you are tired, challenged, under pressure or worried about the outcome?

Think about the people you lead too. If autonomy is important to somebody in your team while certainty is important to you, can you give them enough room to work without constantly needing greater visibility? If you value pace and achievement while somebody else needs time to think, can you recognise the value in their approach without quietly judging them against your own?

Then there is what happens when one of your own values comes under pressure.

If excellence matters deeply to you, notice what happens when somebody produces work that doesn’t meet your standard. If loyalty is important, pay attention to your response when somebody challenges you. If being useful is part of how you see yourself, notice how quickly you step in when somebody is struggling. If you value harmony, think about the conversations you may have been putting off.

These questions tell us far more about leadership than whether somebody can recite the organisation’s values.

The people you lead experience your values through your behaviour, particularly when things are difficult and you have less capacity to manage how you come across.

Spend some time understanding what is important to you, where it serves your leadership, where you can overplay it and what happens when somebody else’s values collide with yours.

Then pay attention to what the people around you actually experience.

An organisation can put integrity, courage, collaboration and respect on the wall.

The people inside it will show us what those words really mean, and leaders have an enormous influence on what those people experience every day.

Change from within. Developing human-centric leaders.