Abstract: Organizations love their values. They print them, post them, frame them, put them on desktop crystals, and increasingly build leadership assessments around them. That sounds sensible. Until it isn’t.
When values become the entire lens for a 360, simplicity can become a limitation. This article explores where values, competencies, and the Simple Monster collide, and why oversimplifying leadership assessment can cost more than it is worth.
Are Values a Differentiator
Over our 60 years in the leadership and succession planning business, almost every client we have worked with has a set of values along with a vision and mission statement.
We have been a consultant helping create those Vision/Mission/Values documents. In general, we are in full support of the effort. It’s a very healthy best practice that gives everyone in the organization a clear purpose and a consistent path to follow.
Because we were curious and a little skeptical, we asked AI to look across the Fortune 500, pull the values expressed in annual reports, and identify the top ten themes.
What came back was striking: significant overlap at the concept level, paired with a wide variety of ways to say essentially the same thing.
Many companies are basically the same while sounding different.
Here are the top 10:
The language may vary, but the underlying concepts repeat again and again. That creates a kind of ‘vanilla-ization’ of values: organizations sound different on the surface while often signaling similar expectations underneath.
The Risk of Values
The risk is that values become broad, agreeable, and interchangeable rather than distinctive and differentiating. If almost every organization says some version of “act with integrity, serve the customer, collaborate, innovate, and be accountable,” the values may describe what a good organization should be, but not what makes this organization meaningfully different today, considering the market and competitive forces.
The real differentiator, then, is not the value words. It is how clearly the organization lives the behaviors behind it, reinforces those behaviors, and uses them to guide real decisions.
5 Important Questions
There are five important questions about the values.
1. Are the values really aligned with the market and competitive conditions?
2. Do or have the values changed over time, when market and competitive conditions changed? Some organizations have values left over from the original founders, now long gone.
3. Do your top leaders actually model the values, or just endorse them?
4. Do the rest of the employee population act in line with the values?
5. Are there processes in place to measure and track compliance with the values?
There are devastating examples of what happens when leaders fail to live the values they publicly champion. Among them was Enron.
At the time, Enron became one of the most notorious corporate fraud and corruption scandals in U.S. history, ultimately contributing to the collapse of the company. And yet, sitting on the desks of many Enron executives was a Values Cube. A very visible declaration of what the organization claimed to stand for.
The values printed with definitions on the sides of the cube were clearly communicated, yet hindsight shows us they were not reinforced.
Integrity – Excellence – Communication – Respect
The real test of values: not whether they are articulated well, but whether they are visible in the behavior of leaders and employees.
360 Feedback Projects
In numerous 360 projects with clients, one request comes up again and again: the need to align 360 content with the organization’s values.
It is a reasonable, and intelligent request. If values are meant to guide behavior, then leaders should receive feedback on whether others actually experience them living those values.
After decades of research, the talent management profession has largely converged on a common periodic table of competencies across levels of work.
The labels vary, but the underlying behaviors are remarkably consistent. So, it is no surprise that credible, research-based competency models naturally cover the ten most common organizational values listed above.
Trouble Lurks
That’s where the trouble starts. The Simple Monster raises its ugly head.
“Align the 360 with our values” can quickly become “make the 360 exactly match our values.” At the extreme, the assessment becomes little more than a compliance check: five values, five items, or perhaps a few behaviors under each value.
The connection to values is sensible. Reducing the entire 360 to the values is not.
A 360 should show whether leaders are living the values, while still assessing the broader set of behaviors required for effective leadership.
Leadership development and succession planning are long-term areas of focus, rather than a compliance view towards a values set that may or may not be differentiating.
In most cases, there is a compromise. The values can be mapped against the valid performance libraries.
A limited content 360 (considering all the effort and resources required) is a disservice to anyone trying to create a long-term career. Leveraging evidence-based 360s allow for a view of the broader behavioral patterns being displayed to inform the right path forward (keep doing, stop doing, start doing). It may be that the practices of today are not what’s needed tomorrow. A 360 restricted to today’s values impedes putting strong candidates on the bench.
A full 360 is a precious thing to waste, and too valuable an opportunity to reduce to a narrow compliance exercise.
Simplicity matters. But simplicity should never come at the expense of completeness.
Best practice is to use a robust, research-based leadership 360, map the organization’s values to the relevant survey items, and add a separate values-alignment view in the debrief.
The weaker alternative is to build the 360 primarily around today’s stated values, which may be incomplete, generic, or too narrow for the broader leadership demands ahead.
A better principle is:
Keep the process as simple as possible, but the content as comprehensive as necessary.
That is how you keep the Simple Monster in check: simplify the process, not the substance.
We appreciate the KISS imperative – Keep It Simple, Stupid. But it shouldn’t be Keep It Simple AND Stupid.
We would propose a new meme – KIASAPBMIC – Keep It As Simple As Possible But Make It Comprehensive. Probably not catchy enough!
