Core Values: Essential or Overrated?
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Are Core Values essential to the long-term success of a company or is the concept of core values a passe, feel-good idea with little real business value? Well... it depends.
First of all, what are core values?
They are a small set of vital and timeless guiding principles for your company.
What is the greatest benefit to identifying your core values?
Your core values define your unique culture and who you truly are as people. When they are clear, they will attract like-minded people to your organization. They will also weed out and repel those that don't fit the core values. Once defined, if they are rigourously adhered to from the top down, a thriving culture will grow with these core values at the center. Rigourous adherence means that as much weight must be given to core values as that which is given to skills, experience, and productivity when hiring, firing, reviewing, and recognizing people.
Given that so many companies have defined core values, why does it rarely make a difference?
That is an easy question. The problem is that most of the time the core values are not really "core." Rather, they are table stakes values, aspirational values, or accidental values.
Mere Table Stakes
"Passion," "teamwork," "customer service," and "professionalism" are examples of table stakes values. Don't most business leaders want their employees to be excited about their work, to work as a team, to take care of customers, and to be professional? If that is the case, by touting these values as core, a company fails to "define their unique culture and who they truly are as people."
The rules of behavior are really no different than anywhere else and thus don't make a difference.
Note that there are companies that are exceptionally committed to some of these values such that they are truly core. For example, Nordstrom (customer service), Service Legends (professionalism and customer service), and McLellan Marketing Group (undeniable passion).
Aspirational
Another issue is that many values selected are not "core" becuase they are "aspirational." Leadership wants values that may or may not exist in part of the organization to become part of the culture as a whole. In order to succeed, the leadership must start to model the core values personally as well as to hire, fire, review, and recognize with those core values as a guide.
If there is any lack of commitment, this values list quickly dies inside the pages of the three-ring binder on every employee's shelf.
Accidental
A final issue is that sometimes, a value can become accidentally core. For example, take a start-up tech company that tends to hire young, single people who tend to wear t-shirts, jeans, and sandals to work. Becasue they are a homogeneous group, they can wind up with accidental core values that attract or repel people and customers for the wrong reasons.
So, after considering why poorly defining core values can backfire, are you more or less convinced that doing it well can help propel a corporate vision?
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