Corporate values - and how not to work with them.

The large number of employees also makes a code of conduct unavoidable. In many places, this also includes values that are desirable and are even used to assess employees and managers.

What happens time and again in everyday organisational life is that values are set in the hope that they will have an immediate generative effect. Values are therefore often highlighted in management workshops, propagated in training sessions or strived for by senior management. This is particularly noticeable when a change project is announced that is based on establishing new, better values: ‘We need to become more effective, more innovative, more entrepreneurial, more agile, build a culture of error, become a family, drive cultural change.’

General lack of understanding of the importance of values

When values are defined in this way in advance and often from the top down, it demonstrates a general lack of understanding of how values arise and work. Values are complex in nature and are therefore not compatible with mechanistic approaches. Everyone knows, for example, that trust cannot be prescribed, but is created through long-term processes with suitable framework conditions.

Values that are developed in workshops, for example, are not wrong per se, but all too often the desired or learned values that are found on websites and in codes of conduct are asked for. Dave Snowden, an expert in complexity thinking and knowledge management, puts it this way: ‘Once you've written down your values, you've lost them.’ In other words, you show your employees what you want to hear without actually changing anything. If these values are then not exemplified by the management, they mutate from guiding principles to rigid guidelines that encourage lip service rather than genuine, value-based action.

How are values created? - Value specifications versus value streams

Furthermore, such values are far too coarse-grained to serve as real guidelines for day-to-day behaviour. There is a danger here of confusing organisational value specifications with the actual, lived and finely woven ‘value streams’. Real organisational life is far richer and more turbulent than what is described in official documents.

It is therefore worth looking at values from a different perspective that does not rely on mechanistic metaphors. In this context, values are the results of complex interactions, relationships and experiences within a human system. They emerge from the interplay of multiple factors, including individual beliefs, social dynamics and organisational cultures.

They emerge from the sum total of all daily interactions, decisions and experiences of everyone in the organisation. They evolve as the organisation itself evolves. They are therefore an expression of the collective intelligence and adaptive learning of an organisation and show what is really important to the company. In short, values are like an organisation's dynamic navigation system, constantly updating itself to keep it on the best path.

Building a culture of values

• How do people treat each other?
• How do managers treat their employees?
• Which values are exemplified?
• What kind of meeting culture prevails?
• Are mistakes allowed?
• How are decisions made?
• How do people learn?
• Do employees trust each other?
• All of this reveals the underlying finely spun ‘value currents’ which - consciously or unconsciously - have a culture-  forming effect in their entirety.