I’m going to tell you about something that has happened to me more than ten times in the last two years.
- HR Manager: We’re having trouble implementing the new culture and values.
- Me: Which ones?
- HR Manager: Well, that we can’t get people to remember them or put them into practice.
- Me: But what are the new values?
- HR Manager: Umm. Hold on, let me look at the document. We just changed them right now.
I swear. I swear it’s true. In many companies I talk to about values, not even the CEO knows them.
And not surprising, because this is how it’s done many times: someone from leadership, a Friday afternoon, between meeting and meeting, remembers that “we need to update the values”. A document is opened. Five or six pretty words are written, almost always the same ones across companies in the world: “the customer comes first,” “innovation,” “teamwork,” “excellence.” It’s sent to design to look good on a PowerPoint with a photo of people smiling in a conference room. It’s posted on the intranet. That’s it.
Reminds me of a shopping list: “Add milk. Add eggs. And add innovation too, just in case, it looks good.”
The thing is that almost no one remembers that list. And those who do don’t know what to do with it.
Don’t Start with the Values
Now imagine that company, with those PowerPoint values that even the CEO can’t remember, gets a new person to lead a team. A promotion, an external hire, doesn’t matter. And that person is told: “We have somewhat outdated values. They need a refresh.”
This idea of “giving them a turn” isn’t something I say lightly; I’ve heard it countless times. And my advice would be precisely the opposite: don’t start with the values. Because culture doesn’t live in a document. It lives in what people do every day.
For me, there are four distinct things that many companies lump together in the same bucket:
- The vision is where the company wants to go. The horizon.
- The mission is why it exists, today, every day.
Values are the rules of the game for getting there without getting lost along the way. They aren’t pretty words. They’re the criteria people use to decide when no one is looking.
And behaviors are the only thing that’s truly visible. No one sees a value walking through the office. What you see is someone who receives a customer’s problem that isn’t strictly theirs, and instead of saying “this isn’t mine” and handing it off to someone else, they find someone who can fix it and make sure it doesn’t fall through the cracks. That’s a value turned into behavior.
First: Look
Before deciding what you want to change, look. Because that company already has a culture, like it or not, written or not. And it isn’t in what it says it values, but in what it rewards, tolerates, and punishes: what happens when someone makes a mistake, when they disagree with their boss, when a project starts to go off track.
Imagine joining a team where problems always surface late, and you announce: “From now on I want transparency.” But for five years, every person who raised a hand to warn about something got chewed out. Those people didn’t learn to hide problems because nobody wrote “hide problems” on the values list. They learned by watching what happened to the person who brought bad news. And five years of learning don’t disappear with a slide.
The Question to Start With
If you’re new to leading a team and want to change its culture, I would start with a much more concrete question: what three or four behaviors do I want to see here in six months that I don’t see today?
Not “more commitment.” That’s not a behavior. Not “customer orientation.” Either. Something observable:
- That when someone detects that a project is veering off course they say so that same day, even if they don’t yet have the solution.
- That in a meeting someone can say “I disagree” regardless of who proposed the idea.
- That when an important decision is made it’s clear what data justified it and who decided.
- That when a problem moves from one person to another, someone remains responsible for ensuring it’s resolved.
Whatever makes sense in your organization. But concrete. Observable. Something that two different people can look at and reasonably agree on whether it happened or not.
Model Them Yourself First
Once you know what behaviors you want, start the real work. Because simply asking for them isn’t enough: you have to do them.
If you want people to own up to their mistakes, start by owning yours. If you want them to bring you bad news early, watch very closely how you react the next time someone brings you one. If you want people to disagree with you, don’t say you want different opinions and then spend twenty minutes proving the first dissenter that they’re wrong. People learn very quickly which behaviors are truly safe and which only appear in a slide deck.
And this doesn’t apply only to you. It applies to anyone who has people under them. If you ask for one thing and your managers do the exact opposite in day-to-day life, the team isn’t going to believe you. They’ll believe the person they see every day. If your leaders don’t do it, it won’t happen.
And Then Train Them
But modeling isn’t enough. You have to practice them. Because knowing how you should act and being able to do it when the moment is tough are two different things. A soccer player doesn’t learn to take penalties by listening to a talk about penalties. He takes them. Many times. And he gets feedback.
Here I propose something that works much better than any presentation: instead of telling your team how they should behave, show them how they’re behaving now. Stage a scene — with actors if you can — that exactly represents a real day-to-day situation where the values you say you have don’t show up anywhere. The meeting where no one says what they think. The problem that gets handed from one person to another without anyone taking responsibility. The rebuke to the one who brought the bad news.
And then, instead of you delivering the lesson, ask them: what’s happening here? What’s working and what isn’t? What would you do differently? And then, let them try. Let them steer that scene toward another ending. Let them make mistakes, receive feedback and try again, as many times as needed.
Two things happen when you do this. First, no one gets defensive, because you’re not pointing at anyone: you’re looking at a scene. Second, and more important, is that the conclusion isn’t yours in a PowerPoint. They draw it. And what someone discovers on their own isn’t forgotten as easily as what they’re told. In this way, almost without realizing it, your team will be creating and practicing your playbook of behaviors.
Real-life situations. Practice. Feedback. Again. Until the new behavior comes naturally, without thinking, even when no one is watching.
The Acid Test
There’s a simple test to know if you’ve achieved it. Imagine a new person starts tomorrow and, without a manual or corporate deck, you let them observe for a month how you and your people behave. Would they be able to guess what your values are?
If the answer is no, you don’t have a problem with communicating values. You have a problem with behavior. And that, as I’ve just explained, can be trained.
Coté Soler, CEO of BeLiquid
