Communicating Values
As we’ve posted in the past, employees discern corporate priorities and strategies first by watching management’s policy decisions, and then by reading management messages. A recent Minneapolis Star Tribune story further illustrates the point, but in this case related to value statements. In the article writer Dale Dauten claims:
As practiced in most companies, a “values statement” is the gas that fills the leadership vacuum, a forgotten set of words on a poster that, when they are noticed at all, remind those who see them of the company’s shortcomings.
We agree … value statements (and their close cousin, vision statements) are often the most empty, and as a result least credible, of all internal leadership messages.
The Coaching Point: The answer is not to banish value statements altogether, but to communicate them via policy decisions (as did the company in the article) rather than via posters or wallet cards For example, if one of the corporate values is diversity, leadership can communicate the legitimacy of that value by implementing diversity training or similar initiatives … doing so will communicate the importance of diversity with more impact and clarity than can any media product.
Communicate values through decisions, and then when you do produce a values wallet card or poster, it serves as a reminder of the credibility of those values, and not of a leadership team that talks values, but never acts.
