5 Core Values for the Workplace
There are many fine values, such as courtesy, confidence, ingenuity, thrift, and so on. The trouble is that the list of values grows easily and can cause many employees to lose their focus. They fail to prioritize. A “short list” of values is far more useful in putting the workplace back on track.
Moreover, when the core values exceed four or five points, it becomes difficult to communicate and reinforce them. The following are five candidates for the practical values having foremost importance:
Integrity
Accountability
Diligence
Perseverance
Discipline
INTEGRITY
Integrity is no simple matter. It is particularly easy for business people to lie. There seems to be some compelling reasons to lie in certain situations. Although we’ve heard a few plausible defences of lying, I’m not sure it is ever justified. Once a company starts to condone lying as a matter of course, it is headed for serious trouble. In such businesses, lying becomes a game. And success goes to those who play it best.
In an article titled, “Where Lying Was Business as Usual,” Businessweek reviewed a book on the Wedtech Scandal, a Washington scandal of the late ‘80s in which a few government officials fed fat contracts to a dubious supplier. The reviewer, Harris Collingwood, concludes his piece, saying, “In the end, what’s remarkable about the Wedtech gangsters isn’t that they were crude and thuggish. It’s that among the sharp-elbowed hordes pushing through Washington’s corridors of power, they didn’t even stand out.”
ACCOUNTABILITY
The value of accountability is the willingness to take responsibility for one’s own actions.
Bob Waterman has written a penetrating little book, Adhocracy: The Power to Change. It narrates an engaging story about accountability in an energy-cogenerating firm called AES. The people in the Beaver Valley, Pennsylvania, AES plant learned what many workers and managers know across the country: They learned who is responsible for the way things run. The answer, of course, is that they are. “They,” however, is not anyone of them, but rather a nameless, faceless force hiding in the organization. These powerful secret terrorists, these mega-gremlins — “they” — are always there to gum up the works.
They send the wrong material handling orders. They misprocess the medical claims. They forget to clean and maintain the machinery.
A courageous top manager in this firm, Bob Hemphill — who is a leader, no doubt about it — decided to declare war on “they.” He sent out coffee mugs emblazoned with, “Who is they anyway?” He put up posters that read: “Send they a letter.”
With a healthy sense of humor, AES eliminated the rationalization, “They make us do it.” It was no longer an acceptable excuse. In a particularly clever step, the workers created a system of organization called the honeycomb structure and organized themselves into families: the turbine family, the coal-pile family and the scrubber family. Workers were also encouraged to move from family to family to expand their range of skills. In this way, AES was able to make the breakthrough on accountability, as each “family” also provided a framework of values that, in turn, became a basis for improving accountability.
DILIGENCE
There are scores of individuals who equate diligence with drudgery. Too often, managers demand diligence about the wrong things: filling out forms is one, glaring example.
According to Arno Penzias, the head of research at Bell Labs, the mother of one of his teachers at Columbia used to ask her son persistently when he was just a young school child, “Did you ask any good questions today, Isaac?” The question was not what did you learn in school today, but what good questions did you ask. The mother’s priority must have had an impact on Penzias, because he eventually helped institutionalize the practice of asking useful questions at AT&T Ben Labs. Asking tough questions has become a hallmark of AT&T research culture and has helped to establish Bell Laboratories as one of the great creative institutions in America. The best firms are diligent about uncommon things — for example, asking creative questions.
Diligence that nurtures strength makes a difference. Indeed, a diligent commitment to improving their already powerful position is what makes the Japanese a formidable competitor in the electronic and automotive industries. Similarly, the Japanese philosophy of perpetual quality improvement is a restless, but positive diligence.
PERSEVERANCE
Perseverance presupposes confidence, and few companies can match Xerox for its sense of confidence and determination. Xerox, which pioneered the photocopying business, lost important ground to the Japanese on price. Now, Xerox is reviving its copying business by focusing on the value added by advanced technologies and color copying. Focused leadership over time implies productive, useful perseverance.
In the ‘80s, “cutting your losses” quickly was fashionable thinking. In the future, companies won’t be able to exit and enter businesses as quickly as in the last decade. The initial costs of entry, especially for marketing, will be prohibitive. Once the massive investment has been made, it becomes increasingly awkward to justify abandoning the business. The vice chairman of the holding company that includes Revlon said in the Wall Street Journal, “[W]e aren’t going to spend $30 million to launch a deodorant.” The minimum stakes can be staggering, and the entry costs for other kinds of products are, in fact, much higher.
DISCIPLINE
How little we know about discipline in modern business! Because of our passion to make things simple, we err and also try to make them easy. As the great battlefield strategist von Clausewitz pointed out, the simple and the easy are not synonymous.
AI Neuharth launched Today, the prototype for USA Today, in Florida back in 1966. Two weeks before the first issue, Neuharth reported that his employees “produced complete prototypes of the paper every day — printed them, put them on trucks, dropped them at delivery points to pinpoint timing, then picked them up and burned them at the local dump to keep them out of the hands of the competition.” In my view, USA Today is assured great commercial success in journalism. In no small measure, it stems from the remarkable discipline that went into building the paper.
Discipline does not always imply following orders. Sometimes, it points in the opposite direction. Business Month named MCI one of the five best-managed companies in 1990. The late Bill McCowan, MCI’s former Chairman and CEO, did “his best to ban... standard procedures and practices.” He would get up in front of his people and say: “I know that somewhere, someone out there is trying to write up a manual on procedures. Well, one of these days I’m going to find out who you are, and when I do, I’m going to fire you.” For McCowan, I think, discipline meant that individuals are required to think on their feet. They have to solve problems sensibly from the earliest days of their careers.
