Have you ever felt a visceral reaction when asked to do something unexpected, or when denied something that seemed obvious to you? Emotions play a part, no doubt, but it’s worth considering to what extent deeply-held values are being challenged in these scenarios.
I recently joined a session hosted by Oasis Human Relations, with guest speaker Arnold Smit, author of Making Values Real. It was fascinating and has provoked a lot of thought in me. One of the dimensions we considered during the session was personal values versus organisational values.
I’m sure I’m not alone in seeing carefully crafted words on office walls and wondering who on Earth thought they were a good idea, and quite how long ago the leadership team’s away day happened? These abstract words can look like senior leaders’ aspirations, with a pretty poster as the only attempt to shift behaviours and create common purpose among customer-facing staff who have many more immediate priorities. Forgive my cynicism!
Yet at the personal level, we all hold values, and often we share similar ideals. Arnold listed five values that any one of us might say when asked:
- honesty
- respect
- responsibility
- fairness and
- compassion.
Some of these might be written on a poster on an office wall near you, right now. I’m going to use these as some examples of values in this post, and see where they take me.
You can see why businesses want to state their values: when they resonate with employees, they create a sense of empowerment. Workers add discretionary effort when what they do, feels like it matters. There’s a buzz that comes from real job satisfaction. A unity of purpose.
But the converse is so often true. Values imposed from above, devoid of meaning, are irrelevant. Work continues how it always has, regardless of those good intentions.
And maybe there’s a third scenario. The words are given meaning, workers do engage with the values statements, but there’s no help when tensions emerge. Being honest all of the time might not be compassionate. Showing respect for one person might come across as unfair to another. That’s when the values start to come alive, when we’re forced to reckon with our different interpretations of what’s right in the circumstances.
Then we need to put all of this under pressure, as happens in business: something big goes wrong. Do we start fibbing to customers about what’s happening? Where’s the respect in that? Can we shift the blame to someone else? Fail to take responsibility and act unfairly in one simple step. Where did the compassion go? It strikes me that values matter most, when they’re at greatest risk. If they are just ‘nice-to-have’ then they’ll be ditched at the first sign of panic. To embed behaviours that survive in the real world takes awareness, understanding and skill.
I opened this piece with that ‘punch to the gut’ sense when our personal values are infringed. If organisational values were lived in this way too, how much more meaningful might work become? And if we felt them like we feel our personal values, then surely they’d stay with us in high-risk situations, enabling us to role-model as leaders in crisis.
This train of thought got me musing on various aspects of my life, and I’d like to share a story from my early career using the lens of values to develop understanding. It’s a tale of missed opportunity but it’s also a moment of vulnerability that we’d now describe as lacking psychological safety. It might also hint at why organisational values aren’t often so deeply embedded as personal ones.
I began my career as a chemical engineer, and the expected progression was to become a plant manager after a few years in a technical role. I knew this when I signed up and I was happy to go along with the bravado among my new-graduate peers. I got one of the first transfers out to the works, the manufacturing site, where I went deep into environmental improvement projects on a technically complex plant that was responsible for a lot of emissions, including sulphurous smells across the neighbourhood. We had a lot of complaints.
Eventually, the career conversation came up. My manager offered me the chance to become plant manager on a smaller, sister plant, with which I’d had no prior involvement. I sat there in silence for longer than was polite, and then I said No.
With that single word, my career path closed and my manager and his seniors were left with a headache as to what to do with me. So began a series of sideways moves until I took redundancy and left, never to work as an engineer again.
Underneath that word No, there were so many emotions and tensions and conflict; none of which were spoken. None of which were invited.
If values are just words written on a poster, you might also choose to leave things there.
But what if we were to unpack some of what was going on for me in that moment? What if personal values might have enriched me and my manager, and the wider organisation, at that inflection point. Let’s dig into what was left unsaid:
- First of all, there was the insult of being transferred to the small sister plant when I’d spent years working with the complexity of the main plant.
- That was followed quickly by the anxiety of leading people and processes that I knew almost nothing about.
- Then there was something deeper. I’d spent years trying to improve environmental performance, having discovered that pollution was considered OK in that company and that sending stuff to the estuary, to landfill and into the atmosphere were just words on a process flowchart. I could hold up my head to say that I was making a difference, albeit small, from the role I was in. To suddenly become responsible for processes generating an impact on the environment was a completely different matter. I couldn’t reconcile that, even though it had been my assumed career path. Confronted with the decision, I knew I couldn’t take this on.
- And then I considered what was happening in this conversation. My manager had provided me with no preparation for this decision: I had no idea that he thought the small plant would be better suited for my next step; and I’d been given no hint to spend time on the other plant. What kind of development process was he providing – and how would things work out if I took the job? There were bound to be situations that I hadn’t experienced before; problems beyond my knowledge. Would he leave me to it then, as well? You can see there wasn’t much of a relationship here, and this conversation wasn’t changing any of that.
- This was a man who had previously told me that my problem was that I lacked confidence, making sure that when I stayed silent in meetings, I understood it to be all my own fault, even though none of my colleagues ever asked me what I thought. And here we are again: my decision, my fault.
No to all of this!
I have the long view on this moment now; it happened over 30 years ago and the manager is long dead. He was doing his best, I’m sure, but what a wasted opportunity. If I’d felt able to say anything about the passion I felt for cleaning up the processes, where might that have taken me with a different manager? The company wasn’t set up for unexpected moves, so maybe they’d have persuaded me to take the job, continue on the career track, and become better established so as to have more impact. Being part of the manufacturing process would have given me a whole new set of insights and far greater credibility. Maybe it was too soon for me to shake things up, especially as a young woman in a heavily patriarchal organisation. I’ll never know. I can’t help but think that this interaction was just one of countless reasons why this company ultimately failed. It’s a window into organisational decline. If we can’t have an honest conversation, what’s the point?
Thinking back to that an on the other side of the desk, I was always on my guard. I suppose I didn’t hold him in a lot of respect: I always felt he’d been promoted beyond his capabilities. None of it felt fair. There was no compassion. I felt no inclination to help him be a better leader, but maybe I had a choice about this. He was my official route to getting things done.
I’d come into the industry in order to take responsibility for change, but that purpose became muddled as the strictures of how things were done within the hierarchy conflicted with what became my approach in the absence of formal power: finding allies and making things happen where we could. I have no memory of what this company’s stated values were, but I was made to feel like a cog in the machine. A cog that didn’t really fit. A cog that wasn’t valued.
That conversation played out with unspoken values, and if only we’d explored them in dialogue, we might at least have started to build a proper working relationship that could have enabled so much more. When I remember this manager, I see quite an elderly man. There had been a fashion for taking early retirement at 50, but not him. That suggests dedication, and probably a low appetite for the risk of trying something new. He held a deeply Christian faith, yet there was nothing in this conversation that spoke of compassion. Giving me the easier plant was maybe his answer to this? I do think he assumed that once I got married, I’d leave and have children, but that was never my plan. Here was another set of assumptions that went unchallenged. As a graduate of University College London, I was one of the ‘godless of Gower Street’ and felt the chasm in our world views. And now I wonder if that lack of confidence with which he’d labelled me was actually a trait he recognised in himself. I speculate, but maybe his plan was to disappoint my career and make me reconsider whether family shouldn’t be a bigger priority. That never happened; I have no regrets.
If only we’d talked…
Reflecting on this story through the lens of values has been powerful for me. Personal values can be visceral. They’re deeply held. They drive how we think, feel and act. Replaying this story can still surface anger, resentment and frustration for me, even after all this time. The ‘what might have been’ still tantalises me.
If I’m going to take up my responsibilities, then sharing the story is only the first step. Where is this train of thought taking you? I could jump off right now and explore why project management probably always was a better fit for me than operations, but also how I’ve developed structure to cope with everyday routine to free up my time for the new. That might have been a great way to tackle plant management, too. And what have I learned about working with people with whom I have fundamental disagreements? Save that for another day, too.
But let’s come back to values: personal and organisational. Arnold talks about societal and professional values too, but these initial headings have given me enough scope for this post.
- What if organisational values were as deeply held as the personal values with which we each show up to work every day?
- What if they aligned so well that we could be one and the same person, at work and in life?
Maybe that’s not the ideal: absorbing your identity into your job can be problematic; although it might also be a definition of having a vocation. I’m a serial entrepreneur because my brand shifts along with my identity over time, but that’s not everyone’s choice.
What I do know is that there’s room for more expression of what truly matters to us, in this time of polycrisis. The old world order has brought us to an unsustainable way of living. Upholding our deeper values might achieve the transformation that’s needed, personally and at the corporate level.
What do you think?
