A Values Based Organization

Our group at work (about 250 employees or so) has just been informed that the leadership team has completed figuring out what the three top values are key to our becoming a values based organization. The team has settled on, "Excellence, Collaboration, and Integrity." After a little wry humor at the expense of this decision, I'll discuss what I think we could have selected that would have been better.

First of all, it's great to see we are in fine company. The Albany Medical Center, California Polytechnic, the Muncie, Indiana Center Township Trustee’s Office, and the Le Bocage International School are just a few examples of other organizations that share this vision. On the other hand, by adopting these values, we may be locked out of other endeavors.

Dennis Nyback tells us that by not striving for mediocrity, rather than excellence, we may not have success in creating Hollywood movies. I've had trouble finding anyone who suggests that a lack of integrity is a good thing. I don't have to look far to find a culture that's generally the opposite of collaboration, as we have that right at home at Microsoft in our ingrained competitive culture. I compete with my peers for review scores, bonuses, and stock grants already, as we are reviewed annually on a curve. No matter how good you are at your job, if your peers are better, you get the low review score.

From that perspective, collaboration as a value for our organization seems relatively reasonable, although it will be a tough sell because when the rubber meets the road, Microsoft's all about competition. It seems like in the process of picking three values for our organization, we totally wasted two of the slots. Who, at least at an organization like Microsoft that at least tries to screen for excellence in the hiring process, isn't going to already have excellence and integrity as goals in their jobs? Don't you think this would come out in plenty of other ways such that those people would be gone from the organization in short order? Of course, many very advanced organizations have picked integrity as a core value they wish to express explicitly. A read through Man on a Mission, a blog of mission statements, reveals many instances of integrity as a stated value. (Incidentally, that's a blog that is well worth reading if you are involved in establish vision or mission statements for an organization.)

It seems to me that if we are going to stick with only three values as our focus, we've wasted two of the slots on things people are going to do anyway. So, if I can get behind collaboration, but not excellence and integrity (remember, just as stated values, not as values in general!) what would I replace them with? If I don't offer up alternatives, I'm just whining, after all.

Ownership: When faced with a problem, whether it's a customer issue, an organizational inefficiency, or some other sort of issue that can be corrected, an employee should exhibit ownership. That is, he should follow the discovered problem through to resolution, even if he is not the one to fix the problem personally. It's easy to refer a customer to a support alias and then forget about the problem. It's hard, but valuable to the organization, to watch that customer issue and make sure the problem is truly resolved, not delivered into the void somewhere leaving the customer dissatisfied. The same goes for other types of problems as well.

"Coventuring": The word "coventure" isn't in the dictionary. Rather, I took that from Why Not?, a book I read on the flight to Alaska on Wednesday. In the final chapter on how to persuade others to pursue the great ideas developed by using the techniques described earlier in the book, the authors describe coventuring as the process of convincing the target audience to become constructive critics interested in overcoming the obstacles with you rather than applying knee-jerk objections to dismiss the ideas. I imagine a culture where employees don't need to go through the persuasion process because the target audience naturally adopts a coventuring approach to new ideas as part of the organizational values, where the automatic answer to an innovative, "I have an idea" is "How can I help?"

Some might argue that these are just two more ways to say collaboration. Perhaps they are, but they are actionable facets of collaboration that really mean something and are a change to the day-to-day behaviors exhibited in our organization (and many others.) At worst, we end up with three overlapping values rather than one indistinct value and two that should be present by default. As I've said before in my post on synergistic goals, some level of overlap between goals is part of a recipe for greater success.

The group that did this work is intelligent, creative, and well-intentioned. That I think they could have done a better job shouldn't be taken that I think less of them - vision and mission development is a very tough task, ripe for Dilbertesque scenarios. At least they didn't settle on, "Quality is Job SP1."