Find Your Why: a practical Guide for Discovering Purpose for You and Your Team pdfdrive com

Corporate Values Versus HOWs
The underlying process for expressing an organization’s HOWs is very similar to
the individual approach. A tribe’s HOWs are its guiding principles, derived from
the themes that emerged during the Why Discovery process. And yet, very often
when we are brought in to do a Tribe Why Discovery, the organization already
has a socialized set of values. In many cases, even though the values may be
written in big letters on the wall, we are able to quickly assess that few people
actually know what they mean. If you ask a handful of people at different levels
of the organization what their core value “integrity” means and you hear a
handful of different answers, that is your sign.
Many of us have worked for a company that listed its core values on every
conference room wall. Included were such garden-variety buzzwords as
“honesty,” “hard work,” “diversity” and, yes, “integrity.” These values are all
fine and good. But they are not HOWs.

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Most companies don’t ground their core values in an understanding of how the
organization performs when at its best. Core values are generally aspirational.
They express the qualities the company would like its employees to embody
rather than those it actually displays. Remember, HOWs are not aspirational.
They do not express who we want to be. They express the ways we actually
behave—the things we actually do—when we are at our best.
The other difference between HOWs and core values is that values are not, in
and of themselves, actions. “Courtesy” is a value. “Treat people with kindness
and respect” is a HOW. The distinction is even more important when the
applications of a core value are not immediately apparent. Imagine someone
coming to work on their first day of a new job and seeing a poster of the
company’s core values in the cafeteria. Seeing the word “integrity,” they might
think, “Okay, sure. But what do you want me to do?” Now imagine that same
employee is given a copy of the company’s Why Statement and sees the HOW
“Always tell the truth.” Then later that day at the training they hear their
supervisor say, “We do not misrepresent the effectiveness of our product even to
make a sale.” In this case they’d probably say, “Got it! I can do that.” If we
expect people to live the core values of an organization, we have to be able to
tell them what those values look like in action. In other words, the HOWs must
be simple and actionable.
Sometimes we meet with the leadership of the organization and for various
reasons they are attached to their current list of values. It could be that it’s been
socialized for so long they think it would be inauthentic to just change them out
of the blue. It could be that they just spent millions of dollars to have a big firm
help them come up with and roll out their values and changing them would feel
wishy washy. Whatever the reason, if you find yourself in that situation, we
suggest going through the Tribe Approach process exactly as advised in chapters
4 and 5, then use the themes discovered to add some color to the corporate
values they already have. You likely will find a few clear intersections of what
they already have and the themes you found. Help them make a deeper and more
meaningful connection where things naturally come together.