Sometimes Ambiguous, Sometimes Completely Unknown

Each time we kick off our Emerging Leader Development course, Cindy and I open with a slide detailing the importance of having and exemplifying core business values. In one of the first we ever provided on site for a large organization, Cindy shared her experience serving on the Maxwell Leadership President’s Advisory Council, learning not just the acronym for remembering their values but what each of those values looked like for members of that group. I followed that by sharing some of the general ideas most companies have at least woven into their values - like safety, quality, or service - then asked that very seasoned group of supervisors and managers to list their organizational values. A few of them fumbled through random guesses before one had had enough and blurted out that no one in the room had any idea what their corporate office listed as their formal values. As awkward as that moment was, his blunt comment ended the suffering. Feeling like I had irritated an old wound, I changed gears and challenged the group to develop a list of values that they could rally their respective teams around, with hopes of not calling too much undesired attention to how any existing values within the company had (or had not) been communicated. Since that time, we’ve been very intentional to ask about the organization’s specific values in our initial conversations before ever starting a training session.

As uncomfortable as I was when that happened, I shouldn’t have been surprised. As I shared before, I can’t list the stated values from the organization I spent nearly two decades with, and I was involved in the new hire onboarding process for three-quarters of that time! Even with a well-intended initiative to roll out values from the ivory tower (corporate office), George Bernard Shaw’s statement can ring far too true; “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

Even in a few of the cases where we discussed the organization’s values in detail with the manager or owner bringing us on site, we’ve still seen a lot of folks with the deer-in-the-headlights look when we’ve asked them to detail their company’s values; think back to the example I shared where those values were on the wall in the room and the participants still struggled to list them… With each of these situations fresh in mind, should we really be surprised with how things unfolded at Enron even with values as simple as respect, integrity, communication, and excellence? While each had basic and clear definitions listed to provide more context, I can certainly understand how other more immediate pressures could cause employees to bend each to fit what they felt like they had to do to hit their targets.

Before we dig into how seldom folks know the behavior required to even meet expectations or what we can do to alleviate that problem, let’s consider what ambiguity is really costing our own organizations. I realize the article I referenced before that detailed a large tech firm’s “staggering $75 million loss attributed to misaligned goals and unclear expectations” may not resonate with most of us - since most of us aren’t working in large tech firms. Without knowing the name of that firm, who knows what percentage of their revenue or profit that represents? While we could write it off that easily, could you come up with a better way of using that $75 million, regardless of the percentage? Since I know that answer, we’ll look at how to connect those statistics to our own situation next…