The compass within (solid core, part 4)
In The Culture Code, Dan Coyle recalls in 1982 when J&J learned, to their horror, that seven people died in Chicago after ingesting cyanide-laced Tylenol. They faced a crisis they were utterly unprepared for, they had no playbook. But they had something much more powerful that drove one of their first decisions (ignoring advice from FDA and the FBI) to recall all 31 million pills on the market at a cost of $100 million. As the crisis unfolded, they continued to make decisions based on The J&J Credo written in 1943 by Robert Wood Johnson that begins with:
“We believe our first responsibility is to doctors, nurses, and patients; to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services…”
The New York Times predicted Tylenol was finished as a business, their writer declaring, “I don’t think they can ever sell another product under that name.” Coyle tells us that trust rebuilt after ”innovating tamper-proof packaging, implementing exchange, disposal, and refund programs . . . and partnering with government, law enforcement, and the media.” The brand’s current status speaks for itself.
Then CEO James Burke said, “We had to make hundreds of decisions on the fly; hundreds of people made thousands of decisions . . . Those thousands of decisions all had a splendid consistency about them, and that was that the public was going to be served first . . . the Credo ran that. Because the hearts and minds of people who were J&J and who were making the decisions in a whole series of disparate companies . . . they all knew what to do.”
That’s what values do. They tell us what to do, how to act and react, how to decide (organizationally and personally) in good times and in times of confusion, chaos, and hardship. When we veer from them, as we all do, they are that invisible conscience sitting on our shoulder telling us to get back on track.
We’ve talked about vision and mission as the first two components of a solid core. The third, core values, are the seeds from which the vision and mission sprout.
Putting words to values
Core values — organizational or personal — already exist. They are not what we want to be, they are what we are. They are our truth, what we stand for and hold important. While we may evolve how we express our values, they don’t change — they have guided us all along.
Values have to be true and lived. They have to be primary. They have to be relevant for every part of the organization and every aspect of our lives. They are often common and widely shared. We’re not going to be the only ones who think our patients or customers or family come first, yet if this value defines us, it’s core. In J&J’s credo, Responsibility is primary. It’s an ordinary and overused word, yet it powerfully drove an entire organization to work in lockstep when faced with a crisis demanding rapid-fire decisions and little time to stop and analyze.
When facilitators help people and organizations establish their values, they often provide a list of values and guide them to zoom in on the ones that most fit. This feels backwards, and can result in choosing values that we want to have, rather than the values that actually hold true. Instead, we must find the words that exquisitely describe what already guide us.
In organizations, values can’t be set at a leadership offsite or spun by communications or PR people. To put words to the values that already exist, Jim Collins suggests assembling a Mars team: “Imagine you’ve been asked to recreate the very best attributes of your organization on another planet, but you only have seats on the rocket ship for five to seven people. Who would you send?”
This team of people work together to unearth the organization’s values through data mining the truth, using prompts like:
Which words describe how we behave and make decisions each day? What about when we hit obstacles or challenges?
What do we say when we’re asked what it’s like to work for this organization?
What stories do we tell about our organization? What values come out in those stories?
What’s so important to us that we would continue to be guided by it even if it could have a negative impact on our organizational results?
Collins urges us to keep the number of values to three: “if there are more than three, there aren’t any.” It takes a lot of effort and awareness to know what is truly primary. But it pays off, and I’ve found that if an organization has more than three core values, people will sort to the dominant three that guide them, and they’re usually the same ones for everyone.
Once a draft set of values has been unearthed, getting feedback from the organization is essential. It helps fine-tune them, and get buy-in to their authenticity. And, before they’re cemented, pressure-test them. Observe the organization through the lens of the values for a couple of months. Are these the primary values that really guide us? Is anything missing? Is anything not true?
These same prompts, and some of the tools for discovering our purpose also unearth our personal values: the River of Life exercise shines light on what has guided us. The stories we tell about ourselves reveal our values. Ask people close to you which three words describe you. Our friends and family hold a mirror to the values we live.
The beginning of the beginning
We’ve now discovered how to create the solid core, and it’s only the beginning. In the last of the solid core posts coming next, we’ll talk about embedding them in our lives and organizations.