Shared Values - Hit or myth?

A post in Stephen Billing's blog, entitled Three Reasons Not To Aim For Shared Values, has sparked an interesting discussion on the credibility of establishing "Shared Values" within an organization, and on the worth of striving to do so. 

The need for Shared Values has been one of the taken-for-granted assumptions of management orthodoxy for almost 30 years now. Pursuing it consumes a lot of time, effort and money, as development programmes, HR policies, formal communication initiatives and so on are designed and implemented to bring these about.

But is it right to view the idea of Shared Values as one of the 'hits' of leadership practice?  Or, as Billing argues, is the perceived benefit that these bring to an organization a myth that needs to be challenged?

The genesis of the idea

The pursuit of "Shared Values" as a central tenet of leadership practice came to the fore in the early 1980s. The term first rose to prominence when it was positioned at the centre of McKinsey’s "7-S Framework" in the bestseller In Search of Excellence, written by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman. Their colleagues from McKinsey, Richard Pascale and Anthony Athos, had published a version of the framework a year earlier, in 1981. In The Art of Japanese Management, they had used the term "Superordinate Goals" at its centre, rather than Shared Values. But, as in the then contemporary clash between VHS and Betamax, Shared Values won through and Superordinate Goals was consigned to the dustbin of history.

A common-sense response?

For managers to seek to instil a uniform set of shared values across an organization seems like common sense. If people have a commonly-held view of what’s important, they will be better placed to think and act in concert. For this to happen, so the argument goes, managers need to distil the essence of the desired organization into a statement of core values (either working alone or in consultation with others in the organization), and then to communicate these widely. When arrived at, this statement will often also be used to inform such things as recruitment and promotion, performance assessment, personal development plans and so on – at least in principle.

Complex social dynamics of organization

What this rationale ignores though, as Billing points out, are the complex social dynamics of organization. Organizations are made up of people in continuous, diverse and shifting patterns of interaction. Outcomes emerge from this interactional (essentially conversational) process and from the actions that this generates.

At the same time, these emergent outcomes affect the ongoing patterns of interaction in a reflexive way. Most obviously in this respect, any new structures, systems or processes that result will clearly impact upon the nature and content of formal interactions going forward. But many informal outcomes emerge as well, which powerfully influence ongoing interactions. Most particularly here, the more that people make sense of emerging events in one way rather than another, the more likely they are to make similar sense of things in the future. That is to say, as the conversational process continues over time, patterns of taken-for-granted assumptions will emerge that reflect the nature of previous sense-making. And these assumptions will tend to channel ongoing sense-making down familiar, well-trodden pathways.

It is important to recognize that these interactions occur ‘locally’. In other words, they take place in one-to-one and small group settings. This is the case whether we think about the interactions between senior executives or members of the organization at large. Individuals can only meaningfully interact with a few people at a time – even if they happen to be the CEO or Department Head.

This means that an organization-wide statement from on high can only ever be a ‘call to arms’. What happens as a result of it will depend solely on the interplay of the actions that people take locally, in response to the sense-making conversations that the statement sparks. And the impact of the statement on everyday organizational life will be heavily conditioned by the particular circumstances that people find themselves in whenever they are called upon to make value-based choices.

So, whenever a declaration of Shared Values (or any other statement of intent) is communicated formally, this merely provides a further input to the ongoing, self-organizing process of local interaction. Insofar as people consciously attend to the formally stated values, the meaning that they take from them and their relative salience will depend on interpretation and negotiation in the moment of their interaction with others. Each of these interactions - which occur at specific times, in specific situations and between specific people - will be influenced by:

• participants’ personal frames of reference (including their own beliefs and values), through which they pursue their self-interests, seek to maintain a sense of competence and self-worth, and strive to keep all of their important relationships in a desirable state; and
• the in-built structural tensions and contradictions that are inherent in the design of all organizations.

So, as Billing says, these interactions are unavoidably conflictual (and political). At the same time, the essence of human relating is being able to navigate one’s way through these interactions in ways that are mutually satisfactory and that allow people to continue on together. It is therefore this natural and essential process of human interaction and sense-making that is "shared", not the values that consciously inform the choices made by people along the way.

Only in the sense that the taken-for-granted patterns of (cultural) assumptions tend to channel sense-making down familiar pathways might it be reasonable to think in terms of shared ‘values’ of any kind. But these assumptions:

• emerge and become embedded through this same conversational process, not by managerial dictat;
• reflect the ways in which people have jointly made sense of their everyday, ‘real world’ experiences of organizational life, not an idealized and abstract view of it;
• are much more fragmented across the organization than is implied by the 'monoculture' view of Shared Values; and
• are not immediately open to conscious reflection.

Leading through words and deeds

For leaders, then, how they are perceived to speak and act in the everyday give and take of organizational interaction will have a substantially greater impact on organizational outcomes than any formal statement of "Shared Values" that they or others might make.

Comments

[Stephen Billing]

As usual, very well said Chris.

[Bill Stagg]

Chris, your comments come both as a revelation and in the nick of time. My organization was poised to unleash a "shared values/culture change" initiative that, it turns out, was heavy on the directive and training front, and skinny on the messier, informal side of change. Thankfully, circumstances have caused us to pause before pulling the trigger. After knocking back a few of your postings and the first chapter of Informal Coalitions (just received, thank you), we have in hand information that confirms our unease at taking the traditional bus to change. I look forward to blending Informal Coalitions into our cultural change efforts. Bravo, and many thanks...

[Chris Rodgers]

Many thanks, Bill, for your positive comments about this and other posts on the blog. I’m glad that these have helped you in some small way to rethink your strategy and settle on a different course. I hope you enjoy reading Informal Coalitions and that it further stimulates your thinking. If you have any queries of other comments, I’d be delighted to hear them. Good luck with the continuing challenges of change! All the best, Chris.