There are many fine values, such as courtesy, confidence, ingenuity, thrift, and so on. The trouble is that the list of values grows easily and can cause many employees to lose their focus. They fail to prioritize. A “short list” of values is far more useful in putting the workplace back on track.
Moreover, when the core values exceed four or five points, it becomes difficult to communicate and reinforce them. The following are five candidates for the practical values having foremost importance:
- Integrity
- Accountability
- Diligence
- Perseverance
- Discipline
INTEGRITY
Integrity is no simple matter. It is particularly easy for business people to lie. I compiled a list of 46 reasons that executives lie. They include:
If I didn’t lie about my loyalty to the firm, they would never have promoted me.
If I hadn’t lied, I would have exposed our firm to an unfair lawsuit.
If the union knew our real profit prospects, they would beat us black-and-blue at the bargaining table.
There seems to be some compelling reasons to lie in certain situations. Although I’ve heard a few plausible defenses of lying, I’m not sure it is ever justified. Once a company starts to condone lying as a matter of course, it is headed for serious trouble. In such businesses, lying becomes a game. And success goes to those who play it best.
ACCOUNTABILITY
The value of accountability is the willingness to take responsibility for one’s own actions.
Bob Waterman has written a penetrating little book, Adhocracy: The Power to Change. It narrates an engaging story about accountability in an energy-cogenerating firm called AES. The people in the Beaver Valley, Pennsylvania, AES plant learned what many workers and managers know across the country: They learned who is responsible for the way things run. The answer, of course, is that they are. “They,” however, is not anyone of them, but rather a nameless, faceless force hiding in the organization. These powerful secret terrorists, these mega-gremlins — “they” — are always there to gum up the works.
DILIGENCE
There are scores of individuals who equate diligence with drudgery. Too often, managers demand diligence about the wrong things: filling out forms is one, glaring example.
PERSEVERANCE
The developers of the ulcer drug at G.D. Searle knew they had something when they invented aspartame. It took years to learn, however, that aspartame was not an ulcer drug but the heart of the revolutionary sugar substitute NutraSweet.
Perseverance presupposes confidence, and few companies can match Xerox for its sense of confidence and determination. Xerox, which pioneered the photocopying business, lost important ground to the Japanese on price. Now, Xerox is reviving its copying business by focusing on the value added by advanced technologies and color copying. Focused leadership over time implies productive, useful perseverance.
DISCIPLINE
How little we know about discipline in modern business! Because of our passion to make things simple, we err and also try to make them easy. As the great battlefield strategist von Clausewitz pointed out, the simple and the easy are not synonymous.
Obviously, there are many ways to sort and define the five cornerstone values: integrity, accountability, diligence, perseverance, and, discipline. It’s hard to contain the focus to these attributes before other supporting values come into play. Diligence presumes a sense of urgency, for example, because you can’t be just busy; you must be busy in the context of time. Perseverance also requires judgment because no one would ever persist in a patently wrongheaded course. Although they may presume other values, the five cornerstone values are a credible starting point, and, I think, can be considered a priority list of the key workplace values.