Here is an excerpt from an article written by Donald Sull and Charles Sull for MIT Sloan Management Review. To read the complete article, check out others, sign up for email alerts, and obtain subscription information, please click here.
Illustration Credit: Aleksandar Savic
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The bad news about “core” cultural values: In most organizations, employees say leaders don’t walk the talk. Learn from six well-known leaders who know how to do better.
Most companies espouse an official corporate culture. We studied nearly 700 large corporations and more than 8 in 10 published core values on their websites. Core values are ubiquitous — but unfortunately, in most organizations, core values are also irrelevant. When we analyzed more than 1 million online job reviews, we discovered virtually no correlation between the values the companies emphasized and how highly employees rated them on these supposed core values.
Only a handful of companies, which we call the Culture Champions, buck the trend and consistently walk the talk of their espoused core values, according to employee reviews. In a series of podcasts, we have spoken with leaders of several of these companies, including HubSpot, the Lego Group, Bain & Co., Hermès, and Cummins, to understand how the leaders embed core values and leadership expectations throughout the organization.
You can learn from these six key insights that they shared on how to champion your organization’s core cultural values.
[Here are the first two.]
1. Involve employees in articulating core values to ensure authenticity.
Managers sometimes cherry-pick cultural elements from other companies and attempt to impose them on their own organization. Unfortunately, those values are often divorced from organizational realities and fail to resonate with employees.
“You can’t copy and paste values across organizations,” said former HubSpot chief people officer Katie Burke. “People will say, ‘I love Netflix’s view on high performance. … I love Amazon’s solve for the customer. … I’m going to form a company, and I’m just going to pull four of those favorite values.’ And what people are missing is, does that even resonate with your business model, what you’re trying to do, your ambition, the character of your executive team? Those things have to align. … Employees can sniff out a lack of authenticity or that disconnect faster … than a speeding bullet.”
A better approach is to include employees in the process of surfacing and articulating values to ensure that they’re rooted in the company’s distinct history, leadership style, size, location, and other factors that shape corporate culture, Burke advised.
Read the full article, “How to Walk the Talk on Culture: Former HubSpot CPO Katie Burke.”
2. Enlist volunteers to embed culture throughout the organization.
A bottom-up process is a powerful way to not only articulate leadership principles but also embed them throughout the organization. “You need buy-in,” said Loren Shuster, chief people officer at the Lego Group, and “there’s only so much you could do at the top of the organization.” You need as many employees as possible to be truly committed to upholding the organization’s purpose and executing the strategy, he said.
As the Lego Group evolved its culture, Shuster asked for volunteers from 1,200 teams within the company to serve as “playground builders.” Those volunteers didn’t need to work in HR or be the most senior person on their team. “We said, ‘Whoever is interested in shaping the leadership culture of the Lego Group for the next strategy round, please raise your hand.’ And then those individuals became a community,” Shuster said.
The Lego Group brought the playground builders together, introduced them to the company’s leadership principles, and trained them in facilitation skills. Then those individuals went back to their teams and started the discussion around the new leadership model, Shuster explained, tackling topics like what bravery means for a consumer services team in China versus a store associate team in a shop in the U.S. The leadership behaviors were particularly crucial elements in discussions about difficult trade-offs between, for instance, sales targets and environmental impact, Shuster said.
But volunteering to be a playground builder is not a one-way street, Shuster explained. The company’s promise to employees: “If you do this, you’ll learn new skills, you’ll be able to engage differently, and then, hopefully, you could advance your career on the back of that,” he said.
Read the full article, “How the Lego Group Built Culture Change: From the Ground Up.”
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