Many fine values like courtesy, confidence, ingenuity, and thrift exist. However, the dilemma is that the list of values can easily grow long. Emphasizing too many values can cause employees to lose focus and fail to prioritize.
A short list of key, core values is far more useful in the workplace.
I believe these five values—integrity, accountability, diligence, perseverance and discipline—are of foremost importance. I know strong organizations that have focused on these values and have been successful because nearly always these core values generated other values in employees.
What if all organizations started with this same list? Wouldn’t that give American industry an important leg up?
5 powerful cornerstone values
Integrity
Integrity is no simple matter because it’s just too easy for business people to lie. I compiled a list of 46 reasons that executives lie that includes:
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.
Sometimes there are compelling reasons to lie in certain situations. Although I’ve heard a few plausible defenses of lying, I’m not sure it’s ever justified. Once a company starts condoning lying, it’s headed for serious trouble.
In “Where Lying Was Business as Usual,” Business Week reviewed a book about the Wedtech Scandal, a Washington scandal in the late eighties in which a few government officials fed fat contracts to a dubious supplier. The reviewer, Harris Collingwood, concludes by saying: “In the end, what’s remarkable about the Wedtech gangsters isn’t that they were crude and thuggish. It’s that among the sharp-elbowed hordes pushing through Washington’s corridors of power, they didn’t even stand out.”
Accountability
In Adhocracy: The Power to Change, Bob Waterman narrates an engaging story about accountability in the energy-cogenerating firm AES. The people in the Beaver Valley PA AES plant learned that they are responsible for the way things run.
“They,” however, isn’t any of them, but rather a nameless, faceless force hiding in the organization. These powerful mega-gremlins are always there to gum up the works. They send the wrong material handling orders. They mis-process the medical claims. They forget to clean and maintain the machinery.
A courageous top AES manager, Bob Hemphill, declared war on “they,” sending out coffee mugs emblazoned with “Who is they anyway?” and putting up posters saying “Send they a letter.”
With a healthy sense of humor, AES eliminated the rationalization “they make us do it” when it no longer was an acceptable excuse.
Diligence
Too many individuals equate diligence with drudgery; and too often managers demand diligence about the wrong things, like filling out forms.
According to Arno Penzias, the head of research at AT&T Bell Labs, the mother of one of his teachers at Columbia repeatedly asked her son when he was a young schoolchild, “Did you ask any good questions today, Isaac?” Very different from the standard question, “What did you learn in school today?”
This mother’s priority obviously impacted Penzias because he helped institutionalize the practice of asking useful questions at AT&T Bell Labs, where it became a hallmark of their culture and helped establish them as a great creative institution.
I’m afraid we lose the value of diligence as a positive force early in life. Peter Drucker has pointed out that our educational system is obsessed with people’s weaknesses. Rather than making their powerful writing skills even stronger, children weak in geography waste time on remedial geography with few results.
How do we make our strengths stronger is a positive, productive question we should ask ourselves every day.
Diligence that nurtures strength makes a difference: diligent commitment to improving their already powerful position is what makes the Japanese a formidable competitor in the electronic and automotive industries. Similarly, their philosophy of perpetual quality improvement represents positive diligence.
Perseverance
The ulcer drug developers at C.D. Searle knew they had something special when they invented aspartame. However, it took years for them to learn that aspartame wasn’t an ulcer drug but rather 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!
Our passion for making things simple causes us to err and try to make things easy, too. As the great battlefield strategist von Clausewitz pointed out, the simple and the easy are not synonymous.
AI Neuharth launched Today, the prototype for USA Today, in 1966. Two weeks before the first issue, Neuharth reported his employees had “produced complete prototypes of the paper every day — printed them, put them on trucks, dropped them at delivery points to pinpoint timing, then picked them up and burned them at the local dump to keep them out of the hands of the competition.”
In my view, USA Today is assured great commercial success in journalism. In no small measure, it stems from the remarkable discipline that went into building the paper.
Discipline doesn’t always mean following orders. Sometimes, it means pointing in the opposite direction. Business Month named MCI one of the five best-managed companies. Bill McCowan, MCI’s late former Chairman and CEO, did “his best to ban…standard procedures and practices.”
He would get up in front of his people and say: “I know that somewhere, someone out there is trying to write up a manual on procedures. Well, one of these days I’m going to find out who you are, and when I do, I’m going to fire you.” For McCowan, I think, discipline meant individuals must think on their feet, solving problems sensibly from the earliest days of their careers.
Use the 5 cornerstone values as a starting point
Obviously, there are many ways to sort and define the five cornerstone values of 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 they can be considered a priority list of the key workplace values.
In my view, management has no choice but to teach values. US business leaders have shunned talking about values because they seem to suggest a religious or moral outlook. This implication is not necessarily the case.
It’s not possible to sustain industrial competitiveness without attention to values. Ask a Japanese CEO to define his primary job, and he’s likely to tell you his role is to “harmonize” values.
Values are what motivate and sustain behavior over the long run, and these five powerful values serve as an excellent starting point.
Today’s guest post is from Robert L. Dilenschneider, founder and Chairman of The Dilenschneider Group, a global public relations and communications consulting firm headquartered in New York City, and author of many books, including the best-selling Power and Influence.
Image source before quote: Gratisography
