There is a lift lobby I still think about. Five values, laser cut in brushed metal, lit from behind. Somebody had spent real money on that wall. And on the way up in the lift, two people from the same team were having the kind of conversation that told you none of the five words had made it past the ground floor.
I’m not having a go at the wall. I like a good wall. The problem is what we assume it does.
In the study behind Let’s Talk Culture, almost half of people leaders (49%) strongly agreed the values were clearly communicated. Fewer than 3 in 10 strongly agreed their leaders demonstrated them. Only 36% strongly agreed the values were more than words, with the behavioural expectations clearly defined.
Communicated is not the same as defined. Defined is not the same as demonstrated.
Here’s where I’ll be honest. Early in my own leadership I would have told you our values were clear. I could recite them. What I couldn’t have told you was what ‘respect’ looked like on the afternoon a deadline moved and someone went quiet. And if I couldn’t, my team certainly couldn’t. They were guessing. Guessing is exhausting, and people guess differently.
This is what I call the clarification conversation. It has one job: turn a value into a behaviour specific enough that you could point at it. Respect means five things to five people until somebody defines it. ‘We value collaboration’ is a hope. ‘Every new project has a clear owner and a list of contributors’ is something you can see, and hold each other to.
It’s a conversation, not a rewrite. You don’t need new values. You need to sit with your team and ask, for each word on that wall, what does this look like here, with us, when it’s hard? Then write down what they say, in their words, not yours. The words a team chooses for itself get repeated. The words handed down get framed.
Try this. Pick one value. Just one. Ask your team for three behaviours they would expect to see if that value was alive in the room, and one they would expect not to see. You’ll learn more about your culture in twenty minutes than the wall has told you since it went up.