Values You Can Carve in Stone, and Values You Can Live

Integrity. Communication. Respect. Excellence.

Those were Enron's four values. As Dambisa Moyo recounts in How Boards Work, they were carved into the marble wall of the company's Houston lobby. When Enron collapsed in fraud and deception, she writes, those words "made for a bitterly ironic epitaph."

It's an extreme example. The pattern behind it isn't extreme at all.

The gap almost every organization admits

Moyo cites a Columbia Business School study in which 92 percent of senior executives said improving their company's culture would increase its value. Only 16 percent said their culture was where it should be. The reason respondents gave for the gap was simple: their organizations weren't putting their stated values and policies into practice.

Think about that. Nearly every leader believes culture matters. Almost none believe they've got it right. And the problem isn't the words. It's the distance between the words and the behavior.

Moyo puts it plainly: articulating a culture is, in some respects, the easy part. Embedding it so it permeates every layer of an organization is much harder.

Values are a personal brand, not a slogan

I think about organizational values the same way I think about personal brand. A personal brand isn't a tagline or a logo. It's the consistency with which you live what you were made to be. People don't believe what you say about yourself. They believe what they watch you do, especially when it costs you something.

Organizations are no different. A values statement only becomes real when employees see leaders honor it at a moment when honoring it is inconvenient: passing on a profitable deal, promoting the person who spoke up, admitting a mistake publicly. Each of those moments teaches people more about the culture than any poster ever will.

Enron's marble didn't fail because the words were wrong. It failed because nobody with power was living them.

Why culture can't be standardized into place

There's a reason most organizations struggle here. They try to install culture the way they install a process: write it down, roll it out, train on it, measure compliance. That works for procedures. It doesn't work for belief.

Values only live when individuals can see themselves in them. A value like "respect" means something different to a nurse at 3 a.m., a trader on a volatile morning and a new hire on day one. If leaders don't help each person connect the shared value to their own work and their own judgment, the value stays on the wall.

This is the healthy tension at the center of culture. You need a shared standard, the nonnegotiables that hold an organization together. You also need room for each person to own those values in their own way. Lean too hard on the standard and you get compliance without belief. Lean too hard on the individual and you lose the common ground. The art is finding the harmony that fits your people and your moment.

How to close the gap

Watch the expensive moments. Culture is revealed when living your values costs money, time or comfort. Pay attention to what your leaders do then. So will everyone else.

Ask people what the values mean in their work. Not what they mean in general. What "integrity" looks like in this role, this week. The answers will tell you whether the values are alive.

Reward the carriers. Moyo notes that some boards she has served on tied as much as 20 percent of compensation to cultural factors. Whatever your mechanism, make sure the people who live the values are the ones who advance.

Don't engrave what you won't live

There's nothing wrong with putting your values on a wall. Just remember that the wall is a promise, and every employee and customer is keeping score.

The organizations that close the 92-to-16 gap aren't the ones with the most eloquent statements. They're the ones whose people could explain the culture without ever reading it, because they see it lived every day.

This essay responds to ideas in How Boards Work by Dambisa Moyo (Basic Books, 2021). The Enron example, the Columbia Business School findings and the compensation example are cited from her book.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.