When you think about values within your organization,
what comes to mind? In the Army, we may have a huge advantage over other
organizations when it comes to identifying our values. We have had 241 years to
develop them! The interesting thing is that we don’t necessarily recruit people
that share those same values. That doesn’t mean that our values as Soldiers are
not in line with that of the organization (the Army). Let me clarify that a
little. As a recruiter, it isn’t my job to find people that hold any particular
set of values or ethics. My job is to identify and recruit people that are
qualified academically, physically, morally, and administratively for service.
How is it, then, that Soldiers’ values are aligned with that of the Army?
Again, we have another advantage over other organizations in that we indoctrinate
our new hires. When you join the Army, your freedoms are temporarily removed.
You go to Basic Training where you are totally immersed in organizational
doctrine. You either adapt or you leave. It’s a genius method that has been
proves to work. However, I’m quite positive that other organizations don’t have
the same ability that we do to force adaptation and adoption of values. Can you
imagine being hired be JP Morgan or Deloitte and being whisked away for several
months to a secluded spot separated from life as you know it? I think not. So
how do organizations develop and align their values?
Before I get into this next part, I have to point out
that I am working on the assumption that the values of organizations are
ethical. I just heard on the news this week that Wells Fargo terminated the
employment of 5,300 employees for creating fake accounts to bolster the bottom
line of the company. That kind of sounds like something that would have
happened at Enron all those years ago. Clearly, to get that many employees to
cheat, there had to have been some kind of an accepted norm – a set of values.
That doesn’t mean it is ethical. So what is ethical? Denning (2011) notes that there
are three basic components to an ethical community. They are trust, loyalty,
and solidarity. Trust, to me, is synonymous with faith. I love the definition
of faith found in Hebrews 11:1 which says “Now faith is the substance of things
hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (KJV). Trust, therefore, is
complete confidence that all members of an organization will act with integrity
and ethically in any professional actions. Loyalty is “acceptance of the
obligation to refrain from breaching one another’s trust and to fulfill the
duties entailed by accepting that trust” (Denning, 2011, p. 133). Basically,
that means that I know that no matter what, others in my organization are not
only doing what is right but they are going to protect my best interests in the
process. The third component of solidarity is so similar to loyalty in that it
means that the members of the organization has my back but it also means that I
know that others will take care of me even at a personal cost to them. When
members of the organization take ownership of one another and start to treat
each other as teammates and not just individuals then that is when true
solidarity exists. Using these three components – trust, loyalty, solidarity –
an organization can construct a set of ethical values.
Values are not necessarily just something that are
magically decided upon one day. They are built and refined over time. However,
there has to be a conscious effort to ensure that the values are ethical.
Again, consider the cases I mentioned above such as Enron and this new Wells
Fargo scandal. Both of those organizations started off with ethical values.
Through gradual changes, though, and group acceptance of minor variations of
truths eventually led to the full on acceptance of unethical values. Part of
the key to holding on to ethical values is to bring members of the organization
in line with those values. Again, you won’t go to Accenture’s Basic Training or
something like that so that makes the job of the HR department that much more
important. They must first determine who already shares the values of the
organization before even conducting the initial hire. At that point, though,
the values set forth must be a team effort and they must be consistently met
every day. By allowing any variations or exceptions to ethical policy sets
forth a precedence of a gradual moral decline. So the bottom line – the key to
the alignment of individual and organization values – is consistency.
Denning, S. (2011). The leader’s guide to
storytelling: Mastering the art and discipline of business narrative. San
Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
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