Values

How to Bring Values to Life in Your Business

Ed Mayo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781783535354
• eBook ISBN: 9781351283823
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

What matters to us? One way of answering that question is through the lens of values, which have a powerful influence on our attitudes and behaviours. Yet it can be difficult for businesses to realize the true potential of values, which is to engage staff, customers and suppliers in an emotional way that touches on their own core motivations.

Drawing on a range of case studies worldwide, including "profit with purpose" businesses such as co-operatives, this short guide reveals how to make a success of values. By unpacking what we mean by values and ethics, and setting out a series of practical approaches, Ed Mayo presents how values can become a natural part of commercial life. This book identifies both the pitfalls and the potential of bringing values into the heart of an organization, from a bank that responds to an ethical crisis to a fast-growing worker co-operative founded on the values of equality.

The values that guide your business are not necessarily the ones that are written down, or that you would expect. There is no one right or wrong set of values, but there is power and potential in making the most of the values that are right for the business you are in. By reading Values: How to Bring Values to Life in Your Business, you will find out more about the business that you are, and the business that you could be.

Contents

1. Abstract
2. About the Author
3. Acknowledgments
4. 1 What are Values?
   1. Values are what motivate us
   2. Values help us to work together
   3. Values challenge us
5. 2 Organising Values
   1. In search of coherence
6. 3 How do Values Play Out in Business?
   1. One in four new entrepreneurs are values-driven
   2. Not all values lead to action
   3. Values that matter
   4. The business case for shared values
7. 4 Co-operatives as a Test-case of Values in Action
   1. A global set of values
   2. Do co-operatives use their values?
8. 5 Values and Purpose
   1. Starting with purpose
9. 6 Getting Going on Values
   1. Personal values
   2. Shared values
   3. A participative approach to selecting values
   4. A participative health-check on values
   5. Bringing values to life
   6. The values fit
10. 7 Five Tools for Values
    1. 1. How to introduce values: a card game on co-operation
    2. 2. How to recruit for values
    3. 3. How to build values in the supply chain
    4. 4. How to govern for values
    5. 5. How to measure values
11. 8 The Values Checklist
12. Appendix: Key Definitions
13. Notes and References

1. Cover
2. Title
3. Copyright
4. Abstract
5. About the Author
6. Acknowledgments
7. Contents
8. 1 What are Values?
   1. Values are what motivate us
   2. Values help us to work together
   3. Values challenge us
9. 2 Organising Values
   1. In search of coherence
10. 3 How do Values Play Out in Business?
    1. One in four new entrepreneurs are values-driven
    2. Not all values lead to action
    3. Values that matter
    4. The business case for shared values
11. 4 Co-operatives as a Test-case of Values in Action
    1. A global set of values
    2. Do co-operatives use their values?
12. 5 Values and Purpose
    1. Starting with purpose
13. 6 Getting Going on Values
    1. Personal values
    2. Shared values
    3. A participative approach to selecting values
    4. A participative health-check on values
    5. Bringing values to life
    6. The values fit
14. 7 Five Tools for Values
    1. 1. How to introduce values: a card game on co-operation
    2. 2. How to recruit for values
    3. 3. How to build values in the supply chain
    4. 4. How to govern for values
    5. 5. How to measure values
15. 8 The Values Checklist
16. Appendix: Key Definitions
17. Notes and References

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Guide

1. Cover
2. Title
3. Copyright
4. Abstract
5. About the Author
6. Acknowledgments
7. Contents
8. Start of Content
9. Appendix: Key Definitions
10. Notes and References

CHAPTER 1
What are Values?

What Matters to Us?

One way of answering that question is through the lens of values. Our values influence both our attitudes and our behaviours. They affect how we behave in a powerful way. But they are not easy always to engage.

It is easy to pay lip service to values and many businesses do. It is harder to realise the true potential of values, which is to engage staff, customers and suppliers in an emotional way that touches on their own core motivations. Drawing on a range of case studies worldwide, including ‘profit with purpose’ businesses such as co-operatives, and relevant academic research, this book is a short guide to making a success of values.

My aim is to unpack for you what we mean by values and ethics and set out a series of practical approaches, with advice on bringing values to life. The values that guide your business are not necessarily the ones that are written down or that you would expect. The book explores a series of case studies, identifying the pitfalls and the potential of bringing values into the heart of an organisation, from a bank that responds to an ethical crisis through to a fast-growing worker co-operative founded on the values of equality.

Business can be a way to change the world around us, for better or worse, and, if you accept that, then values can be seen as a natural part of commercial life. Values are what motivate us. Values help us to work together. But values also challenge us. I hope that, in reading this book, you will find out more about the business that you are, and the business that you could be.

But, first, a small introduction to values as motivation in social psychology, the academic discipline that underpins so much contemporary work on values (ethics, sociology, theology and behavioural economics… we can leave those until later). This is done through the retelling of the fable of the carrot and the stick… and the rose.

Values are what motivate us

If you woke up one morning as a donkey, the choice between the carrot or the stick might be more than just a metaphor. You are stubborn, of course, and, after the metamorphosis, probably a little prickly. The carrot dangled in front of you is to encourage you to get up. For now, of course, you can think of little you’d find more tasty.

But getting up is not quite what you feel like. So, next, the stick gives you a thwack. Even with your new thick hide, it is a bit painful. The carrot and the stick seem to be opposites. But they are designed to do the same thing: to get us to behave. In the language of economics, both would be classed as ‘incentives’. But, you might muse, with all the costs of carrot growing and stick wielding, isn’t there a better way to influence donkeys… and people?

So, a little psychology comes to mind. Punishments and rewards for behaviour tend to be set by someone else. Both carrot and stick are externally controlled – or ‘extrinsic’ in terms of the motivation of the person being targeted. There is a different way. It is called the theory of self-determination, a fairly well-established and proven approach in social psychology that says that what makes us happy to act is down to what we feel from inside – ‘intrinsic’ motivations, such as our personal values. Acting on our intrinsic values keeps us satisfied and motivated. It saves on the costs of carrots and sticks.

We can call this the rose: an alternative motivation to both the carrot and the stick. The rose is a thing of beauty. It draws you to act because you already care for it, rather than being an instrument of pain, or gain, to induce you to change course.

What lies behind are values. As defined by Oxford English Dictionary, values are ‘principles or standards of behaviour; one’s judgement about what is important in life.’¹

In passing, it is worth noting that, by this definition, values are about what matters and what motivates people, whether through carrot, stick or rose, not necessarily about what is ethical or unethical. Ethical values are a narrower set – ones that make a wider normative claim about how to live or act. As eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant saw it, values like pleasure, courage or power are not ethical because there are times when they are associated with unethical outcomes. An ethical value, such as caring or forgiveness, is something that is always good in itself, from anyone’s rational perspective, and therefore has a claim on us in terms of giving us a duty to act where we can.

There can certainly be an extraordinary motive power to the roses of ethical values, as we will come to explore, but it is mistaken to think that business behaviour you might not approve of is not shaped by values. They may just be the wrong values – for example, of power, status or personal greed. To effect change, though, values are still where you have to start.

Values help us to work together

So, how do values emerge in the first place? There is a new branch of science – moral cognition – that combines social psychology with other disciplines such as studies of the brain, and suggests one answer. Shared values evolved as an effective strategy for group survival, creating a willingness to act for the benefit of others, even at a personal cost. Harvard Professor Joshua Greene puts it like this: ‘We have co-operative brains because co-operation provides material benefits, biological resources that enables our genes to make copies of themselves. Out of evolutionary dirt grows the flower of human goodness.’²

So, the need to collaborate shapes the evolution of group values over time, but it doesn’t specify what those values should be. Human values over time, including the deeper framing of faith and religion, are fabulously diverse. Football hooligans have values. The mafia has values. They’re not what most would share but they offer a linked code, a ‘moral syndrome’ that they can coalesce around as a group. What then holds one group together may divide or conflict with another. As James Q. Wilson, author of The Moral Sense, comments, ‘arguments about values often turn into fights about values’.³

Standing up for our values is part of that evolutionary imprint. We are willing to do the right thing, despite the possible costs of doing so – that is what moral theorists tend to focus on. But we are also willing to challenge those who act unfairly, despite the possible costs of doing so. Our instinctive watchful eye for free riders and cheats (or ‘defectors’ in the language of game theory) is one of the reasons why we watch hours of murder mysteries and detective series on TV. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Abstract
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Appendix: Key Definitions
• Notes and References