Yesterday I blogged about values in the workplace.  Today I’d like to give you a real life example about a client I was working with who wanted to identify values for his organization.  Before we started the work I asked them if the values they were identifying were going to be a description of what they were currently or a statement of what his company was striving for (and you will see why this is an important question in a moment)  His answer was that it would be a description of what the company values were currently.  One of the values the leadership team identified was integrity.  So we started to talk about what integrity meant in the workplace.  As you might imagine they identified things like doing the right thing when no one was looking, being respectful to co-workers, subordinates, and superiors, etc.  It was a hard conversation to broach, but I had to ask the CEO if he felt that his leadership team was currently modeling those behaviors.

It took some cajoling to get him to admit that a high ranking member of his executive team had recently publicly teased a low-level employee for a physical impairment, had sold a high ticket item to a family member at a loss to the company, and had employees working on his personal home and car during hours of business (and the list went on.) While it was painful for him to recognize, he admitted that he couldn’t stand in front of his employees and say that “integrity” was a value they currently embodied when executives on his team were acting in a very contrary way to the value of integrity.

The decision he had to make was this:  Did he want integrity to be a value his organization held or did he want to keep the current leadership and sacrifice that value.  That was a decision that he, and he alone, had to make.   Those are hard conversations to have, and hard realities to face.  What’s going on in your workplace?

If you are interested in reading more about culture in the workplace I would highly recommend Organizational Culture and Leadership by Edgar Schein.  It isn’t an easy read, but if you take the time, the lessons you will glean will be worth the effort.