Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal Post in two sentences:
An organization’s values become meaningful when they begin to influence what it chooses, protects, refuses and is willing to sacrifice. Stand for something clearly enough and consistently enough, and eventually you will not have to tell people what matters to you because they will be able to see it, feel it, and experience it.
What does it actually mean for a business to stand for something?
Not simply to have a set of values, a purpose statement or a position carefully articulated on its website, but to stand for something clearly enough that people outside the organization know what it is.
I started thinking about this in the context of my own life and business, following yesterday’s Scalerator® event, Start Up to Scale Up: The People Strategies Every Growing Business Needs, when Keith Belgrove, Managing Director of Belgroves Funeral Home Ltd., offered this deceptively simple piece of advice:
Stand for something publicly.
The more I’ve thought about it, the more I realize how much is contained in those four words.
Most businesses can tell you what they value. Fewer can tell you what those values cause them to do differently.
Organizations spend considerable time defining values.
Integrity. Excellence. Innovation. Respect. Service. People first. These words matter because they are intended to establish something about how the organization sees itself and how it intends to operate. But choosing the words is only the beginning. Eventually, those values have to be put into practice, reflected in the decisions the organization makes and in the choices people make within it.
Standing for something publicly does not require a business to comment on every issue, support every cause or continually tell the world what it believes.
I think it means that there are principles important enough to the organization that they can be recognized in how the business operates. People should be able to experience the organization and come away with an impression that reflects what it says it stands for, without ever having been told what those words are.
- If an organization says it values its people, for example, that belief should influence decisions about how people are treated, developed, compensated, listened to and led.
- If it says it values quality, there should be a point at which it is prepared to say that something is not good enough to carry its name.
- If it says integrity matters, there should be business it will not pursue, promises it will not make and practices it will not accept, even when there is money on the table.
In these instances, values become useful strategically. They begin to provide boundaries.
They help answer questions such as: What will we protect? What are we prepared to compromise? What will we refuse? What kind of client will we work with? What behaviour will we tolerate from someone who performs well? What will we do when the easiest decision conflicts with the principles we say matter?
Without those boundaries, a value can remain aspirational indefinitely.
We can believe in it without ever having to prove that it has any influence over what we do.
Perhaps the clearest evidence of what an organization stands for appears when there is something to lose.
It is relatively easy to say that people come first when looking after them does not interfere with a deadline. It is easy to emphasize quality when doing so does not affect the margin. It is easy to talk about integrity when the ethical choice and the profitable choice happen to be the same one.
The harder decisions are revealing because they force priorities into the open.
An internal consequence to standing for something clearly.
People inside an organization are constantly learning what really matters, often without anyone formally teaching them. They watch which behaviours are rewarded. They notice which standards are enforced and which ones become negotiable under pressure. They see what leaders challenge, what they ignore and what they make exceptions for.
Those observations gradually become the real culture of the organization.
Clients are gathering evidence too. So are suppliers, partners and prospective employees. Over time, they develop an understanding of the organization that may have very little to do with the words displayed on its website. Their understanding comes from accumulated experience of its choices.
Standing for something publicly is not simply a communications exercise. It is an alignment exercise.
There needs to be a recognizable connection between what the organization says matters, the decisions its leaders make, the behaviours it rewards and the experience it creates for the people who encounter it.
And when that alignment is strong enough, an interesting thing happens:
The organization has less need to tell people what it stands for. Everyone can see it and feel it.
Strategic Reflection Prompt
If your organization’s values statement disappeared tomorrow, what would your decisions, behaviours and choices lead people to believe you stand for?
About Giselle
Most costly decisions begin with a wrong read of the situation.
I’m Giselle Hudson — The Pre-Fixer. I help leaders see the real problem before they act, in my writing and in my work. I don’t fix; I pre-fix. Most advisers jump to solutions before they’ve found the real problem. I find it first — the part that isn’t fully visible yet. Once we see that clearly, everything else falls into place, and confident, right action can follow.
Through my daily Strategic Alignment Journal, I explore leadership, decision-making, and the patterns that shape organizations — helping leaders make sense of complexity before they commit significant time and money to the wrong thing.
What’s the one thing about your business that frustrates you most — the thing that, despite your best efforts, you can’t seem to resolve?
