2024-10-27 23:00:00
“Values are guidelines for action.”
How do clear values affect corporate culture? Hauser: Exclusively positive. Values are guidelines for action. They strengthen you internally and externally. If the basic orientation is understood, it makes it easier to act and make decisions because it is clear where the path is heading. This saves a lot of work in management and leadership because you don’t have to have a new discussion every time. Values are also the basis for strategic decisions and the guide for priorities.
Are there values that suit every company? Hauser: They exist, even if they change with social change. In recent years, the following values have emerged as essential for companies that want to be seen as relevant and credible: integrity, transparency, employee orientation and social responsibility. Companies are expected to proactively communicate when mistakes happen, own up to them and find ways to resolve them. That doesn’t mean that everyone is floating on clouds – with ethics and fairness come tough operational agendas: escalation guidelines, communication culture. It also requires innovation and adaptability. With today’s technological and demographic challenges, keeping the tried and tested is a risk.
How do companies actually define their values? Are employees allowed to have a say in this process? Hauser: There are clear leadership tools to share values. The most basic is a mission statement process. This is best supported externally and can never be implemented top-down, otherwise it will end up in a drawer. You start very, very openly so that employees can get involved, and then you tighten things up more and more. Communication is essential: Even when this process is completed, the values must be discussed again and again – even at the meta level -, understood and reflected in daily work.
Studies show that when it comes to cultural development, so-called front runners are always needed. Hauser: If a company has 2,000 employees, it is clear that you cannot listen to everyone, but you have to define who is part of the mission statement process. I abandoned the term key workers because it suggests that they are on a special mission and that too much responsibility is being placed on them. There should be different areas, generations, hierarchical levels and genders. So people are selected according to objective criteria. They also need to have a desire to think creatively. Some people feel ignored. There needs to be clear communication from management about who is there and why.
What happens when the values that a company promotes do not match the values it practices? Hauser: Values are a kind of constitution to which a company commits itself. If these are not lived, a conflict of goals arises on a cultural level that has fatal consequences – internally and externally. The ability to act and credibility of the manager and the entire company fall by the wayside.
How do you ensure that values are not just on paper? Hauser: First of all, managers have a role model function. If the communicative cooperation works, they can mention it again and again. Securing values is also part of recruiting. During the application process, you can use role play to test how someone deals with conflicts and whether the value of fairness is actually lived. To do this, HR managers must be trained accordingly.
Make values visible
The present is characterized by multiple crises: Millennials with a changed worldview for whom work-life balance is of fundamental importance, the decline in the economy in individual sectors such as the construction industry and high interest rates are just a few of them. Companies are challenged. This is demonstrated by the complex activities of the managers who are busy extinguishing individual sources of fire in order to lay a prosperous basis for the future. They are doing a good job with this because the trough will be followed by lighter peaks.
At the same time, the demands of managers can easily become overwhelming due to the various crises. And the problem of changing values in leadership will persist because Millennials have a different sense of importance. They ask and question their activities – and they cannot (always) understand the companies’ core tasks. Because these are “buried” by the variety of operational tasks. The why is no longer visible. Therefore, misunderstanding is the result.
Unsuccessful communication, in which managers are convinced that they are communicating openly, leads to dissatisfied employees, which is reflected in employee surveys and in fluctuation. The dissatisfaction is also noticeable on the part of the managers: They do their best and are still not understood.
It is therefore essential to make the buried values visible again. In this way, the interaction between generations can be successful and – as my experience in management work shows – organizational effectiveness can be achieved.
Gerhard Furtmüller is an expert in leadership development. He teaches at the WU Vienna and at the University of Salzburg.
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