Stories from our work · 4 min read
Words on a wall
Walk into almost any head office and you will find them somewhere. Integrity. Excellence. Teamwork. Values on a wall, in a frame, on a lanyard. Ask the people walking past what those words mean for the work they are doing today, and you will often get a polite pause.
Culture · Values · Strategy · Leadership
When a new leadership team arrived at a listed life sciences company, they did not want another set of words for the wall.
They had a new strategy. They also had a clear sense that the strategy would only work if the culture pulled in the same direction. How people made decisions, worked together and got recognised would all need to support the plan. That meant looking again at what the company said it valued, and asking whether it still fitted where the business was going.
Starting where the strategy lived
We began with the people who had written the strategy. In workshops with the executive team and then the wider leadership group, we worked through the values and beliefs the new direction would really need, and tied each one back to a strategic goal.
That link matters. A value connected to the strategy gives a leader something to reach for when a decision gets hard. A value that floats free of it tends to stay on the wall.
Handing over the pen
Then the leaders did something many leadership teams find difficult. They let go of the pen.
A diverse project team was brought together to design the refreshed values, with people who saw the company from very different points of view. Their job was to make sure the values sounded like the place people actually worked, not a version of it seen from the top floor.
Once the words were right, a creative team brought them to life visually, so that people could picture them as well as read them.
Leaders first
There was one more choice to make: who would see them first.
The answer was the top 50 leaders around the world, in a soft launch. They were the people who would be asked about the values before anyone else, by their teams, in meetings, in the corridor. Giving them the chance to understand and own the values first meant that when the wider organisation heard about them, it heard from leaders who already believed in them.
What happened next
The new direction became a celebrated milestone for the company. Engagement improved, and positive financial results followed. Strategy, markets and many other things contribute to financial results, so we see our part as helping the culture point the same way as the plan.
Why we tell this one
Values become real when the people living them recognise themselves in the words. That is far more likely when they had a hand in writing them.